Abikal Borah
Assistant Professor
Office: AL 557
Email: [email protected]
Education
Ph.D. in History, The University of Texas at Austin (2021)
M.A. in History, The University of Texas at Austin (2015)
M.Phil. in Comparative Literature, University of Delhi (2010)
M.A. in English Literature, University of Delhi (2008)
B.A. in English Literature, Ramjas College, University of Delhi (2006)
Abikal Borah is an Assistant Professor of History. He completed his graduate studies in African history at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining SDSU, he was a Public History Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University.
Professor Borah’s research is situated in the intersection of violence studies, labor history, and racial tensions among subaltern social groups in Durban, South Africa. His work speaks to recent interests in questions of racial and political violence in South African history that do not fit into the black and white dichotomy. He sees Durban simultaneously as an African and Indian Ocean city. He is currently revising a book manuscript, entitled Violence of the Wretched: Origins of the Durban Riots of 1949. This monograph draws on multi-year archival research conducted in Durban, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town. Exploring histories of migration, land, and labor in the province of Natal since the mid-nineteenth century, it traces the social origins of the 1949 racial violence between the indigenous Zulus and migrant Indians in Durban. It is a social history of collective violence between the Zulus and the Indians that alludes to non-linear dynamics of race relations and the fluid logics of subject formation in South Africa.
At SDSU, Professor Borah offers specialized courses in African history as well as thematic courses in global history. In his undergraduate and graduate courses, he incorporates themes such as violence and colonialism, writing violence, politics of memory, racial dynamics, postcolonial reason, and methodological uncertainties of doing history.
Edited Volumes
Borah, Abikal and Toyin Falola. eds. Violence in the Postcolony: Entangled Histories of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2026.
Sotunsa, Mobolanle E. and Abikal Borah. eds. Imagining Vernacular Histories: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020.
Borah, Abikal, Bisola Falola, and Toyin Falola. eds. Creative Incursions: Cultural Representations of Human Rights in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2019.
Journal Articles
Borah, Abikal. “Capitalist Flows and Working-Class Conditions: Colonial Labor Management and Racial Formations in Southeastern Africa, 1851–1900,” The Journal of African History, 66, e21 (2025): 1–16.
Borah, Abikal. “Writing the Biopolitical Struggle through the Remains of Apartheid,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 26, no. 1, (2025): 1-10.
Borah, Abikal, Luis Picard Cataldo, and Toyin Falola. “Refashioning Gender Relations: Materiality of Love and Sex in Contemporary Nollywood.” Africa Today, 66, no. 1, (2019): 52-71.
Borah, Abikal. “Pluralizing the Narrative: Reconfiguring ‘Vernacular Modernism’ in Assamese Literary Culture.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41, no. 3 (2018): 1-16.
Borah, Abikal. “A Region in a Mobile World: Integration of Southeastern sub-Himalayan Region into Global Capitalist Economy (1820-1900).” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 37, no. 2 (2014): 87-127.
Book Chapter
Falola, Toyin and Abikal Borah. “African Philosophies of History and Historiography.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Methods, Sources, and Historiography in African History, vol. 2, edited by Thomas Spear. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 1092-1110.
- Outstanding Dissertation Award for Humanities and Fine Arts, Graduate School, The University of Texas at Austin.
- Barnes F. Lathrop Prize, Best Dissertation Award, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin.
- National Endowment for the Humanities Awards for Faculty (August 2025-July 2026) ($60,000) [Administrative Termination by DOGE on April 3, 2025]
- American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow (August 2021- August 2022) ($65,000)
- Faculty Fellow in Global Racism, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University (August 2021- July 2022) (Declined) ($60,000)
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin (September 2021- August 2022) (Declined) ($48,000)