Past Imperfect

This book proposes to examine French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ethnology, museology, sociology, and (art) history. In this discussion, a specific

focus is placed on temporality and the role ascribed by these different disciplines to African pasts, presents, and futures. It is argued here that the post-war context, characterized, inter alia, by the creation of UNESCO, the birth of Pr�sence Africaine and the prevalence of existentialism, bore

witness to the development of new regimes of historicity and to the partial refutation of a progress-based modernity. This investigation is predicated on case studies from West and Central Africa (AOF, AEF and Belgian Congo) and, whilst adopting a postcolonial methodology, it explores African and

French authors such as Georges Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chris Marker, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Claude L�vi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre and Placide Tempels. This study explores the intellectual legacy of the 'long nineteenth century' and the difficulty encountered by these

authors to articulate their anti-colonial agenda away from the modern methodologies of the 'colonial library'. By focussing on issues of intellectual alienation, this book also demonstrates that the post-WW2 period foreshadowed twenty-first century debates on extroversion, racial inequalities, the

decolonization of history, and cultural (mis)appropriation.