ASC Seminar: Colonial Convergences: Assemblages of Power and Fantasy in Equatorial Africa (Gabon)

Florence Bernault, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Firstly, Bernault traces how colonialism was a crucial moment for reconfiguring ideas of personal and collective agency. Contemporary dilemmas about human and super-human power in Africa cannot be understood without reconstructing the fierce battles that occurred over social reproduction, the value of the human body and the efficacy of machines, objects and charms. Secondly, Bernault does not view colonizers in Africa as global and rational agents but as intimate and intrusive actors in a mutual recomposing of shared cosmologies of power. Please register.

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