Postcolonial Senegal Research Articles

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant (review)

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant (review)

Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

State Power and Elite Appropriation of Resources in Post-colonial Senegal: Macky Sall’s Regime as a Salient Example

State Power and Elite Appropriation of Resources in Post-colonial Senegal: Macky Sall’s Regime as a Salient Example

Fisibilillah: Labor as Learning on the Sufi Path

At the core of this study of spiritual empowerment and Black Atlantic Sufism lies the pre-occupation of understanding precisely the manner by which particular Muslim subjectivities are fashioned within the bounds of the Mustafawi Sufi tradition of religious cultivation through charitable giving and community service in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This article examines Black Atlantic Muslim religiosities and argues that West African Sufism in diasporic context—which draws upon nonwestern theories of the body and theories of the soul—can be theorized as a philosophy of freedom and decoloniality. In the American South, spiritual empowerment becomes possible through varying forms of care and bodily practice that take place in a mosque that is situated on a former slave plantation. Meanwhile, that empowerment takes place through discourses on Islamic piety and heightened religiosity in a postcolonial Senegal. Spiritual empowerment occurs, as I show, through attending to the body and spirit as students connect themselves, via West African Sufism, to a tradition of inward mastery and bodily discipline through philanthropic efforts.

Review of Edges of Exposures: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal, by Noémi Tousignant

Review of Edges of Exposures: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal, by Noémi Tousignant

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant

Shelf Projects: The Political Life of Exploration Geology in Senegal

Since the early 2000s, southeastern Senegal has emerged as a premier gold exploration and mining frontier. At present, the Sabodala gold mine, owned by the Canadian company Teranga Gold, is the only operational gold mine and mill in Senegal. But two more open-pit gold operations are scheduled to open this year, and several other companies have announced discoveries of industrial-scale deposits. By documenting the shifting ownership and exploration of the Sabodala deposit, this article draws attention to how the protracted phase of mineral research shapes the political life of mining operations in Africa and elsewhere in the global South. Geological exploration in colonial and post-colonial Senegal, as in much of Africa, has relied heavily on the expertise of indigenous miners and smelters. Mining Sabodala has thus unearthed multi-vocal and contested histories of gold discovery. Historians of science have established that field assistants and experts in Africa have produced agronomic and medical knowledge typically credited to “the West.” By extending this argument to gold exploration, the article brings African history into dialogue with an emergent anthropology of subterranean knowledge production.

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant

Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films by Vlad Dima

Reviewed by: Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films by Vlad Dima Ian W. Gerg Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films. By Vlad Dima. (African Expressive Cultures.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. [ix, 232 p. ISBN 9780253024213 (cloth), $80; ISBN 9780253024268 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9780253024336 (e-book), varies.] Still frames, notes, bibliography, filmography, index. In Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films, Vlad Dima considers the role that sound plays in constructing narrative planes throughout the oeuvre of the Senegalese filmmaker. Dima holds that Mambety's thoughtful use of sound develops currents of storytelling that surround and advance that of the moving picture. For Dima, "[sound] is Mambety's prized instrument and the tool that allows him to introduce the audience to an entirely new scale of stories" (p. 1). Throughout the volume, the author contends that the elements of the soundtrack—speech and effects as well as music—negotiate the sonic space in order to engage in the narratives of postcolonial Senegal. In this pursuit, Dima draws parallels between West Africa's tradition of oral storytelling and the elevated position of sound in Mambety's films, writing that "sound subverts the narrative primacy of the visual and takes its place as the primary narrative venue" (p. 77). Dima appropriately places Mambety's films [End Page 457] within their socio-historical context in which the specters of Western colonialism, slavery, and imperialism persist. We are led to find this tension between the First and Third Worlds (and their respective cinematic traditions) embodied in the counterpoint between sound and image. To this end, the author demonstrates a firm grasp of the relevant philosophical, psychoanalytic, and film scholarships. While its ambitious scope is occasionally disorienting, this volume is a successful interdisciplinary study of sound and narrative in Mambety's filmmaking. The book begins with a substantial introduction that provides a thematic framework for analyzing Mambety's films. Dima situates the filmmaker's work within the context of postcolonial West Africa while simultaneously threading an intertextual narrative throughout the oeuvre. The films do not exist in isolation; instead, themes, characters, actors, images, and sounds recur and seem to speak backward and forward through the chronology of his filmmaking. Dima reserves an inclusive space for studying film sound. In addition to the diegetic (inside the primary narrative) and nondiegetic (outside the primary narrative) spaces, he dedicates considerable time to analyzing the sounds that occupy the uncertain, liminal areas. This "fantastical gap" (p. 30, quoting Robin J. Stilwell, "The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic," in Beyond the Soundtrack; Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 186) produces new strands of narrative discourse. Within the introduction, Dima develops the concept of the "acousmatic panopticon" (p. 34) to explain the ways in which vestiges of Western hegemony persist in Dakar and throughout Senegal. (The term blends Michel Chion's acousmêtre—the disembodied, all-powerful voice—and Michel Foucault's panopticon—the controlling, all-seeing watchman.) The acousmatic panopticon takes on many forms throughout Mambety's films, including loudspeakers, sirens, radios, and even the French dialect spoken within Dakar. Dima returns to this several times throughout the text to describe how power is negotiated in postcolonial spaces. This first section concludes by outlining the structure of the remaining chapters. Each addresses one or two of the Mambety's films and specific issues of film sound and narrative, including diegetic and nondiegetic spaces, geography, fantasy, trauma, and voice. Chapter 1 examines the aural space in Mambety's third film, Touki Bouki (1973). Dima holds this film up as the "aesthetic and thematic lynchpin" of the filmmaker's oeuvre (p. 41). Its signature treatment of the image is a marked departure from the standards of contemporary African film. The rhythm of the image is often quick, disorienting, and even alienating. Shots frequently concede spatial continuity to embrace thematic counterpoint. This is demonstrated in the opening sequence, which jumps back and forth between the tranquility of the sub-Saharan plains and the interior of a slaughterhouse. The contrast is jarring and forms a compelling dialectic. We further learn of Mambety's aesthetic within the...

Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer

Karmen Gei (2001) by Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gai Ramaka is the first African adaptation of Carmen. The film garnered attention for its indulgent sexuo-erotic rhetoric and its reinvention of Carmen as a bisexual libertine. Most critical assessments of Karmen Gei have accordingly applauded Joseph Gai Ramaka's ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ intervention into the political and heteropatriarchal landscape of postcolonial Senegal, a country with a strong, increasingly radicalised, Moslem majority and a nascent yet burgeoning homophobia. Yet the peculiar trajectory outlined in the title of my essay, whereby Bizet's Carmen travels to the African postcolony and gets queered by/in the postcolonial moment, grounds the queer in the postcolonial and asserts that the queer is organic to the postcolonial. More precisely, the postcolonial adaptation of Bizet's Carmen offers a theoretical template for rethinking the interface between the postcolonial and the queer by showing how Carmen goes effortlessly if not inevitably queer in the postcolony as a result of intrinsic postcolonial modalities of power, resistance and subjectivity.

PHARMACY, MONEY AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN DAKAR

ABSTRACTPharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform ‘street-level’ public health research that they regard as ‘relevant’ to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment – its brief openings and more durable closures – as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students’ biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists’ roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards’ parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists’ prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.

PHARMACY, MONEY AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN DAKAR

Pharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform 'street-level' public health research that they regard as 'relevant' to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment-its brief openings and more durable closures-as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students' biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists' roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards' parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists' prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.

The Origins of Senegalese Homophobia: Discourses on Homosexuals and Transgender People in Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal

Abstract:This article traces the history of homosexual and transgender behavior in Senegal from colonial times to the contemporary period in order to demonstrate the flimsiness of the claims, made by many political and religious leaders and scholars, that homosexuality is “un-African.” Such claims, which appear as reactions to neocolonialism and Western intervention in African affairs, usually are homophobic discourses that invoke patriotism, cultural difference, and morality in order to justify the subjugation of homosexual and gender nonconforming individuals (goor-jiggens) living in Senegal. In an attempt to understand the roots of Senegalese homophobia, the article analyzes several depictions of homosexuals and transgender people in contemporary Senegal and traces them to similar representations in European writings of the colonial period. As this approach reveals, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal, from colonial times to the present, have been constructed as scapegoats, first of the French mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) and then of Senegalese political and Islamic backlashes. Although they have always cohabited with the rest of the society, homosexuals and transgender people in Senegal have been treated largely as strangers in their own land. By analyzing the discourses of both French colonials and Senegalese, one finds a persistent binary opposing the West and Africa and denigrating sexual and gender variances and subcultures in Senegal as pathological European imports.

The Prophet Muhammad reincarnated and his son, Jesus: re-centering Islam among the Layenne of Senegal

This article explores how the Layenne of Senegal have employed the historical geography of the Cap Vert peninsula as an archive to effectively re-center the Islamic world away from Arabia to the coast of West Africa. Annual pilgrimages to Layenne religious sites and shrines that serve as lieux de mémoire provide ‘foyers’ on which contemporary collective and individual identities are contemplated with regard to Layenne perceptions of the past. The Layenne historical imagination is tied to the geographic space that constitutes Cap Vert in a symbiotic relationship by which history gives meaning to place and vice versa. While the rituals practiced at the Layenne places of memory revolve around the hagiography of their founder, Seydina Limamou Laye, who claimed to be the Mahdi and the reincarnation of the Prophet Muhammad, the Layenne have also appropriated sites and symbols associated with French colonization and a post-colonial Senegal into a vibrant and fluid conception of modernity that is simultaneously indigenous and global.

Killing Time

This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of “lazy” young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea “all day.” But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas scholarships and government positions. This suggests that what some see as political and economic inactivity is manufactured through state-sponsored encadrement: techniques of trapping, quartering, and containing youth.

African Colonial Soldiers between Memory and Forgetfulness : The Case of Post-Colonial Senegal

African Colonial Soldiers between Memory and Forgetfulness : The Case of Post-Colonial Senegal

Epistolary Friendship:La prise de parolein Mariama B�'sUne si longue lettre

Mariama Bâ's Une si longue lettre has attracted the attention of literary critics and scholars in both Africa and the Western world. The novel, written in the form of a letter that the protagonist, Ramatoulaye, writes to her childhood friend, examines the challenges and issues that face contemporary Africa at a time of profound change in the political and social arenas following decolonization. Much of the initial discussion of this text has concentrated on such ideological functions of the novel such as sociopolitical implications of polygamy, cultural conflicts in post-colonial Senegal, and the role of the African woman writer (see Cham; d'Almeida; and Stringer). More recently, studies have engaged in a discussion of the formal elements of the work, its narrative structure, and use of discourse (see Larrier; Mortimer; and Stratton). This paper joins this current dialogue through an examination of Bâ's use of the epistolary [End Page 110] genre. Bâ distinguishes herself from her contemporaries in her choice of genre. Although the first-person narrative is common in the African corpus, it is usually represented in the form of autobiography or journal writing. Letter novels are a rarity. One study of the francophone African corpus at the end of the 1970s reveals only five letter novels published before or around the time of Une si longue lettre, all by men. 1 Bâ's surprising choice of genre has provoked much discussion (see Cham; Miller; and Schipper).

Mariama Bâ and the Politics of the Family

The Senegalese woman writer, Mariama Bâ, chronicles a changing society in post colonial Senegal, caught between the attraction of modernization and the resistance of traditional beliefs. Her award-winning novel, Une si longue lettre, is examined as an example of the kind of subversive "journalism-vérité" proposed by Paulin Hountondji: an anecdotal reconstruction of facts combined with organization and interpretation that leads readers to an awareness of the real conditions of daily life and exposes the structures that make them possible. Bâ's novel exemplifies this "return to the real" not only because Bâ speaks about and exposes the all-too-common reality of abandonment in the details of everyday reality. This essay reads the novel against the background of social, cultural, and political events in Senegal in the 1970s, including the passage of the Family Code into law and the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. It addresses the modern perversion of the system of polygamy and the economic and social ramifications of abandonment for women, children, and the country. It also addresses issues of class, caste prejudices, education, forced marriage, and the figure of the progressive mother.