Francois G Richard
Biographic Data
| ID | 223910 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francois G Richard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francois G |
| FAMILY NAME | Richard |
| SIGNATURE | RICHARD F G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Cracks and Fugitive Geographies: Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Landscapes in Central Veracruz, Mexico, Nineteenth-Twentyth Centuries
Ambiguous Kingdoms: States, Subjects, and Spatialities of Power
Chapter 5 performs a genealogy of the trope of the predatory kingdom, which has structured the literature on Atlantic West Africa. Where scholarship has often assumed centralized kingdoms’ sovereign control over matters of space and place, the chapters suggests that rural landscapes were more fractious political terrains, shaped by a peasant ‘political unconscious’ of ambivalence about sovereignty. The chapter shows the obstacles to centralizatio…
The Politics of Absence: Peasant Lifeworlds and Colonial Government
Chapter 8 expands the analysis of colonial power fields begun in the previous chapter, with an examination of the lived experience of colonialism – namely, how Siin villagers negotiated, complied with, and elided colonial government. Shortages of human (and other) resources compelled the colonial administration to graft itself reluctantly onto local institutions, a ‘politics of absence’ that gave peasant communities ample room to rework colonial …
Object Trajectories: Atlantic Commerce and Genealogies of Material Practice
Chapter 6 examines Siin’s entanglement with the Atlantic economy through archaeological evidence collected in the region. While studies of the Atlantic commerce have often focused on the stagnation or destruction of African economies, the cultural life of mundane trade goods – liquor, beads, imported ceramics and tobacco pipes – reveals complex strategies of appropriation, creative transformation, and consumption. The chapter explores practices o…
Hesitant Sovereignties: Logics, Logistics, and Aesthetics of French Rule
Chapter 7 revisits the problems of colonialism and the colonial state by analyzing the brittle foundations of French power in rural Senegal and the deeply contested history of colonial rule in the Siin. Picking up on the discussion of state forms and political landscape begun in earlier chapters, it argues that rural milieus offer clues about the materiality of colonial rule, more specifically, about the logics of colonial government, and the con…
“The Very Model of Egalitarian and Anarchic Peasantry”: Seereer Cultural Landscapes and the Ethnographic Imagination
Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, attentive to convergent and dissonant accounts, shows that images of typical peasants greatly underestimate the dynamism of rural culture. The chapter also examines how static portraits of Seereer farmers speak as much to imperial anxieties and colonial p…
What’s in a Name? Notes on the Making of Seereer Identity
Chapter 3 takes on the historical limits of ethnicity, a ‘public secret’ whose avoidance does a great deal of political work in Senegal. Starting with common depictions of Seereer people as traditional peasants and of ‘Seereerness’ as a time-deep identity, the chapter draws on multiple archives to question these scenarios and the applicability of ethnicity to past settings. Specifically, it argues that, far from making up a primeval entity, the S…
Reluctant Landscapes
Chapter 1 opens with an ethnographic look at Siin’s rural landscapes and the political marginalization that the province has suffered since the days of independence in 1960. Moving away from ideas of space as map, physical setting, or background, it builds on Seereer people’s relationship to their agrarian milieu to develop a theory of political landscape. This approach centers on three elements: first, landscapes are multi-temporal they conjoin …
Writing Senegambian Political Pasts
Chapter 2 addresses the question of global history in Senegal and suggests that we reframe its “problem-space.” If scholarship has often foregrounded the agencies of state, capital, and colony, the chapter suggests we interrogate their limits through the lens of landscape, with an eye for minor-key stories of resilience, dissidence, and complicity that slice across the plane of global events and reintroduce a sense of unpredictability in the maki…
Conclusion: Archaeological Pasts, Postcolonial Presents, Traditional Futures
The conclusion tracks the legacies of contested sovereignty and the dialectics of state presence/absence in postcolonial Senegal. Since independence, the state’s involvement in Siin has tacked between intrusiveness and benign neglect, which has propped up some social projects while bringing about economic decay. The conclusion examines the consequences of these long histories of power for our thinking about tradition and how it has featured in na…
Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal
“Excessive Economies” and the Logics of Abundance: Genealogies of Wealth, Labor, and Social Power in Pre-Colonial Senegal
Materializing Colonial Pasts: African Archaeological Perspectives
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience investigates the material production and expression of colonial experiences in Africa. It combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources to explore the diverse pathways, practices, and projects constructed by Africans in their engagement with the forces of colonial modernity and capitalism. This volume is situated in ongoing debates in archaeological and anthrop…
Traveling Theory: Mark Leone, Slavery, and Archaeology's Critical Imagination
This article presents considerations inspired by Mark P. Leone’s keynote address at the African Diaspora Archaeology Network Forum convened at the 2012 Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Leone’s reflections raised poignant historical and conceptual questions, with relevance for the historical archaeology of African experience and critical scholarship on African diasporas. In a more disciplinary reading, the …
Thinking through “Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms”: Historical Archaeology in Senegal and the Material Contours of the African Atlantic
Hesitant geographies of power: The materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850-1960
This essay draws on archival and archaeological sources to examine historical matters of power in the Siin province (Senegal) and their inscription in village landscapes. It focuses specifically on the entanglements of the longue durée binding Siin's Serer peasantry and the 'colonial state'. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, the article suggests that historical archaeology is in a prime position to study the construction of colonial rule i…
“In [Them] We Will Find Very Desirable Tributaries for Our Commerce”: Cash Crops, Commodities, and Subjectivities in Siin (Senegal) During the Colonial Era
Materializing Poverty: Archaeological Reflections from the Postcolony
Recharting Atlantic encounters. Object trajectories and histories of value in the Siin (Senegal) and Senegambia
The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossi…
Response and responsibility (before and after the ‘facts’). Postcolonial thoughts on ethical writing
Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility of criticism , to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form…
The Archaeology of Collective Action by Dean J. Saitta
Historical and Dialectical Perspectives on the Archaeology of Complexity in the Siin-Saalum (Senegal): Back to the Future
Thinking through “Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms”: Historical Archaeology in Senegal and the Material Contours of the African Atlantic
Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal
Materializing Poverty: Archaeological Reflections from the Postcolony
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience investigates the material production and expression of colonial experiences in Africa. It combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources to explore the diverse pathways, practices, and projects constructed by Africans in their engagement with the forces of colonial modernity and capitalism. This volume is situated in ongoing debates in archaeological and anthrop…
Hesitant geographies of power: The materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850-1960
This essay draws on archival and archaeological sources to examine historical matters of power in the Siin province (Senegal) and their inscription in village landscapes. It focuses specifically on the entanglements of the longue durée binding Siin's Serer peasantry and the 'colonial state'. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, the article suggests that historical archaeology is in a prime position to study the construction of colonial rule i…
Historical and Dialectical Perspectives on the Archaeology of Complexity in the Siin-Saalum (Senegal): Back to the Future
Traveling Theory: Mark Leone, Slavery, and Archaeology's Critical Imagination
This article presents considerations inspired by Mark P. Leone’s keynote address at the African Diaspora Archaeology Network Forum convened at the 2012 Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Leone’s reflections raised poignant historical and conceptual questions, with relevance for the historical archaeology of African experience and critical scholarship on African diasporas. In a more disciplinary reading, the …
Historical and Dialectical Perspectives on the Archaeology of Complexity in the Siin-Saalum (Senegal): Back to the Future
Recharting Atlantic encounters. Object trajectories and histories of value in the Siin (Senegal) and Senegambia
The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossi…
Response and responsibility (before and after the ‘facts’). Postcolonial thoughts on ethical writing
Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility of criticism , to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form…
The Archaeology of Collective Action by Dean J. Saitta
“In [Them] We Will Find Very Desirable Tributaries for Our Commerce”: Cash Crops, Commodities, and Subjectivities in Siin (Senegal) During the Colonial Era
Materializing Poverty: Archaeological Reflections from the Postcolony
Thinking through “Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms”: Historical Archaeology in Senegal and the Material Contours of the African Atlantic
Hesitant geographies of power: The materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850-1960
This essay draws on archival and archaeological sources to examine historical matters of power in the Siin province (Senegal) and their inscription in village landscapes. It focuses specifically on the entanglements of the longue durée binding Siin's Serer peasantry and the 'colonial state'. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, the article suggests that historical archaeology is in a prime position to study the construction of colonial rule i…
Traveling Theory: Mark Leone, Slavery, and Archaeology's Critical Imagination
This article presents considerations inspired by Mark P. Leone’s keynote address at the African Diaspora Archaeology Network Forum convened at the 2012 Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Leone’s reflections raised poignant historical and conceptual questions, with relevance for the historical archaeology of African experience and critical scholarship on African diasporas. In a more disciplinary reading, the …
Materializing Colonial Pasts: African Archaeological Perspectives
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience
Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience investigates the material production and expression of colonial experiences in Africa. It combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources to explore the diverse pathways, practices, and projects constructed by Africans in their engagement with the forces of colonial modernity and capitalism. This volume is situated in ongoing debates in archaeological and anthrop…
“Excessive Economies” and the Logics of Abundance: Genealogies of Wealth, Labor, and Social Power in Pre-Colonial Senegal
Ambiguous Kingdoms: States, Subjects, and Spatialities of Power
Chapter 5 performs a genealogy of the trope of the predatory kingdom, which has structured the literature on Atlantic West Africa. Where scholarship has often assumed centralized kingdoms’ sovereign control over matters of space and place, the chapters suggests that rural landscapes were more fractious political terrains, shaped by a peasant ‘political unconscious’ of ambivalence about sovereignty. The chapter shows the obstacles to centralizatio…
The Politics of Absence: Peasant Lifeworlds and Colonial Government
Chapter 8 expands the analysis of colonial power fields begun in the previous chapter, with an examination of the lived experience of colonialism – namely, how Siin villagers negotiated, complied with, and elided colonial government. Shortages of human (and other) resources compelled the colonial administration to graft itself reluctantly onto local institutions, a ‘politics of absence’ that gave peasant communities ample room to rework colonial …
Object Trajectories: Atlantic Commerce and Genealogies of Material Practice
Chapter 6 examines Siin’s entanglement with the Atlantic economy through archaeological evidence collected in the region. While studies of the Atlantic commerce have often focused on the stagnation or destruction of African economies, the cultural life of mundane trade goods – liquor, beads, imported ceramics and tobacco pipes – reveals complex strategies of appropriation, creative transformation, and consumption. The chapter explores practices o…
Hesitant Sovereignties: Logics, Logistics, and Aesthetics of French Rule
Chapter 7 revisits the problems of colonialism and the colonial state by analyzing the brittle foundations of French power in rural Senegal and the deeply contested history of colonial rule in the Siin. Picking up on the discussion of state forms and political landscape begun in earlier chapters, it argues that rural milieus offer clues about the materiality of colonial rule, more specifically, about the logics of colonial government, and the con…
“The Very Model of Egalitarian and Anarchic Peasantry”: Seereer Cultural Landscapes and the Ethnographic Imagination
Chapter 4 addresses the construction of peasantries and tradition in colonial ethnography. Although the Seereer have been portrayed as timeless farmers, a close reading of ethnographic archives, attentive to convergent and dissonant accounts, shows that images of typical peasants greatly underestimate the dynamism of rural culture. The chapter also examines how static portraits of Seereer farmers speak as much to imperial anxieties and colonial p…
What’s in a Name? Notes on the Making of Seereer Identity
Chapter 3 takes on the historical limits of ethnicity, a ‘public secret’ whose avoidance does a great deal of political work in Senegal. Starting with common depictions of Seereer people as traditional peasants and of ‘Seereerness’ as a time-deep identity, the chapter draws on multiple archives to question these scenarios and the applicability of ethnicity to past settings. Specifically, it argues that, far from making up a primeval entity, the S…
Reluctant Landscapes
Chapter 1 opens with an ethnographic look at Siin’s rural landscapes and the political marginalization that the province has suffered since the days of independence in 1960. Moving away from ideas of space as map, physical setting, or background, it builds on Seereer people’s relationship to their agrarian milieu to develop a theory of political landscape. This approach centers on three elements: first, landscapes are multi-temporal they conjoin …
Writing Senegambian Political Pasts
Chapter 2 addresses the question of global history in Senegal and suggests that we reframe its “problem-space.” If scholarship has often foregrounded the agencies of state, capital, and colony, the chapter suggests we interrogate their limits through the lens of landscape, with an eye for minor-key stories of resilience, dissidence, and complicity that slice across the plane of global events and reintroduce a sense of unpredictability in the maki…
Conclusion: Archaeological Pasts, Postcolonial Presents, Traditional Futures
The conclusion tracks the legacies of contested sovereignty and the dialectics of state presence/absence in postcolonial Senegal. Since independence, the state’s involvement in Siin has tacked between intrusiveness and benign neglect, which has propped up some social projects while bringing about economic decay. The conclusion examines the consequences of these long histories of power for our thinking about tradition and how it has featured in na…
Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal
Cracks and Fugitive Geographies: Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Landscapes in Central Veracruz, Mexico, Nineteenth-Twentyth Centuries
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · History (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Art (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Colonialism (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works)