Behavior, Movement, Identity: African Subjectivities in Process

These papers seek to demonstrate how the complexities of nation building in both colonial and post colonial Africa prescribed artificial norms of behavior, movement and identity to African subjects. An important consideration for each paper is to address the ways in which individuals and or groups responded to these changing norms? The panel will also reposition the term ‘development,’ as a non-progressive concept which has indeterminate results and necessitates a critical (re)thinking of the historical processes of state building and identity formation. Specific areas of concentration are colonial Tanganyika from 1949-1965, colonial Benin in the 1930’s, post colonial Tanzania from 1957-1979, and pre-colonial, colonial, and independent Liberia from 1816-through 21st century.

The Road through the Swamp: French Development Initiative and
African Resistance in Colonial Dahomey

Marcus Filippello
Graduate Student, University of California-Davis
mfilippello at ucdavis dot edu

During the 1930s, European officials championed public works projects as a means to ‘compassionately’ promote economic development in African colonies. Yet in spite of their apparent bureaucratic sophistication, schemes oftentimes failed to achieve goals set forth by administrations. In 1937, French West African officials authorized the construction of a road to connect Pobé and Ketu in southeastern Dahomey. Initial plans indicated that local wage laborers would complete construction in the early 1940s. By 1945, however, disgruntled prisoners had barely completed twenty-percent of the project. An analysis of the early stages of construction reveals the dysfunctional nature of colonial rule.

Irreconcilable Differences: Colonialism and Pan-Africanism in the Making of Liberian Nationalism

Jamila Moore
Cultural Studies Graduate Student, University of California-Davis
jammoore at ucdavis dot edu

In January 1995, a New York Times article referred to the Liberian civil war as “a war without purpose in a country without identity.” The weight of this statement rests not in the conflict of war itself, but in the greater emergency of a national identity crisis. Since the American Colonization Society first conceived of an African settlement, colonized by free blacks and guided by white American benefactors, Liberia has been a territory in crisis. The ideals of nationhood prescribed by the ACS were not only contradictory, but they also contrasted those of early Pan-Africanists, whose desires also contributed to the making of the future state. Thus, modern challenges to nationalism, as exposed through the four-teen year civil war can be re-evaluated in relation to the country’s early trans-Atlantic identity, in which various audiences constructed a nation that was always already at war.