Duke University Press Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon (Theory in Forms)

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. Review "A well-documented scholarly work enriched with an elegant style.... With this new book, Florence Bernault makes an invaluable contribution to African cultural anthropology by proposing an innovative approach to witchcraft that transcends the nativist paradigm and explores the intersecting third space of mutual influences (colonized/colonizers) from which arose the creolized spiritual landscape of postcolonial Gabon."--Marc Mvé Bekale "African Studies Review" (12/22/2020 12:00:00 AM) ". . .This should be a key text for African studies and certainly for any collection centered on West and Central Africa."--J. R. Kenyon "Choice" (12/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "Bernault's ability to trace . . . imaginaries throughout centuries of thought and praxis in both France and Gabon make this book a valuable addition to the historiography of west Africa."--Amanda Ford "International Social Science Review" (12/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "Bernault's book fills a void in many ways, providing an English-speaking audience with one among the very few in-depth studies out there on a nation and its people that certainly merit more attention."--Cheryl Toman "Postcolonial Text" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) Review “Florence Bernault develops a revolutionary view of colonial history that overhauls basic frameworks and pervasive dichotomies, showing how Gabonese and French colonizers’ imaginaries were convergent rather than oppositional, as is generally assumed. Colonial Transaction’s audacious theoretical sophistication, vivid examples, and innovative analysis give it an urgency and broad relevance that will have an impact that exceeds far beyond its Gabonese focus.” Author: Peter Geschiere, author of Source: Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison From the Author Florence Bernault is Professor of African History at Sciences Po (Paris), Emerita Professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of Démocraties ambigües in Afrique centrale: Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940–1965; and editor of A History of Prisons and Confinement in Africa. About the Author Florence Bernault is Professor of African History at Sciences Po (Paris); Emerita Professor of African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; author of Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale: Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940–1965; and editor of A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa.