Friday, March 14, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Rather fittingly in February 1968, on the eve of the upheavals of France's Mai 68, the French New Left philosopher, Louis Althusser, declared philosophy to be a revolutionary weapon. Gazing across the Mediterranean to North and West Africa to examine two lesser-known francophone movements in Tunisia and Senegal, this paper will explore how agents of the state and student protestors used colonial history to negatively depict the other. Leading political officials in Senegal and Tunisia leaned on colonial history to claim that protesting students in 1968 were practitioners of neo-imperial mimicry, merely copycats of the decadent protest movement of their former French colonial oppressors. Students in France drew upon the sordid history of government repression during the Algerian War to vilify the actions of the French riot police in 1968. For both parties, French colonialism was the villain, though degrees of distancing from Frenchness varied among groups. This paper will confront the tensions between Senegalese President Leopold Senghor's dueling concepts of Negritude and Francophonie, as well as Tunisian head of state Habib Bourguiba's tenuous position as a resistor and promoter of French culture for Tunisia. For their part, Tunisian and Senegalese student activists recycled and transformed the anti-imperialist characterizations of French oppressors and redirected them at newly formed governments that they felt were in collusion with the former colonial power. The convulsions of the francophone 1968 thus provide a window into the deployments of colonial history as both a counter-revolutionary and revolutionary weapon by states and student activists.
