Reluctant landscapes : historical anthropologies of political experience in Siin, Senegal /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Richard, François G., 1976- author.
Imprint:Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
©2018
Description:xii, 414 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm
Language:English
Subject:Politics and government.
Sine-Saloum (Senegal) -- Politics and government.
Sine-Saloum (Senegal) -- History.
Senegal -- Sine-Saloum.
History.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11700170
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780226252544
022625254X
9780226252407
022625240X
9780226252681
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-400) and index.
Summary:West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known - but equally important - experiences of those living in the region. Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states? demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial - but often overlooked - role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin's perceived 'primitive' conservatism standing at odds with the country's Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard's groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal's national imagination.
Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note on Orthography
  • Prologue: Opening Frames, Orientations
  • Part 1. Framing Perspectives
  • 1. Reluctant landscapes
  • 2. Writing Senegambian Political Pasts
  • Part 2. Visions of Colonial Subjects: Imagining and Constructing the Seereer Landscape
  • 3. What's in a Name? Notes on the Making of Seereer Identity
  • 4. "The Very Model of Egalitarian and Anarchic Peasantry": Seereer Cultural Landscapes and the Ethnographic Imagination
  • Part 3. Atlantic Passages: World History and the Ambiguity of Materiality
  • 5. Ambiguous Kingdoms: States, Subjects, and Spatialities of Power
  • 6. Object Trajectories: Atlantic Commerce and Genealogies of Material Practice
  • Part 4. Colonial Indetenninacies: Entangled Landscapes, Overlapping Sovereignties
  • 7. Hesitant Sovereignties: Logics, Logistics, and Aesthetics of French Rule
  • 8. The Politics of Absence: Peasant Lifeworlds and Colonial Government
  • Conclusion: Archaeological Pasts, Postcolonial Presents, Traditional Futures
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Index