Description
Book SynopsisA historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal.
This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of
Trade Review
The Casamance conflict has been the object of multiple books by scholars from diverse disciplines but Mark Deets’s book stands out as one the most insightful. Deets has performed a tour de force by carving out a unique niche in the crowded field of what one might call 'Casamance conflict studies.' Eschewing ethnicity, state centered, and elite driven approaches that inform most research on the Casamance rebellion, Deets zooms in on those he calls “ordinary casamançais” and their responses to the nationalist discourse of Western educated urbanized separatist leaders. Another strength of this book is its focus on space making and its exploration of the entanglement between place and nationalist imaginings, delineating conflicting mapping and counter-mapping of Casamance geographies that reflect clashing invented postcolonial identities. A Country of Defiance is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Casamance conflict. It’s a well-researched and accessible book that should figure prominently in the library of anybody interested in the postcolonial history of Senegal. -- Cheikh Anta Babou
