scholarly journals The Values of Versatility: Pharmacists, Plants, and Place in the French (Post)Colonial World

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 432-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Monnais ◽  
Noémi Tousignant
Keyword(s):  
Medicinal Plant ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Plant Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Simple Equations ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractColonial pharmacists bio-prospected, acclimatized, chemically screened, and tinkered with plants and their parts, hoping to create products to supply colonial public health care, metropolitan industries, and imperial markets. This article's approach is to examine the trajectories of expertise of two French colonial pharmacists, Franck Guichard and Joseph Kerharo, to illuminate the history of modern medicinal plant research. Both men studied medicinal plants as part of their colonial duties, yet their interests in indigenous therapies exceeded and outlived colonial projects. We take this “overflow” as our point of departure to explore how science transformed medicinal plant values in French colonial and postcolonial contexts. Our focus is on the relationship between value and space—on the processes of conceptual and material (de-/re-)localization through which plant value is calculated, intensified, and distributed. We study and compare these processes in French Indochina and French West Africa where Guichard and Kerharo, respectively, engaged in them most intensively. We show that their engagements with matter, value, knowledge, and mobility defy easy categorizations of medicinal plant science as either extractive or neo-traditionalist. By eschewing simple equations of scientists' motivations with political projects and knowledge-production, we argue that approaching plant medicine through trajectories of expertise opens up grounds for finer analyses of how colonial power and projects, and their legacies, shaped scientific activity.

scholarly journals الإبداعات المغربية باللغات الأجنبية بين سلطة اللغة وسلطة الهوية: قراءة تراتبية

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (80) ◽  
pp. 142-111
Author(s):  
فؤاد بوعلي
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Cultural Alienation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Creative Writings ◽  
The Relationship

أثارت الكتابة الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية العديد من المواقف المتعارضة في الحقلين: الأكاديمي، والثقافي. فقد عرف تاريخ المغرب الحديث سجالاً قوياً بخصوص هوية الكتابات الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية، بين مَن يرى فيها استلاباً ثقافياً، ومَن يرفض ربط الجنسية الأدبية بالانتماء اللغوي، بل وربطها بالمتخيّل الجماعي أكثر من أيّ شيء آخر، ثمّ بالمنتوج الأدبي بوصفه تجسيداً لهذا المتخيّل. فالتعبير عن الذات بلغة أجنبية يطرح للنقاش مفاهيم، مثل: الهوية الثقافية، والسلطة، والخصوصية، والعلاقة بالآخر. وباستخدام القراءة التراتبية التي ظهرت في الدراسات بعد الكولونيالية أمكننا إثبات التلازم بين استعمال اللغة الفرنسية في الإبداع ومسار الفرنكفونية بوصفها إيديولوجيا استعماريةً تفرض لغتها على الشعوب والفضاءات الذيلية. The debate over literary writing in a foreign language has instigated a lot of dichotomous points of view in Moroccan academic and cultural circles. History of modern Morocco has witnessed strong ongoing debates about the identity of creative writings in foreign language. There are those who would consider such writings as cultural alienation. Contrary to that, there are those who refuse to link literary text to language belonging, and link it instead to the collective imaginary and to the literary product as a manifestation of this imaginary. In fact, expressing the self by using a foreign language puts into question notions such as cultural identity, authority, nation-building, and otherness. By applying the theory of hierarchical reading which appeared in the post colonial studies, we have established the relationship between using French in creative writings and La Francophonie as a colonial ideology imposed on people and annexed spaces.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

The History of Guinea

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Saliou Camara
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Arable Land ◽  
Mineral Resources ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Civilian Leadership

Like most of post-colonial African nation-states, Guinea is the product of Europe’s colonial partition of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. France followed up on the Berlin arrangements with military campaigns against West African rulers and treaties with other European colonial powers (Britain and Portugal) vying for territories in the region and the Republic of Liberia. However, the ancient communities whose descendants inhabit the Republic of Guinea were part and parcel of some of the greatest kingdoms and empires that marked West Africa’s history between the 6th and 19th centuries (Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Batè, Wassolon, and Futa-Jallon). Islam, which was introduced into the region through trans-Saharan trade, scholarship, and wars involving Muslim North Africa and Islamized elites of the Bilad as-Sudan, gained prominence and ultimately became the dominant religion in Guinea. The Atlantic Slave Trade spearheaded by the Portuguese, and the succeeding legitimate trade opened West Africa to colonial conquest and occupation in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Under French occupation, Guinea underwent major political, cultural, social, and economic mutations brought about by events and processes such as its integration into the French West Africa Federation and its multifaceted participation in the World Wars, as well as in France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. In the process, a nationalist anti-colonial consciousness evolved and crystallized, leading to the country’s advent to independence in 1958. As the sole French colony to reject Charles de Gaulle’s Franco-African Community, its modern history is in many ways unique. Since independence, Guinea has gone through a pro-Soviet single-party regime, military rule, and a shaky transition to the current civilian leadership, whose record of democratic governance has been checkered at best. Economic development has also been largely elusive, despite the abundance of arable land and mineral resources. This notable uniqueness notwithstanding, the history of Guinea does epitomize in some respects that of the African continent.

An Alternative Account of the History of Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Directions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Historians of science (whether philosophers, epistemologists, historians of science, or sociologists of science) have been stubbornly reluctant to deal with archaeology in favour of other disciplines such as geology and medicine. Most histories of archaeology have, therefore, been written by archaeologists and this book is no exception. Being trained in the subtleties of stratigraphy and typology does not, however, provide archaeologists with the necessary tools to confront the history of their own discipline. Many of the histories of archaeology so far written revolve around a narrow, almost positivistic, understanding of what the writing of one’s own disciplinary history represents. This volume attempts to overcome these limitations. Questions addressed have been inspired by a wide range of authors working in the areas of history, sociology, literary studies, anthropology, and the history of science. It uses the case of nineteenth-century world archaeology to explore the potential of new directions in the study of nationalism for our understanding of the history of archaeology. Key concepts and questions from which this study has drawn include the changing nature of national history as seen by historians (Berger et al. 1999b; Hobsbawm 1990) and by scholars working in the areas of literature and political studies (Anderson 1991); transformations within nationalism (Smith 1995); new theoretical perspectives developed within colonial and post-colonial studies (Asad 1973; Said 1978); the relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault 1972 (2002); 1980b); and the consideration of social disciplines as products of history (Bourdieu 1993; 2000; 2004). Perhaps historians and sociologists of science’s lack of enthusiasm to engage with archaeology derives from its sheer lack of homogeneity. The term comes from the Greek arkhaiologia, the study of what is ancient. It most commonly encompasses the analysis of archaeological remains, but the emphasis on what body of data lies within its remit has always differed—and still does—from country to country and within a country between groups of scholars of the various academic traditions. For some it revolves around the study of artistic objects, as well as of ancient inscriptions and coins, for others it encompasses all manifestations of culture from every period of human existence.

Francophone Africa at fifty

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Sub Saharan

2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the ‘Year of Africa’. All France’s colonies in sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in that year. This book brings together leading scholars from across the globe to review ‘Francophone Africa at Fifty’. It examines continuities from the colonial to the post-colonial period and analyses the diverse and multi-faceted legacy of French colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa. It also reviews the decolonization of French West Africa in comparative perspective and observes how independence is remembered and commemorated fifty years on.

Vocabularies of Spatiality in French Colonial Urbanism: Some Covert Rationales of Street Names in Colonial Dakar, West Africa and Saigon, Indochina

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 1109-1127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ambe J. Njoh ◽  
Esther P. Chie
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Political Power ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
French Military ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Urbanism

The study analyses toponymic practices in two colonial spaces on two continents. The colonial spaces, Dakar and Saigon, were capitals of the Federation of French West Africa and French Indochina, respectively. Toponymy is used as a tool to articulate socio-cultural and political power in both spaces; also, streets were christened after French military, politico-administrative and religious personalities. Two differences are noted. First, streets in colonial Saigon were named after French military heroes and clergymen, while streets in Dakar were named after French political luminaries. Second, post-colonial Saigon witnessed efforts to re-appropriate the city’s identity, but not so in Dakar.

scholarly journals Emerging infrastructures: the politics of radium and the validation of radiotherapy in India’s first tertiary cancer hospital

BioSocieties ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Research ◽  
Health Priorities ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Tata Memorial Hospital ◽  
Cancer Hospital ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Business Family

AbstractThis article traces the history of India’s first tertiary cancer hospital, Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH). TMH was originally conceived in 1932 as a philanthropic project by the Tatas, an elite Parsi business family in Bombay. The founding of TMH represented a form of philanthro-capitalism which both enabled the Tatas to foster a communal acceptance for big businesses in Bombay and provide the Tatas with the opportunity to place stakes in the emerging nuclear research economy seen as essential to the scientific nationalist sentiment of the post-colonial state. In doing this, the everyday activities of TMH placed a heavy emphasis on nuclear research. In a time when radium for the treatment of cancer was still seen as ‘quackery’ in much of the world, the philanthro-capitalist investment and the interest in nuclear research by the post-colonial state provided an environment where radium medicine was able to be validated. The validation of radiotherapy at TMH influenced how other cancer hospitals in India developed and also provided significant resources for cancer research in early-mid twentieth century India. Ultimately, this article identifies ways in which cancer comes to be seen as relevant in the global south and raises questions on the relationship between local and global actors in setting health priorities.

Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovitch (eds.), The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 355 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
French Government ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Schools ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reviews the book The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities (2016), edited by Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovitch. The Jews of Modern France situates the history of French Jews “within a comparative, transnational and post-colonial context.” The book explores the relationship between the Jews of metropolitan France and those of the colonies, and links the history of French Jewry with that of Jews of the colonies. Topics include the construction of synagogues and the central role of the French government in Jewish affairs or the allotment of cemeteries; the distribution of “patriotism” prizes for girls learning in Jewish schools; the status of religious and civil divorce; and the “Jewish Marshall Plan” aimed at strengthening local Jewish communities.

scholarly journals Beyond denial and exclusion: The history of relations between Christians and Muslims in the Cape Colony during the 17th–18th centuries with lessons for a post-colonial theology of religions

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaco Beyers
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Theology Of Religions ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Context ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Relationship

Learning from the past prepares one for being able to cope with the future. History is made up of strings of relationships. This article follows a historical line from colonialism, through apartheid to post-colonialism in order to illustrate inter-religious relations in South-Africa and how each context determines these relations. Social cohesion is enhanced by a post-colonial theology of religions based on the current context. By describing the relationship between Christians and Muslims during the 17th–18th centuries in the Cape Colony, lessons can be deduced to guide inter-religious relations in a post-colonial era in South Africa. One of the most prominent Muslim leaders during the 17th century in the Cape Colony was Sheik Yusuf al-Makassari. His influence determined the future face of Islam in the Cape Colony and here, during the 18th century, ethics started playing a crucial role in determining the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The ethical guidance of the Imams formed the Muslim communities whilst ethical decline was apparent amongst the Christian colonists during the same period. The place of ethics as determinative of future inter-religious dialogue is emphasised. Denial and exclusion characterised relationships between Christians and Muslims. According to a post-colonial understanding of inter-religious contact the equality and dignity of non-Christian religions are to be acknowledged. In the postcolonial and postapartheid struggle for equality, also of religions, prof Graham Duncan, to whom this article is dedicated, contributed to the process of acknowledging the plurality of the religious reality in South Africa.

Mother India and Her Children Abroad

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Latha Varadarajan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Common Origin ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Foreign Policy ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks into the historical evolution of the relationship between the Indian state and the Indian diaspora to explain both the nature of the diaspora itself as well as the ways in which it has served to influence Indian foreign policy. Briefly tracing the complex history of colonial and post-colonial migrations, the chapter first makes the claim that despite a common origin, there exist very diverse emigrant communities with distinct political trajectories and socio-economic interests. Therefore, one should be cautious about framing the Indian diaspora as a unitary actor that has consciously and effectively shaped foreign policy. Beyond that, it also argues that despite specific moments when the concerns of the diaspora seemed to be prominent in foreign policy deliberations, the diaspora as a whole has been and continues to be marginal in the formulation of India’s foreign policy.

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