SOAS Research Online

Abstract

My talk today proceeds from a chapter in a book that has now been quite long in the making, based on my critical historical and anthropological research of ‘eighteenth- century’ West African communities and subjectivities whose gender-variance, sexuality, spiritual and linguistic diversity greatly exceeded the colonial, often binary, regimes of selfhood. Whilst the book intends to follow these subjectivities through the horrors of the Middle Passage into the so-called ‘new world’ of colonial, first ‘French’ and then ‘Spanish’, Louisiana, against the grain of the colonial archive that sought to violently expunge any trace of their existence, today I want to briefly address their lifeworlds in their homelands of Greater Senegambia, that is, the territories of today’s Senegal, the Gambia, western Mali and lower Mauritania.