About
"Expanse: Historical Imagination in Africa’s Distant Past"
Expanse tells a narrative history of the Bantu Expansion, a millennia-long population shift throughout the southern half of the African continent that accounts for the current distribution of languages. The gradual, small-scale movement of communities and the languages and ideas they carried with them altered the genetic, cultural, intellectual, and technological landscapes of East, West-Central and Southern Africa, making the Bantu Expansion a critical process in early African history. Expanse brings together a preponderance of evidence across diverse disciplines and data-bound imaginative work to narrate human-centered stories of environmental change, movement, encounter, technological innovation, and kinship from circa 3000 – 500 BCE as Bantu-speakers moved through the equatorial rainforest. Through story and description, methodological rigor, and encompassing interdisciplinarity the book makes visible and familiar the importance of the Bantu Expansion to human history.
Raevin Jimenez is Assistant Professor of History.
