Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 PDF Download

Author: James Eskridge Genova
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820469416
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 offers an innovative and provocative reassessment of the history and legacies of French colonial rule in West Africa between the First World War and the late 1950s. Making critical use of postcolonial and cultural theory, James E. Genova argues that the colonizers and the colonized were locked in a struggle for authority increasingly structured by competing notions of what it meant to be French or African. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the centrality of the cultural question in the imperial encounters between France and West Africa. It maps the emergence of the French-educated elite as a social class in French West Africa as a window into the complex relationship between agency and structural context in the making of history. A disjunction developed between decolonization and liberation in the colonial liaison of France and West Africa that left colonizers and colonized trapped in a neocolonial cultural framework actualizing Frantz Fanon's deepest fears about the postcolony.

Author: David A. Guba Jr
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228002559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Despite having the highest rates of cannabis use in the continent, France enforces the most repressive laws against the drug in all of Europe. Perhaps surprisingly, France was once the epicentre of a global movement to medicalize cannabis, specifically hashish, in the treatment of disease. In Taming Cannabis David Guba examines how nineteenth-century French authorities routinely blamed hashish consumption, especially among Muslim North Africans, for behaviour deemed violent and threatening to the social order. This association of hashish with violence became the primary impetus for French pharmacists and physicians to tame the drug and deploy it in the homeopathic treatment of mental illness and epidemic disease during the 1830s and 1840s. Initially heralded as a wonder drug capable of curing insanity, cholera, and the plague, hashish was deemed ineffective against these diseases and fell out of repute by the middle 1850s. The association between hashish and Muslim violence, however, remained and became codified in French colonial medicine and law by the 1860s: authorities framed hashish as a significant cause of mental illness, violence, and anti-state resistance among indigenous Algerians. As the French government looks to reform the nation's drug laws to address the rise in drug-related incarceration and the growing popular demand for cannabis legalization, Taming Cannabis provides a timely and fascinating exploration of the largely untold and living history of cannabis in colonial France.

Author: Michael T. Martin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253066220
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume One of this landmark series on African cinema draws together foundational scholarship on its history and evolution. Beginning with the ideological project of colonial film to legitimize the economic exploitation and cultural hegemony of the African continent during imperial rule to its counter-historical formation and theorization. It comprises essays by film scholars and filmmakers alike, among them Roy Armes, Med Hondo, Fèrid Boughedir, Haile Gerima, Oliver Barlet, Teshome Gabriel, and David Murphy, including three distinct dossiers: a timeline of key dates in the history of African cinema; a comprehensive chronicle and account of the contributions by African women in cinema; and a homage and overview of Ousmane Sembène, the "Father" of African cinema.

Author: James Genova
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628954779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
On August 4, 1983, Captain Thomas Sankara led a coalition of radical military officers, communist activists, labor leaders, and militant students to overtake the government of the Republic of Upper Volta. Almost immediately following the coup’s success, the small West African country—renamed Burkina Faso, or Land of the Dignified People—gained international attention as it charted a new path toward social, economic, cultural, and political development based on its people’s needs rather than external pressures and Cold War politics. James E. Genova’s Making New People: Politics, Cinema, and Liberation in Burkina Faso, 1983–1987 recounts in detail the revolutionary government’s rise and fall, demonstrating how it embodied the critical transition period in modern African history between the era of decolonization and the dawning of neoliberal capitalism. It also uncovers one of the revolution’s most enduring and significant aspects: its promotion of film as a vehicle for raising the people’s consciousness, inspiring their efforts at social transformation, and articulating a new self-generated image of Africa and Africans. Foregrounding film and drawing evocative connections between Sankara’s political philosophy and Frantz Fanon, Making New People provides a deeply nuanced explanation for the revolution’s lasting influence throughout Africa and the world.

Author: Jessica Lynne Pearson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989260
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as postwar decolonization movements gained strength. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.

Author: Claire Griffiths
Publisher: University of Chester
ISBN: 1908258039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This collection of essays casts a critical eye over fifty years of independence in former French colonial possessions of Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Discover how European colonization across the many regions in Africa dramatically altered the continent and the daily lived experiences of its peoples. Daily Life in Colonial Africa explores nine facets of daily life in the European-colonized African continent, such as domestic, economic, political, and religious life. Examples of everyday people-farmers forced to switch to cash crops, people of faith melding native traditions and European Christian doctrine on beliefs about the afterlife, storytellers using allegory to discreetly challenge colonial rule-show how colonialization impacted every aspect of life for Africa's indigenous people, as well as how they adapted to new ways of life while maintaining their cultural roots. Alongside the main text, helpful additional resources such as a timeline of the colonization of Africa and a glossary of terms provide useful context for understanding what life in this period of history was truly like for the many different people and groups affected by Africa's colonization.

Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803220944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Violence was prominent in France?s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France?s empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.

Author: Ousman Kobo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900423313X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
In this book Ousman Kobo analyzes the origins of Wahhabi-inclined reform movements in two West African countries. Commonly associated with recent Middle Eastern influences, reform movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso actually began during the twilight of European colonial rule in the 1950s and developed from local doctrinal contests over Islamic orthodoxy. These early movements in turn gradually evolved in ways sympathetic to Wahhabi ideas. Kobo also illustrates the modernism of this style of Islamic reform. The decisive factor for most of the movements was the alliance of secularly educated Muslim elites with Islamic scholars to promote a self-consciously modern religiosity rooted in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions. This book therefore provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of “Wahhabism.”