Quelque chose de pourri dans le post-empire

RésuméLe mémorial pour Savorgnan de Brazza au Congo ouvre de nombreuses questions qui ne se limitent pas aux politiques néo-coloniales de la France (et du Congo) dans cette région de l’Afrique équatoriale. Cet article retrace les principaux enjeux politiques du transfert des restes de l’explorateur au Congo avant de s’interroger sur le statut du corps humain dans les manœuvres des États modernes et sur le rôle des fétiches occidentaux et africains. Il en profite pour critiquer les interprétations classiques de la biopolitique (Foucault), de la notion de sacré appliquée à la personne humaine (Agamben), et du sacré comme inéchangeable (Godelier et Warnier). En conclusion, c’est la notion même de fétichisme de la marchandise (Marx) qui est critiquée et étendue à une théorie nouvelle : celle du caractère marchand des fétiches.AbstractThe Memorial for Savorgnan de Brazza in Congo-Brazzaville opens up numerous questions that transcend the neocolonial politics at bay between France and the Congo. This article examines some of the main political meanings of the explorer’s remains’ transfer to the Congo, before questioning the role of the human body as a fetish in modern politics. In doing so, the author discusses the conventional interpretations of biopolitics (Foucault), of the sacred status of people (Agamben), and of the idea of the sacred as belonging to the sphere of the non-exchangeable (Godelier and Warnier). Finally, she criticizes and extends the theory of commodity fetishism (Marx) by showing that fetishes themselves have always been produced and exchanged as commodities

De la modernité comme impuissance. Fétichisme et crise du politique en Afrique équatoriale et ailleurs

Depuis les années 1990, la sorcellerie moderne est devenue l’incarnation du spécifique religieux africain et le paradigme dominant des chercheurs contre la notion de fétiche, abandonnée par la langue savante après les années 1920. Mais la présence têtue du répertoire populaire du fétiche en (post)colonie montre qu’un pan entier de l’histoire de cette « idée-problème » n’a jamais été entrepris : son usage en Afrique coloniale et postcoloniale. En omettant de repenser les fondations conceptuelles et historiques de ces concepts, les universitaires ont hérité une dialectique coloniale bloquée que j’appelle ici imaginaire de l’infra-politique : l’institution-séparation du pouvoir indigène dans les deux champs distincts du religieux et du politique, et la prescription de leur impossible déprise. Cet article retrace l’histoire coloniale de cet imaginaire et sa survie dans les débats contemporains. Il suggère comment ses limites peuvent être dépassées par l’étude des théories historiques de la puissance en Afrique équatoriale.On Modernity as Powerlessness: Fetishism and Political Crisis in Equatorial Africa (and Beyong). Since the 1990s, modern witchcraft has become the dominant paradigm in the studies of African religious beliefs, against the older notion of fetishism that had declined in scholarly language since the 1920s.  Yet the stubborn use of the repertoire of the fetish in postcolonial popular parlance shows how little is known of the history of its colonial transfer and reappropriation in Africa. Ignoring such processes, I argue, has led scholars of the religious to carry on significant conceptual blockage, which I call the imaginary of infra-politics.  This article retraces some of the historical steps in the emergence and endurance of this imaginary, first in the colony where colonizers created two distinct categories, the religious and the political, to define and disempower African cosmologies and practical initiatives, and to predict that Africans could never adequately separate the two in order to achieve progress towards a secularized form of modernity, and second, among contemporary studies of modern witchcraft and African Christianities.  To go beyond this conceptual dead-end, it also suggests a return to studies of African theories and practices of power

Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reçoit un « Distinguished Africanist Award »

Bernault Florence. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reçoit un « Distinguished Africanist Award ». In: Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, tome 87, n°326-327, 1er semestre 2000. Les Juifs et la mer, sous la direction de Richard Ayoun. pp. 389-390

Some Lessons from the History of Epidemics in Africa

The history of endemic diseases, epidemics and pandemics in Africa shows, contrary to a stubborn belief, that the continent has had a long experience of biomedicine – its theory, techniques, and modes of action. Africans have been active in biomedicine, exercising methods of appropriation and implementation that are as ‘modern’ and effective as in the rest of the world. Like Westerners, they have a long experience in the theories of microbial contagion and modern prophylaxis and treatment, which appeared in the 1860s but did not become widespread until the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, coinciding with colonial expansion across Africa. During and after this period, Africa played an essential role in the discovery and treatment of many diseases such as malaria, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis and plague (Packard 2007; Webb 2013). Major scientific institutions such as the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1887) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1899) played a part in circulating imperial knowledge. Their role in the progress of research is increasingly studied by historians (Arnold 1996; Tilley 2012). The expertise of Africans, whether as researchers, caregivers, or ordinary consumers of biomedicine, is therefore comparable to that of the rest of the world. In many points, it is even superior; I will come back to this in my conclusion.[...

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reçoit un « Distinguished Africanist Award »

Bernault Florence. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch reçoit un « Distinguished Africanist Award ». In: Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, tome 87, n°326-327, 1er semestre 2000. Les Juifs et la mer, sous la direction de Richard Ayoun. pp. 389-390