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

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:	Magic -- Social aspects -- Gabon. Witchcraft -- Social aspects -- Gabon. Imperialism in popular culture -- France -- History -- 19th century. Gabon -- Colonial influence. Gabon -- History -- 1839-1960. Gabon -- Religious life and customs. France -- Colonies -- Africa -- Administration. Africa. France. Gabon. History.
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

Table of Contents:

A siren, an empty shrine, and a photograph
Charms and their double lives
Carnal fetishism
The value of people
Cannibal mirrors
Eating.