Humanities

Recently, the Senegalese people have learned to speak more openly of their history. But, as late as the 1980s—the years of my youth and early schooling—the wounds of colonialism were still fresh. I contend that slavery had been so powerful a blow to the Senegalese ethos that we—my family, friends, and schoolmates—did not speak about it. The collective trauma and shame of slavery was apparently so powerful that we sought to repress it, keeping it hidden from ourselves. We were surrounded by its evidence, but chose not to see it. Such was my childhood experience. As an adult, I understand that repression never heals wounds. The trauma remains as a haunting presence. But one can discover its “living presence,” should one choose to look. Just 5.2 km off the west African coast of Senegal lies Gorée Island, where millions of Africans were held captive while awaiting transport into slavery. Much of the four-century history of the African slave trade passed through Senegal, where I grew up....

Archaeology and Memory, 2011

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between ...

Diptyk, 2018

Museum International, 2009

FRENCH ABSTRACT: L’article met en relief la contribution d’écrivains Africains, à travers la littérature engagée, à la consolidation du mouvement Conscience Noire et à l’indépendance du Continent. Sur le plan idéologique et symbolique, l’auteur rend hommage au Sénégal pour la pérennisation de la mémoire collective, notamment la préservation des vestiges de l’esclavage et le développement, sur l’ile de Gorée, de projets d’envergure tels que la Maison d'Education Mariama Bâ en vue de former des leaders féminins de demain. Par leurs productions intellectuelles et plumes acerbes, les écrivains Africains ont changé le cours de l’histoire en présentant à la face du monde la vraie image de l’Afrique et la personnalité de l’homme noir préalablement construites par Gorée autour des paradigmes de douleur, cruauté, torture, barbarie, négation de la vie et de l’existence humaine. Cette littérature de libération et d’auto-détermination présente une image réaliste et objective de l'Afrique, tout en contestant la vision biaisée de l’imposteur et du colonisateur, dont Gorée est l’illustration parfaite. Pour emprunter à Ira Berlin, les écrivains Africains ont bravé la «génération de captivité » pour conquérir, à travers le pouvoir de la plume et de l’intelligence, la « génération de liberté et de confiance en soi. » Pour étayer son argumentaire, l’auteur s’appuie sur des productions scientifiques qui traitent des thématiques ci - après : traditions africaines, stratification sociale, relations genre, colonisation et relations Europe – Afrique.

Etnografica

Etnográfica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Emoções sustentáveis: palcos e bastidores da escravatura na Ilha de Goré  Mais do que meramente simbólicos, os destinos do turismo de raízes, como a ilha de Goré (Senegal), são lugares onde se espera que a emoção despoletada pela escravatura seja experienciada e exibida. Para isso contribuem as múltiplas declarações da UNESCO, os depoimentos políticos de visitantes ilustres, as performances de artistas afro-americanos conhecidos e os comentários registados pelos turistas. O meu modesto argumento é que a ideia de comunidade internacional, baseada no princípio da universalidade dos direitos humanos é recriada e reencenada, através da convocação dos sentimentos para lugares como este. O regime global do património promovido pela UNESCO e por outras plataformas institucionais similares deve ser considerado o aparato mais persuasivo para a criação de um sentimento de pertença coletiva, ultrapassando fronteiras nacionais e difundindo uma ética liberal e formas de memória cosmopolita que já não são definidas em função da moldura dos estados-nação. A questão é que a ideia de comunidade internacional mobiliza para a sua construção os mesmos dispositivos imaginativos e exibicionários e o mesmo pressuposto pancultural das emoções que Anderson descreve para a ascensão das nações, embora paradoxalmente, se assuma como inter-nacional, feita de nações: uma metanação. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: comunidade internacional, escravatura, turismo de raízes, ilha de Goré, emoções cosmopolitas.

2006

Going Home? The Foiled Myth of Return in Eddy L. Harris's Native Stranger: A Black American '5 Journey into the Heart of Africa and Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound Zara Bennett Located a few kilometers off the coast of Dakar, Goree Island served as a strategic location for bringing together slaves captured in the region that now makes up for Senegal and Gambia Its and provided a harbor slaving ships. role in the transatlantic slave trade has memory for the made Goree an important site of Afro-Atlantic diaspora. As such, it receives thousands of international visitors each year Afro-Atlantic diasporic pilgrims, critical; who travel to this cultural heritage site to reconnect with slavery's memory. For and being this well-received by voyage represents a homecoming, a long-awaited return to the motherland's bosom. Through this act of reconnection, they seek to affirm the part of their cultural identity marked by slavery, as well as their membership in the Pan-Af...

Advances in Archaeological Practice, 2018

ABSTRACTGorée Island is Senegal's first site on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is associated with the infamous Atlantic slave trade, and over the past few decades, Gorée has become a prime destination for global tourism, particularly for the African diaspora from the New World but also for many Europeans and African nationals. Today, Gorée is a forum where different stakeholders battle over the role, place, and significance of the island in the Atlantic slave trade and its enduring legacies in the present. While Gorée owes much of its reputation to its heritage, including architecture, archaeology, and monuments, recent controversies over site preservation and policy compliance raised questions about heritage presentation and consumption. This article analyzes stakeholders’ attitudes toward archaeology and heritage to gain insights on how they are presented and consumed by different stakeholders and eventually destroyed by them as well. The discussion shows ambiguous attitud...

Coastal Studies & Society, 2022

This article explores the relationship between islands and the continental shore through the lens of the French colonial administration at Gorée after the Seven Years War. In this period, the French Ministry of the Marine deliberately sought to check French territorial expansion across the globe in order to favor France's lucrative plantation complex in the Caribbean. As part of this official policy, Gorée was deemed critical for the protection of the French slave trade, but not seen as a point of departure for colonial empire on the African continent. Unreliable provisioning from the metropole, labor shortages, and environmental conditions at Gorée, however, pushed local French administrators to rely on the African mainland for resources, nourishing expansionist ambitions in the process. Focusing on the environmental, geo-political, and commercial dimensions of island-continental interaction at Gorée and the Senegambia's coast, this article brings into view unaddressed tensions among official French imperial policy, colonial provisioning, and territorial expansion.