Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

All days
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Wednesday 12 April 2023 16.30 - 18.30
S-4 AFR01b European Identities in Africa – Session 2: Going African
Victoriagatan 13, A252
Network: Africa Chair: Márcia Gonçalves
Organizer: Márcia Gonçalves Discussants: -
Julien Charnay : The « Lebanese Issue » in Dakar from the Second World War to the Independence of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française). A Middlemen Minority seen from a Colonial Outlook
This article proposal is inspired by a PhD dissertation in History defended at Paris-Nanterre University in November 8th 2021 and supervised by Pr Sabinne Effosse. It intended to study Lebanese and Syrian transnational migrations to French West African colonies, especially Senegal, from their beginning in the 1880s to the 1960s, ... (Show more)
This article proposal is inspired by a PhD dissertation in History defended at Paris-Nanterre University in November 8th 2021 and supervised by Pr Sabinne Effosse. It intended to study Lebanese and Syrian transnational migrations to French West African colonies, especially Senegal, from their beginning in the 1880s to the 1960s, in the aftermath of the independence of the federation of colonial territories, Afrique Occidentale Française. Thanks to the tools of Imperial and Colonial Studies as illustrated by Frederick Cooper’s or Ann Laura Stoler’s work, and to various and recent studies on Lebanese transnational migrations in Africa, we aim at discussing the tensions those migrants’ and merchants’ integration in Senegal aroused within this colonial society. Actually, various colonial actors expressed fears on the end of French colonial empire as it was allegedly overwhelmed by foreign migrants. Those actors claimed to represent whole parts of French colonial society in Senegal like White independent retailers who had long advocated strict limitations or expulsion of Lebanese migrants depicted as political and economic threat to French « mission civilisatrice ». Expressed from the late XIXth century, this colonial and racial dogma had actually justified political domination of the French over African territories due to political and material progess White settlers were supposed to bring to the Africans. But such an anti-migrant rhetoric also stressed imperial contradictions as Lebanon had long been a target of a long-term French influence which justified patronage to those migrants from French authorities.
In order to illustrate thoses tensions and the contradictions of French imperialism it implemented, this article focuses on the political and media activity of Maurice Voisin, a French retailer and journalist settled in Dakar, Senegal, between 1947 and 1956. Through various press campaigns he led in the newspapers he founded, Les Echos africains and Les Echos d’Afrique noire from 1950, he tried to raise an anti-Lebanese awareness among Senegalese society. He depicted migrants as unwanted economic agents and as a potential political threat through Arab nationalism they alledgedly brought into Africa. With such a rhetoric, Maurice Voisin’s press campaigns highlighted French small independent traders’ social downgrading while he intended to save French Empire from massive uprisings. From the aftermarth of the Second World War, it was actually challenged by revolutionnary nationalisms which were particularly deep-rooted in its North African territories or in Syria and Lebanon, two former Société des Nations’ French Mandates which gained independence through violence in 1946. Thus, Maurice Voisin advocated the union of Senegalese society, no matter the racial divides between French settlers and the Senegalese population. Recent studies on Lebanese migration in Africa stressed the reactions of the Lebanese community in Dakar to those racist press campaigns. According to some authors, they were the first step to the birth of a national community overwhelming Lebanese political and religious divides : Afro-Lebanese. From an imperial angle, we will try to show that if those campaigns actually arose collective reactions from Lebanese migrants in Dakar, they illuminated lingereing identity divides and questionned ambiguous positions towards French imperial authority. (Show less)

Ruhan Fourie : We are not Europeans, we are of Africa as any other Person is of Africa”: Afrikaner Africanisation in the Wake of Decolonisation
The public jury is still out if white South Africans is considered, or consider themselves as African. This is especially true of those of Afrikaner heritage. Afrikaners is a colonial creation which emerged from mainly Dutch, German, and French emigrants who were bound together by their protestant religion, aversion to ... (Show more)
The public jury is still out if white South Africans is considered, or consider themselves as African. This is especially true of those of Afrikaner heritage. Afrikaners is a colonial creation which emerged from mainly Dutch, German, and French emigrants who were bound together by their protestant religion, aversion to imperial subserviency, and their creole language, Afrikaans. By the turn of the twentieth century this group had spread throughout the territory that is today South Africa, established republics in the north, fought and lost an anti-imperial war against the British, and emerged as a volk – a people, or nation. The following three decades saw the emergence of a national consciousness which was organised into a thriving Afrikaner nationalist movement. In 1948 the Afrikaner’s Nationalist Party (NP) took charge of South Africa who implemented apartheid. The literature indicates that throughout these developments Afrikaners’ identification as European became a key justification for their existence in Africa. Up until the first the early 1960s Afrikaner leaders such prime minster Hendrik Verwoerd still casted Christian Nationalist Afrikaners as an outpost of European civilisation. His successor John Vorster however reacted to regimes changes against South Africa’s northern borders by recasting Afrikaners as Africans, dubbed by some as an African volk or the white tribe of Africa. This was an attempt to gain legitimacy both amongst its African nationalist neighbours to the north, and the Western powers of the globe. This paper is particularly concerned about how Afrikaner leaders, both political and cultural, framed this constructed shift in identity to the volk itself in the 1960s-1980s. It is hypothesised that this was an elite shift which was not readily accepted by grassroot Afrikaners. Many factors played into this failure, but specifically the fragmentation of the volk in the last three decades of white minority rule played a major role. In turn, it is suggested that a new South African rather than African identity was accepted to replace the association with the old European anchor identity. (Show less)

Gabriele Montalbano : Latin Africa. An Euro-African Colonial Project. The Case of the Italian Migrants in French Protectorate of Tunisia
The history of colonial spaces and cultures is often divided into imperial categories following the national narratives resulting from that past. Scholars usually analysed the national and imperial building of European nations taking into account the colonial spaces under their rule. Thanks to my PhD research about the Italian migrations ... (Show more)
The history of colonial spaces and cultures is often divided into imperial categories following the national narratives resulting from that past. Scholars usually analysed the national and imperial building of European nations taking into account the colonial spaces under their rule. Thanks to my PhD research about the Italian migrations in a French colonial space, the Protectorate of Tunisia, I have analysed how national categories have been influenced and challenged by the colonial context especially when there was a connection between labour migrations in foreign colonial possessions. After having demonstrated in my PhD the eminent role of foreign colonial possession in Italian nation-building project, in this paper I would like to frame it in a wider perspective that considers the Wallerstein world theory, colonial bio-politics and trans-imperial connections. Usually, scholars have studied the case of foreign white communities or minorities in the perspective of rivalry towards the colonial authority. In the wake of the studies concerning Eurafrica, I want to consider the link between colonial powers, in this case, France and Italy, focusing on Italian working-class migrants as ‘vital subjects’ of a trans-imperial biopolitical project aiming to build a European or ‘Latin’ Africa in the southern shore of the Mediterranean basin. My interest here is to disclose the case of Italian migrants in Mediterranean Africa to a new and challenging perspective founded on world-theory perspective applied to colonial systems, considering Italy as a semi-periphery imperial power, and international workforce mobility -t he ‘poor-white’ migrants - as intermediary actors in colonial society. (Show less)



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