| Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon Contributor(s): Bernault, Florence (Author) |
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ISBN: 1478001232 ISBN-13: 9781478001232 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $102.55 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: July 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Africa - Central - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Religion |
| Dewey: 967.210 |
| LCCN: 2018047203 |
| Series: Theory in Forms |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6.2" W x 9.2" (1.35 lbs) 344 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Central Africa |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |