Seminar: Untimely Utopia: Senegal’s Pan-African Heritage

Social analysis has recently moved away from the nation-state as the pivotal research unit. However, in research on heritage, the nation-state remains the unexamined frame in which museums, memorials and intangible heritage acquire their visibility and functionality. It is through this ‘national’ heritage that nations are imagined. This seminar suggests that the nation-state may not be the appropriate context for the study of heritage. That the nation-state should be a problematic unit is especially acute in the context of postcolonial states as the nationalisms that led to the establishment of postcolonial states had their origins in the anti-colonial struggle, and should be conceived as transnational. This seminar summarizes the findings of a project to revise the relations between nation-state, heritage and collective memory in order to engage with Bhabha’s suggestion of thinking through postcolonial difference. It suggests that heritage in Senegal be framed as Pan-African. Even fifty years after it acquired political independence as one of many African nations, the Senegalese state continues to imagine itself as a Pan-African nation. As the utopian project of the independent postcolony has lost much, if not all, of its initial popular appeal, the postcolonial nation is thus caught between a dystopian reality of exhausted expectations and the memories of a utopian future. This project examines how colonial heritage serves the imagination of a pan-African nation as a form of belated Utopianism.