Colonial transactions : imaginaries, bodies, and histories in Gabon /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Bernault, Florence, author.
Imprint:Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2019.
©2019
Description:xi, 332 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Series:Theory in forms
Theory in forms.
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11927095
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781478001232
1478001232
9781478001584
1478001585
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages [293]-319) and index.
Summary:In 'Colonial Transactions' Florence Bernault moves beyond the racial divide that dominates colonial studies of Africa. Instead, she illuminates the strange and frightening imaginaries that colonizers and colonized shared on the ground. Bernault looks at Gabon from the late nineteenth century to the present, historicizing the most vivid imaginations and modes of power in Africa today: French obsessions with cannibals, the emergence of vampires and witches in the Gabonese imaginary, and the use of human organs for fetishes. Struggling over objects, bodies, agency, and values, colonizers and colonized entered relations that are better conceptualized as "transactions." Together they also shared an awareness of how the colonial situation broke down moral orders and forced people to use the evil side of power. This foreshadowed the ways in which people exercise agency in contemporary Africa, as well as the proliferation of magical fears and witchcraft anxieties in present-day Gabon. Overturning theories of colonial and postcolonial nativism, this book is essential reading for historians and anthropologists of witchcraft, power, value, and the body.
Other form:Online version: Bernault, Florence, author. Colonial transactions Durham : Duke University Press, 2019 9781478002666
Review by Choice Review

In Colonial Transactions, Bernault (Sciences Po), a noted historian of Central Africa, contributes an attempt to fuse related social scientific concepts with her study of spirituality and mysticism in Gabon communities. She articulates a complex adaptive-systems model of the mental and physical worlds, creating an empirical picture of how cross-cultural adaptation and integration occur. Her fascinating chapters deal with religious syncretism, fetish objects, cannibalism narratives, and wealth and collectively show how value--through both economic and cultural transactions--proves to be liquid, embodied as needed in people or ideas. This approach works to generate evenhanded comparisons between colonial Europeans and indigenous Gabonais, and Bernault escapes the traditional colonial power narrative and instead presents a fluid, dynamic systems model of power and belief. However, there is an element of disjointedness if one reads straight through the book, as the chapters do not follow each other as comfortably as the author might have intended. That said, this should be a key text for African studies and certainly for any collection centered on West and Central Africa. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jeremy Robert Kenyon, University of Idaho

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review