Colonial Transactions

Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon

Florence Bernault (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

344 Seiten

2019
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-0123-2 (ISBN)

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In Colonial Transactions Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.

Florence Bernault is Professor of African History at Sciences Po (Paris); Emerita Professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of DÉmocraties ambigÜes en Afrique centrale: Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940–1965; and editor of A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa.

Preface ix
Introduction 1
1. A Siren, an Empty Shrine, and a Photograph 27
2. The Double Life of Charms 69
3. Carnal Fetishism 96
4. The Value of People 118
5. Cannibal Mirrors 138
6. Eating 168
Conclusion 194
Notes 205
Bibliography 293
Index 321

Erscheinungsdatum	16.07.2019
Reihe/Serie	Theory in Forms
Zusatzinfo	35 half-toness, 4 maps
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	612 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4780-0123-2 / 1478001232
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-0123-2 / 9781478001232
Zustand	Neuware