Seventh session of the 2024-2025 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar The Map and the Border
In 2023 we started questionning the very act of bordering and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory). In short, thanks to the interdisciplinarity of our respective disciplines, we began inquiring into the question of the map and the border.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday April 25, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Silvestr TRNOVEC (Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Discussant: Jakub ŠTOFÁNIK (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Abstract
The historical relationship between France and Central Europe has long been the subject of in-depth study. However, much less attention has been paid to the region’s interactions with the French colonial sphere, and these remain largely underexplored. In recent years, Central European academic and intellectual circles have become increasingly involved in the global debate on colonialism and its contemporary repercussions. Slovakia is no exception, although questions are frequently asked about the relevance of these issues in a country with no direct colonial past and its own unresolved historical challenges and traumas. In this context, do themes such as colonialism in Africa, the slave trade, orientalism and the decolonisation of knowledge have a particular significance for Slovak society and its history? This seminar aims to examine these questions through the prism of (Czecho)slovak history and the French colonial empire in Africa from the 18th to the early 20th century.
Silvester Trnovec is a historian and Africanist at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. His research focuses on the dynamics of the transformation of African societies in West and North Africa as a result of European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also interested in the historical relations and interactions between the African continent and the territory of today’s Slovakia.
See the complete program of the 2024-2025 seminar here.
