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.

Table of Contents:
Preface  ix Introduction  1 1. A Siren, an Empty Shrine, and a Photograph  27 2. The Double Life of Charms  69 3. Carnal Fetishism  96 4. The Value of People  118 5. Cannibal Mirrors  138 6. Eating  168 Conclusion  194 Notes  205 Bibliography  293 Index  321

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.

Review :
". . .This should be a key text for African studies and certainly for any collection centered on West and Central Africa." - J. R. Kenyon (Choice) "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) "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) “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) “Florence Bernault offers an original and refreshing history of European-African colonial encounters in Gabon, Equatorial Africa. She does so by using a wealth of sources.... [Colonial Transactions] will appeal to scholars of colonialism in Africa and beyond, and to anyone interested in African spirituality and modernity.” - Ndubueze L. Mbah (Journal of African History) “Bernault’s conception of colonialism as a transaction . . . does much to reconfigure understandings of power under colonialism. . . . [Colonial Transactions] should be read widely not just by scholars of history and gender but also by anthropologists and others interested in African studies or colonialism, more broadly.” - Avenel Rolfsen (Gender & History) “Colonial Transactions expands our knowledge and refines our understanding of the two themes that stand at its center – witchcraft and colonialism. . . . No future research about witchcraft or about colonial relations will be able to ignore this fascinating and eye-opening book.” - Ruth Ginio (Middle Ground Journal)