Facilitator of Axis 2: Inclusive societies
Elara Bertho is a research fellow at the CNRS, at LAM (Africas in the World, UMR 5115, Sciences Po Bordeaux). His work focuses on the relationships between literature and history in West Africa. She has published notably Witches, tyrants, heroes (Honoré Champion, 2019), Local history of Djiguiba Camara. The work of a Guinean historian during the colonial era (Brill, 2020). She directs the “Letters from the South” collection at Karthala, and participates in editorial boards of journals ( Multitudes ; Cahiers de Littérature Orale ; Études Littéraires Africaines ).
- HAL sheet: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/elara-bertho
- For more information: https://www.lam.sciencespobordeaux.fr/annuaire-chercheurs/nom/elara-bertho/
- Works on Academia: https://cnrs.academia.edu/ElaraBertho
Portrait of Elara Bertho on video
- Duration: 4:28
[Portrait]
Tell us about your journey
I studied literature at the ENS in Lyon, under the direction of Cécile Van den Avenne. After the aggregation of modern letters, I completed a thesis in comparative literatures with Xavier Garnier at Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. I worked on three figures of resistance to colonization, Samori Touré in Guinea, Nehanda in Zimbabwe and Sarraounia in Niger. For these three figures, I crossed published corpora, novels or plays (by authors like Abdoulaye Mamani, Yvonne Vera for example), and unedited corpora, songs, stories that I found in public archives or private archives. I am now a researcher at the CNRS, in section 35 (philosophy and text studies), and I continue to practice this method which combines library studies and field investigation practice to find unedited texts.
What are the research themes you work on?
Currently, I am working on an intellectual history of Guinea during the First Republic, from 1958 to 1984, under the regime of Sékou Touré. My investigation focuses on two aspects: on the one hand, bringing together the texts and stories of the regime's cultural policy – plays performed during cultural festivals, state poetry, etc.; – and also collect private archives which document repressions on a daily basis. This regime was both a formidable vector of pan-African, independence and anti-imperialist hope, but which was also built on very strict supervision of the populations, at the cost of significant political violence. Telling the story and behind the scenes can only be done by combining investigations among published texts and among those that cannot be found in libraries: it is then necessary to search in families, in small funds archives, in trunks, cupboards and old boxes, what these memories have become.
What are the big questions that drive your research?
Within the MSH, I carry out a research program on decoloniality. Far from the contemporary political controversies which castigate “wokism”, we seek, collectively, to start from the founding texts of decolonialism, most of which come from South America – Walter Mignolo, Lélia Gonzalez, Maria Lugones… These theoretical texts are difficult, this is why we favor a collegial approach to reading the texts, as horizontal as possible, by questioning what they can bring us in our own work, in Africa or elsewhere, concretely, in our research practices ( https:// elam.hypotheses.org/ ).
Are there any questions or work you would like to present to us?
I would like to present a short text for the general public published last year: it is a biography of Senghor , published by the PUF in 2023. The instruction was to write without any footnotes (which is very disconcerting for a researcher!) and that it can be read in three hours. It was very exciting to write for a wider audience, trying to do justice to all the work of colleagues in literature, political science, and history, who are currently renewing research on Senghor. Between France and Senegal, memories are very contrasting: he is considered a great poet of the Francophonie, pacifist, in France but we ignore his political record as the first president of Senegal, at the head of a authoritarian and repressive regime. In Senegal, it is the opposite, he is quite unanimously hated by the youth who see in him a Francophile who has never really decolonized the economy or diplomacy, but his texts are in reality little read and little known. It was a reconciliation of these memories, or at least a dialogue between them, that I tried to tackle by writing this little object.
Are there any questions that remain enigmas for you?
My idea is to continue to explore writing for the general public. It is not easy to write differently and take the time to explain our research methods, and the bridges with society. The Institut des Afriques ( https://institutdesafriques.org/ ) does this magnificently through meetings, film festivals, and performances. Federating these efforts between Idaf, our research laboratories like the LAM (Africas in the world) to which I belong, the MSH would make it possible to better articulate social science research in the city.
I'm thinking about a small general public book around the activist couple Stokely Carmichael and Miriam Makeba ( https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article252905&id_mot=9745 ).
