Discipline Contra Autonomy in the Landscape of Emancipation of Colonial Saint-Louis, North-Western Senegal

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the mid 19th century, several thousands of enslaved people from north-western Senegal fled their enslavers to seek freedom in the colonial city of Saint-Louis and in neighbouring French outposts, where slavery had just been abolished. This movement continued throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creating a landscape of overlapping diasporas where the autonomy and agency of freed people encountered the disciplinary and necropolitical drive of the French colonial authorities, expressed through increasingly militarised landscapes and attempts at confining migrating freed people in distinct settlements to continue exploiting their labour. Through a combination of archival research in France and Senegal, oral history interviews, and archaeological survey, this research explores the diverse dynamics and power relations at play in this landscape, as well as its heritage and (neo)colonial legacies including carceral expansion, shifts in gender dynamic, and socioeconomic and environmental destruction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• 2023 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow