The nature of the path : reading a West African road / Marcus Filippello.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Filippello, Marcus, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roads--Benin--History.

Roads.

Roads--Social aspects--Benin.

Roads--Environmental aspects--Benin.

History.

Roads--Environmental aspects.

Roads--Social aspects.

Benin--History--20th century.

Benin.

Benin--Social conditions.

Social conditions.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

ix, 217 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2017]

Summary:

The Nature of the Path reveals how a single road has shaped the collective identity of a community that has existed on the margins of larger societies for centuries. Marcus Filippello shows how a road through the Lama Valley in Southeastern Benin has become a mnemonic device that allows residents to create a narrative that differs from established histories. Built by the French colonial government along a traditional pathway, the road serves as a site where the Ohori people narrate their changing relationship to the environment and assert their independence in the shifting political milieu of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Filippello first visited the Yor-bá-speaking ohori community in Benin knowing only the history revealed in archival records. Over several years, he interviewed more than a hundred people with family roots in the valley and discovered that their personal identities were closely tied to the identity of their community, which in turn was inextricably linked to the history of the road that snakes through the region's seasonal wetlands. Filippello's research counters prevailing notions of Africa as an "exotic" and pristine yet contrarily war-torn, disease-ridden, environmentally challenged, and impoverished continent. His informants' vivid constructions of history through the prism of the road, coupled with his own archival research, offer new insights into Africans' complex understandings of autonomy, identity, and engagement in the slow process we call modernization. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Crossing the black earth

The roads into Igbó Ilú : the making of an Ọhọri identity

Roads to subversion : displaying independence and displacing authority in the early colonial era

Going to the greens seller : Ọhọri communal expansion in the 1920s and 1930s

"It has become a joy to go to Tollou" : reinterpreting the tools of French colonial développement

Cementing identities : negotiating independence in a changing landscape

Conclusion: Breathing with the road.

Notes:

"A Quadrant book" -- title page.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781517902834

9781517902827

1517902827

1517902835

OCLC:

951094470

Publisher Number:

99971110951