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THURSDAY 1 DECEMBER, 15.00 – 16.30
PROFESSOR FLORENCE BERNAULT (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Power, Sacrifice and Transgression: On the Magic of Colonial Rule in Equatorial
Africa”
Venue: Birkbeck, Room 152
(From Birkbeck main entrance on Malet Street turn left after entering the
building and walk down a long corridor. Turn left again to go up the stairs to
the 1st floor. At the top of the stairs turn right and then left. You will see
the Central Computing Services Help Desk on your left in room 151. Room 152 is
the second room on the left.)
"Power, Sacrifice and Transgression: On the Magic of Colonial Rule in Equatorial
Africa"
In the field of colonial studies, after two generations of scholars have
recovered the fragility of white rule and its uncanny predilection for being
informed by the colonized, European hegemony seems to have been exposed to its
bare bone. Yet social scientists absorbed with the mechanics and nature of
colonial rule in Africa have rarely ventured beyond the confines of political
authority and economic power, leaving the deeper cultural foundations of the
process largely under-explained. Using colonial perceptions of the body as an
entry point, I will explore in this paper how whites’ anxieties about the
fragility of their rule allowed them to share a set of crucial visions with the
colonized. Through the fiction work of two novelists who visited Equatorial
Africa in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and the
mythical figure of the “jungle-doctor” Albert Schweitzer, who lived in Southern
Gabon from the1910s to the early 1960s, the paper questions the ways in which
Europeans regarded colonial violence in this region, and in turn, how they
shared some moral and political imaginaries (imaginaires) with the colonised.
The predatory nature of colonialism in Equatorial Africa, combined with the
extraordinary psychological and material profits that colonists derived from
it, openly transgressed the moral order that had informed European political
tradition for centuries. This fact was expressed in a number of archetypal
stories about colonizers’ personal survival; and, more broadly, about colonial
rule as a form of illegitimate sacrifice conducive to self-destruction. The
paper will suggest how such ideas overlapped in considerable ways with African
views and interpretations of colonial rule, and how this hypothesis carries
analytical benefits for colonial history.
Harry G. West
Lecturer in Anthropology
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom
Direct line: +44 (0)20 7898 4414
Fax: +44 (0)20 7898 4699
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