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Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
This collection brings together six papers of the some seventy that were presented at the international symposium held at Université Laval in October, 1987 entitled “Mémoires, Histoires, Identités”. Organized jointly by the History Department of Université Laval, the Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales de Paris and the Laboratoire 363 “Tiers-Monde-Afrique” CNRS/Université Paris VII, the symposium aimed to stimulate reflection and research on the links between the construction of identities and the production of history as a discourse on the past, and thus on the links maintained by two modes of production of History-the academic and the popular. Achieving this objective required a broadening of the empirical field to avoid unduly singularizing African experiences.
The papers here concentrate on the process of the production of history by historical actors or by cultural intermediaries who, educated or not, are not of the university milieu which imposes the western conception of historical discourse. The relationships between academic and popular discourse and between the norms of the dominant culture and the practices of dominated cultures are at the center of the analyses.
Isaiah Berlin recently summarized the past century as follows:
The other, without doubt, consists in the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the explosions of nationalism, racism, and, in places, of religious bigotry, which, interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted.
- Type
- Papers from the Conference “Memoires, Histoires, Identites: Experiences Des Societes Francophones”
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © African Studies Association 1988
References
Notes
The local organizing committee consisted of J. Dagneau, B. Jewsiewicki and S. Pelletier. The colloquium benefited from the financial support of the Agence Canadienne de Coopération Internationale, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of International Relations of the Government of Quebec, and Université Laval.
1. Chartier, R., “Le passé composé,” Traverses, no. 40 (1987), 6–18.Google Scholar
2. Other papers will be published as part of edited volumes, as well as in two numbers of Cahiers d'études africaines.
3. Revel, J., “La culture populaire: sur les usages et les abus d'un outil historiographique” in Culturas Populares (Madrid, 1986), 223–38.Google Scholar
4. Berlin, Isaiah, “On the Pursuit of the Ideal,” New York Review of Books (3/17/1988), 11–18.Google Scholar
5. Cohen, D.W., “The Production of History,” paper delivered at the Fifth International Round Table of Anthropology and History, Paris, 2–5 July 1986.Google Scholar
6. Mudimbe, V.Y., The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, 1988),Google Scholar
7. Graff, H.J., The Legacies of Literacy (Bloomington, 1987)Google Scholar; Illich, Ivan and Sanders, B., The Alphabetization of the Modern Mind (Berkeley, 1988).Google Scholar
8. Marcia Wright analyzes this question in relation to the individual strategies of the social promotion of women in Africa in one of the Cahiers d'études africaines papers.
9. Goody, J.R., The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987).
10. His must be compared with Léopold Senghor's project, which was as much literary as political.
11. Chrétien, J-P, “Confronting the Unequal Exchange of the Oral and the Written” in African Historiographies, ed. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil and Newbury, David (Beverly Hills, 1986), 75–90.Google Scholar
12. Cultural Models in Language an Thought, ed. Holland, D. and Quinn, N. (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Récits de vie et mémoires: vers une anthropologie historique du souvenir, ed. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil (Quebec, 1988).Google Scholar
13. Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar
14. Carr, D., Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington, 1986), 9.Google Scholar
15. Biaya, T.K., “De l'aube des temps jusqu'alors” in Etat Independant du Congo, Congo Belge, Republique Populaire du Congo, République Zaire? ed. Jewsiewicki, Bogumil (Quebec, 1984), 23–34.Google Scholar
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