Séminaire papiers en Afrique (5 nov, Paris)

La première séance du séminaire « L’Etat documentaire et les mondes du papier en Afrique: matérialité, technologies, affects » (séminaire CEAf-CEMAf) aura lieu le 5 novembre, de 13h30 à 16h, en salle Person, 9 rue Mahler 75004 Paris (2e étage).
Après une introduction à la thématique du séminaire, nous écouterons Lorena Rizzo (Universités de Bielefeld & Bâle) dont la présentation, sur la Namibie coloniale, est intitulée
« Between the Book and the Lamp. Interiors of Bureaucracy and the Materiality of Colonial Power ».
Vous en trouverez un résumé ci dessous, et en pièce jointe le programme annuel du séminaire.

Séverine Awenengo, Guillaume Lachenal, Aïssatou Mbodj

Abstract
Scholarly work on colonial administration and bureaucracy in Africa has moved away from narratives of modernization and alleged Western civilization towards more nuanced analytical engagements with colonial state institutions and their forms of organisation and communication. These studies have shown a growing concern with the cultural dimensions of colonialism and with the construction of imperial subjects and subjectivities through objects, desires and commodification.
In line with this scholarship the paper explores the materialities of colonial administration in Namibia, first under German and later under South African rule. Investigating historical photographs of bureaucratic interiors, i.e. offices and homes of former colonial personnel, the paper retraces how particular objects and images – desks, books, maps, and photographs – referenced cultural practices that helped constitute spaces of self-articulation and display. Therein the conjunction of materiality and visuality was significant, as it heightened the importance of technological mediation within colonialism’s modernist pretence.

Séminaire Etat documentaire_Présentation et Programme