Colonial Conscripts PDF Download

Author: Myron J. Echenberg
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This text offers a socio-political history of post-war Francophone West Africa, focusing on colonial conscripts from Senegal.

Author: David Scott
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386186
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.

Author: David Scott
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822334446
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
DIVUses C.L.R. James’sThe Black Jacobins as a jumping-off point for a reconsideration of colonial and postcolonial concepts of history, politics, and agency./div

Author: Gebreyesus Hailu
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 082144445X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 93

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Book Description
Eloquent and thought-provoking, this classic novel by the Eritrean novelist Gebreyesus Hailu, written in Tigrinya in 1927 and published in 1950, is one of the earliest novels written in an African language and will have a major impact on the reception and critical appraisal of African literature. The Conscript depicts, with irony and controlled anger, the staggering experiences of the Eritrean ascari, soldiers conscripted to fight in Libya by the Italian colonial army against the nationalist Libyan forces fighting for their freedom from Italy’s colonial rule. Anticipating midcentury thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Hailu paints a devastating portrait of Italian colonialism. Some of the most poignant passages of the novel include the awakening of the novel’s hero, Tuquabo, to his ironic predicament of being both under colonial rule and the instrument of suppressing the colonized Libyans. The novel’s remarkable descriptions of the battlefield awe the reader with mesmerizing images, both disturbing and tender, of the Libyan landscape—with its vast desert sands, oases, horsemen, foot soldiers, and the brutalities of war—uncannily recalled in the satellite images that were brought to the homes of millions of viewers around the globe in 2011, during the country’s uprising against its former leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

Author: Timothy Stapleton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
"West African Soldiers in Britain's Colonial Army, 1860-1960 explores the history of Britain's West African colonial army based in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia placing it within a broader social context and emphasizing, as far as possible, the experience of the ordinary soldier. The aim is not to describe the many battles and campaigns fought by this force but to look at the development of the West African colonial army as an institution over the course of about a century. In pursuing this goal, it is sometimes useful to employ the lens of military culture defined differently by scholars but essentially meaning a set of shared ideas and behaviors that inform daily life in the military. While other locally recruited colonial militaries in Africa have attracted considerable attention from historians as they served as an essential pillar supporting European rule, this book represents the first comprehensive scholarly study of Britain's West African army which was the largest such British-led force south of the Sahara. The study is based on extensive archival research conducted in nine archives located in five countries"--

Author: David Killingray
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
An exploration of the ways in which armies and armed forces were involved in the making, the maintenance and the loss of overseas empires. The volume ranges widely in time and space. Besides chapters on the British Empire in Africa, Asia and Oceana, there are also essays on Algeria, the Dutch East Indies, the Germans in Africa and the American Empire in the Pacific. While not neglecting the traditional concerns of the military historian, the book also explores some of the themes of the "new" military history, including gender and sexuality, race and discipline, and the policing of the labour trade.

Author: Ousman Murzik Kobo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004215255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In this book Ousman Kobo provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of Islamic reforms sympathetic to "Wahhabi" ideas in two West African countries, Burkina Faso and Ghana, and connects these movements to Muslim's search for religious purity in modern contexts.

Author: Gregory Mann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387816
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
For much of the twentieth century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. In this exemplary contribution to the “new imperial history,” Gregory Mann argues that this shared military experience between France and Africa was fundamental not only to their colonial relationship but also to the reconfiguration of that relationship in the postcolonial era. Mann explains that in the early twenty-first century, among Africans in France and Africa, and particularly in Mali—where Mann conducted his research—the belief that France has not adequately recognized and compensated the African veterans of its wars is widely held and frequently invoked. It continues to animate the political relationship between France and Africa, especially debates about African immigration to France. Focusing on the period between World War I and 1968, Mann draws on archival research and extensive interviews with surviving Malian veterans of French wars to explore the experiences of the African soldiers. He describes the effects their long absences and infrequent homecomings had on these men and their communities, he considers the veterans’ status within contemporary Malian society, and he examines their efforts to claim recognition and pensions from France. Mann contends that Mali is as much a postslavery society as it is a postcolonial one, and that specific ideas about reciprocity, mutual obligation, and uneven exchange that had developed during the era of slavery remain influential today, informing Malians’ conviction that France owes them a “blood debt” for the military service of African soldiers in French wars.

Author: Ruth Ginio
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803253397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
7 Adjusting to a New Reality: The Army and the Imminent Independence -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Author: Kathleen Keller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803296916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--Rutgers University, 2007.