Dakar, Jan 15 (APS) – American academic Paul Cheney, specialist in modern history at the University of Chicago, in the United States, called on Tuesday to favor an approach that highlights societies in the writing of colonial history.
»So-called colonial history is all too associated with a group of organic intellectuals. Today we must deconstruct this and approach it from the bottom of colonial societies while highlighting the people on the margins,” he declared.
He was speaking at a conference on the theme ”Writing colonial history from the margins: Gabriel Debien in Cairo, Dakar and Haiti”, organized by the West African Research Center, called Warc in English.
Historian of Europe, specializing in the Ancien Régime and the French Colonial Empire, Paul Cheney believes that for a study of history, particularly colonial history, “we must give importance to the stories of the peripheries, approach the marginalities” ‘.
To do this, he refers to ”Gabriel Debien who laid the foundations of the social history of the French West Indies”.
Moderator of the conference, professor of history Ibrahima Thioub, former rector of UCAD, stressed the need to take into account marginalized layers in writing the history of a society
He argues that history is not simply the top of society, much less the most visible heroes.
According to Mr. Thioub, such an approach would tend ”to remove millions of people as subjects of their own history, because they are not only marginalized by society, politically, economically, culturally”. ”They are considered perhaps for less than nothing, while very often, they are the ones who make up society,” he argued.
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