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‘Independence is not given, it is taken’: the Ivorian cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence[Note 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ...]
Author(s) -
N'Guessan Konstanze
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
nations and nationalism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.655
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1469-8129
pISSN - 1354-5078
DOI - 10.1111/nana.12020
Subject(s) - independence (probability theory) , historiography , forgetting , politics , meaning (existential) , history , sociology , political economy , epistemology , political science , law , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , statistics
This article explores competing histories of independence in C ôte d' I voire. The 2010 commemoration of fifty years of independence led to competing histories about how and if the nation achieved independence in 1960. The postelectoral crisis of 2010–2011 that followed soon afterwards has been interpreted by supporters of the outgoing president L aurent G bagbo as an attempt by F rance and the international community to re‐colonise C ôte d' I voire. The article asks how different versions of this history are connected to different political projects and how they have changed through time. The article will analyse these processes of meaning‐making in a historiology of Ivorian independence, thus contributing to constructivist accounts of nationhood, collective memory and historiography. The paper thus argues that different media of recalling the past in the present, such as commemoration and historiography, should be studied in a complementary manner to understand how (joint) remembering and forgetting are tools and mirrors of nations at work.