Buch, Englisch, Deutsch, 78 Seiten, Format (B × H): 136 mm x 207 mm, Gewicht: 172 g
Reihe: Thyssen lectures 2022-2026
Understanding Power Relations in a Colonial Context: Top-Down, Bottom-Up, In-Between
Buch, Englisch, Deutsch, 78 Seiten, Format (B × H): 136 mm x 207 mm, Gewicht: 172 g
Reihe: Thyssen lectures 2022-2026
ISBN: 978-3-926397-62-1
Verlag: Bittner, Klaus GmbH
UNDERSTANDING POWER RELATIONS IN A COLONIAL CONTEXT:
TOP-DOWN, BOTTOM-UP, IN-BETWEEN
Inspired by categories developed by the Senegalese politician, poet, and political thinker Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), Frederick Cooper’s talk broaches the question of how to study power in the colonial and postcolonial world. Rather than postulating a duality between top-down (elitist) history and a vision coming from the bottom of class, racial, and gender hierarchies, Cooper argues that unequal relationships are still relationships and can be pushed and pulled in different directions. He follows Senghor in linking two forms of solidarity: horizontal (defined by people sharing a common culture or social position), and vertical (the relationship between top and bottom of a political or social order). If Africans across the continent worked together, Senghor argued, they could turn colonizers’ claims on Africans into Africans’ claim on the colonizer for the redistribution of resources and power. Cooper’s talk is a plea for studying the ‘in-between’ – in social, political, and geographical terms – and for examining how people working across social categories have in recent history produced fundamental changes in the world political order.