A presentation by Yarimar Bonilla (Rutgers) on  Non-Sovereign Futures: French Carribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015, University of Chicago Press) and Gregory Mann (Columbia University) on From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality (2014, Cambridge University Press), with discussion featuring Omar Dahbour (Hunter College) and Herman Bennett (The Graduate Center, CUNY).

Co-sponsored by the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar: Cultures & Histories of Freedom.

“Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment marks a significant intervention into debates about Caribbean pasts in the present. Focusing its historical and ethnographic lens on the 2009 labor upheaval in Guadeloupe, the book explores with methodological verve and seminal insight the paradoxical tension between the desire to resist continued dependence on France, and the difficulty of articulating a vocabulary that might embody the collective demand for an alternative mode of political self-determination. In short, the book aims to put into question whether sovereignty can continue to be imagined as the single normative good and ultimate value of modern political life.”

—David Scott, author of Omens of Adversity 

“Gregory Mann gives us a thought-provoking, nuanced, deeply researched exposition of what sovereignty does and does not mean in the context of the decolonization of French West Africa and the inability of African states to meet the hopes of most of their citizens. He explores Africans’ immersion in different forms of connection across space, conflicting claims of African states and the French government to regulate cross-border migration within Africa, controversies over the rights of former citizens from Africa to work and live in France, and the effects of NGO interventions on how Africa is governed.”

—Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960