Regimi di verità. Nazionalismo, anticolonialismo e afrocentrismo nelle agorà del movimento patriottico (Costa d"Avorio)

Abstract

The patriotic movement supporting the president Laurent Gbagbo in the years of the Ivorian political-military crisis, made extensive use of public parliaments popularly known as "agora", in order to mobilize citizens. The orators ("orateurs") animating the agora, offered a day-by-day commentary of political actualities and diffused a virulent anticolonial discourse directed against France (as formerly colonial power) and the "West". Moreover, they proposed narratives of Africans and of their history where afrocentric and panafricanist doctrines are mingled with a religious ideology of deliverance uttered by Pentecostal pastors. In their discourse, "western" narrations of history and their representations of Africans were denounced as rhetoric devices aimed at obviating the recognition of African agency in history. In order to counter them, the orators explicitly constructed regimes of truth with a specific performative power: the power of defining and recreating an imagined african self and its place in history. The enquiry is based on a reflexive ethnographic experience in the agoras of Abidjan. It proceeds though an interpretation of performative utterances of orators and a critical discussion of the identifications and of the logics of positioning and belonging imposed to the ethnographer in such context. ; The patriotic movement supporting the president Laurent Gbagbo in the years of the Ivorian political-military crisis, made extensive use of public parliaments popularly known as "agora", in order to mobilize citizens. The orators ("orateurs") animating the agora, offered a day-by-day commentary of political actualities and diffused a virulent anticolonial discourse directed against France (as formerly colonial power) and the "West". Moreover, they proposed narratives of Africans and of their history where afrocentric and panafricanist doctrines are mingled with a religious ideology of deliverance uttered by Pentecostal pastors. In their discourse, "western" narrations of history and their representations of Africans were denounced as rhetoric devices aimed at obviating the recognition of African agency in history. In order to counter them, the orators explicitly constructed regimes of truth with a specific performative power: the power of defining and recreating an imagined african self and its place in history. The enquiry is based on a reflexive ethnographic experience in the agoras of Abidjan. It proceeds though an interpretation of performative utterances of orators and a critical discussion of the identifications and of the logics of positioning and belonging imposed to the ethnographer in such context.