Support
My Tanner Fellowship supported a comparative research project examining how colonial histories are remembered, represented, contested, and sometimes obscured across public spaces and cultural institutions in France and Senegal. Supervised by Professor Éloïse Brezault, the project brought together decolonial and postcolonial theory with field-based research to consider how the legacies of French empire continue to shape contemporary narratives of national identity, belonging, and collective memory.
Through fieldwork in Bordeaux, Nantes, Marseille, Paris, and Dakar, I documented museums, memorials, monuments, architecture, street names, and other public sites connected to colonial history. Rather than approaching these places simply as repositories of historical information, I examined how their location, scale, language, visual representation, and curatorial choices influence what visitors are encouraged to remember and what remains less visible. Moving between cities made comparison particularly important. Bordeaux, Nantes, and Paris each negotiate their relationships to colonialism and slavery through different local histories and institutional frameworks, while Dakar offered an essential perspective from a society that experienced French colonial rule rather than from the former imperial centre.
The comparative nature of the fellowship also allowed me to think critically about the uneven geography of colonial memory. I became particularly interested in the relationship between official forms of commemoration and counter-narratives that complicate them. Museums and monuments can acknowledge colonial violence while still reproducing particular assumptions about whose experiences are centred, who is represented as an historical actor, and how colonialism is connected to the present. At the same time, public interventions, community memory work, and the reinterpretation of inherited colonial spaces can challenge or expand these official narratives.
Working across these different contexts strengthened my skills in comparative research, visual and spatial analysis, documentation, and the application of decolonial theory outside the classroom. More importantly, the fellowship taught me to understand memory not simply as a question of whether colonial history is remembered or forgotten, but as an ongoing process shaped by power: who has the authority to narrate the past, where those narratives are made visible, and whose memories are given legitimacy.
This Fellowship has provided the foundation for my continued research into colonial memory and its relationship to contemporary questions of race, identity, migration, and belonging in the Francophone world. The materials, photographs, observations, and questions developed through this fieldwork will continue to inform my academic work at St. Lawrence and my broader interest in how communities negotiate the enduring presence of colonial histories in contemporary public life.