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.
- 345 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Information
Publisher
Duke University Press BooksYear
2019Print ISBN
9781478001584
9781478001232
eBook ISBN
9781478002666
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: A Siren, an Empty Shrine, and a Photograph
- Chapter 2: The Double Life of Charms
- Chapter 3: Carnal Fetishism
- Chapter 4: The Value of People
- Chapter 5: Cannibal Mirrors
- Chapter 6: Eating
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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Yes, you can access Colonial Transactions by Florence Bernault in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & African History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.