Ethics, Emotion and the Writing of History in Senegal (the 1960s)

First session of the 2026-2027 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar “Dépaysements”: Clues and Trajectories.
In keeping with the traditions of CEFRES, the interdisciplinary seminar proposes to bring together one Friday per month, researchers, doctoral students, alumni and French-speaking friends of the Center to discuss issues at the crossroads of their respective disciplines. We use the notion of dépaysement as a starting point from which to delve into issues of estrangement, adaptation, and cultural production.

Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday October 9, 2026, from 10 am
Language: French

Speaker: Romain TIQUET (CEFRES / CNRS, Institut des mondes africains)
Discussant: Silvester TRNOVEC (CEFRES / Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Abstract

This presentation aims to explore the concept of ‘dépaysement’ through the lens of a dual displacement, based on a study of several dozen patient records from the Fann psychiatric clinic in Dakar (Senegal) dating from the late 1950s to the 1970s. On the one hand, the aim is to take the patients’ life stories, words and writings seriously in order to understand, at the level of individual experiences, some of the social and political transformations of the post-colonial transition in Senegal and, more broadly, in West Africa. On the other hand, this corpus invites a re-centring of the historian’s perspective itself: faced with sensitive, fragmentary archives that have been heavily shaped by the psychiatric institution, the historian is led to question their categories of analysis, their writing practices and their own position in the production of the narrative. The session will thus examine psychiatric archives as a prime area for reflection on the ethical, emotional and narrative challenges of writing history, whilst questioning the conditions of access to experiences that have been marginalised for many years or solely reduced to medical language.

See the complete program of the 2026-2027 seminar here.