Browsing by Subject "African history"

This dissertation is a history of cosmopolitanism in the francophone, musical, and Islamic intellectual traditions of western Niger from 1958 to 1974. It builds on scholarship that seeks to counter conventional nationalist narratives of African decolonization by viewing it through an anti-teleological lens. While most of this literature focuses on the alternatives to the nation proposed by African leaders prior to independence, framing them as lost futures, this project argues that cosmopolitanism constituted a core state project of Niger’s francophone elite even after independence. Its account begins with this official cosmopolitanism of the PPN-RDA regime, most thoroughly articulated by Boubou Hama in the language of the civilization of the universal derived from Negritude. Drawing on sound studies and a wide variety of audio recordings in addition to period newspapers, films, and other primary sources, it also demonstrates the ways that this utopian cosmopolitanism in a repressive, one-party state was contested and undermined by intellectuals operating from both inside and outside the machinery of the state as well as the exuberant, unruly cosmopolitanism embedded in the radio soundscapes and film screens of Niger. From the traditional Sahelian cosmopolitanism transmitted in the epics of Zarma griots to the unworldly worldliness of vernacular Muslim poets and preachers, the dissertation paints a dynamic portrait of cosmopolitan imagination in modern Niger.

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.

In my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century. My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese Atlantic" world.

My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance, and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.

My research produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion. I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.