An Interspecies Contact Zone: Locusts and Humans in Colonial Burundi (1924-1939) – Benoît Henriet
Columbia University Seminars: Studies in Contemporary Africa
Date: December 3, 5:00 PM
Location: Faculty House, Morningside Drive
To RSVP, write to Mylkah Djacko at [email protected]
Event Description: In interwar Burundi, successive waves of gregarious locust swarms preyed on fields and grazing grounds, exacerbating the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants. The locusts also constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration, which struggled to devise efficient modes of acridian containment and destruction. By using the locusts being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this paper proposes to study the complex interactions between insectile hazards and the segregated human communities who had to face them. The 'interspecies contact zone’ can function as a framework to make sense of multilayered more-than-human encounters occurring in the fraught context of colonial societies.
Speaker: Benoît Henriet obtained his PhD in Contemporary History in 2016 from the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels. In 2017, he was appointed as short-term postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch-Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and, in 2017-2018, as Associate researcher in the Comparing the Copperbelt project led by Prof. Miles Larmer at the University of Oxford. He left this position in October 2018 to become assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Henriet specializes in the history from below, and in the microhistories of (post)colonial Central Africa. He focuses more specifically on vernacular experiences of and responses to state power and to capitalism. He published his first monograph, Colonial Impotence, in 2021, and has steadily contributed to journals including Gender & History, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of African Historical Studies.
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