Mapping a Nation: Space, Place and Culture in the Casamance, 1885-2014

Abstract

This dissertation examines the interplay between impersonal, supposedly objective “space” and personal, familiar “place” in Senegal’s southern Casamance region since the start of the colonial era to determine the ways separatists tried to ascribe Casamançais identity to five social spaces as spatial icons of the nation. I devote a chapter to each of these five spaces, crucial to the separatist identity leading to the 1982 start of the Casamance conflict. Separatists tried to “discursively map” the nation in opposition to Senegal through these spatial icons, but ordinary Casamançais refused to imagine the Casamance in the same way as the separatists. While some corroborated the separatist imagining through these spaces, others contested or ignored it, revealing a second layer of counter-mapping apart from that of the separatists.