Philip Janzen, "An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean" (Duke UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast & Episode

Podcast: New Books Network – African Studies
Host: Eliza Prosperetti
Guest: Philip Janzen, Assistant Professor of History, University of Florida
Book: An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025)
Date: December 6, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with historian Philip Janzen about his new book, An Unformed Map. The conversation explores the complex trajectories of over 500 Caribbean individuals who moved, largely as colonial administrators and teachers, between the Caribbean and Africa from 1880 to 1940. The themes of belonging, diaspora, linguistic translation, and the ambiguities of colonial identities are woven throughout, with a particular focus on how these figures navigated their in-between status—simultaneously marginalized within colonial hierarchies and set apart from African populations. The podcast is also a reflective exploration of the research process, archival discoveries, and methodological approaches for writing histories that de-center the European metropole.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin of the Book & Research Trajectory

• Janzen’s Project Evolution
  • Began as a graduate seminar paper on two Caribbean figures (René Maran & Félix Éboué) in Equatorial Africa ([03:28]).
  • Expanded upon hearing from historian Corinna Ray about an “Anglophone side” to the story.
  • Developed from a paper to an MA thesis, then a dissertation, and ultimately the book.
  • Quote ([03:28]):

    "On one hand, I joke that I’m still writing the same paper... On the other hand, I was very fortunate to have the professor, a mentor, who was not holding back on the problems with it. And that really allowed me to grow from it."

2. Who Were the Caribbean-Africa Migrants, and Why Did They Go?

• Motivations
  • Economic: Late 19th-century Caribbean economic hardship prompted migration as part of broader labor movements (to Panama, Costa Rica, Cuba, U.S., and Africa).
  • Ideological: Many saw Africa as an “imagined homeland,” motivated by post-slavery identities and colonial education ([06:52]).
  • Colonial Demand: British and French needed English- and French-speaking Black staff for colonies; believed Caribbeans would be "acclimatized" and could be paid less ([06:52]).
  • Quote ([06:52]):

    "There was... this attraction to an imagined homeland for most who were two or three generations removed from slavery. These ideas about Africa were totally informed by... colonial education [and] residues of slavery."

3. Double (and Triple) Marginalization and The "Unformed Map"

• Experiences in Africa

  • Caribbean migrants were marginalized by white colonial officials and viewed skeptically by Africans.
  • Not fully accepted by either colonizer or colonized:
    • Paid less, segregated, perceived as "civilized" compared to Africans but never truly part of the ruling class ([09:43]).
  • "In-betweenness" or “profound ambiguity and ambivalence” ([09:20]).
  • Quote ([11:51]):

    "It’s almost more than double marginalization. It’s sort of triple or quadruple... so many tensions at play."

• Title Explanation: “An Unformed Map”

  • Draws from Aimé Césaire’s poem describing Caribbean fragmentation and possibility ([13:41]).
  • "Unformed" captures both disintegration and the potential for new solidarities.
  • Quote ([14:48]):

    "It’s a peculiar adjective... [it] points to this sort of disintegration, something that had form, that has fallen apart... and at the same time... a possibility that will take shape."

4. Historiographical Contributions: Beyond the Metropole

• Decentering Paris & London

  • Past studies focus on diaspora politics in metropoles (Black London, Paris noir). Janzen focuses on the migrants’ experiences "in the periphery," e.g., in African colonies.
  • Critiques scholarship that, even when anti-imperial, centers Europe ([22:08]).
  • Quote ([23:58]):

    "Some of that scholarship built up in an aggregate can reinforce this sort of Metropolitan focus... that I don’t think is a good thing."

• Expanding the Idiom of Diaspora Beyond French & English

  • Attention to how diaspora is practiced in African languages—seen in Félix Éboué’s wordlists and ethnographic work ([25:00]).
  • Example: Éboué’s translation of "chef" in Sango/other languages, negotiating between indigenous and colonial meanings ([28:24]).
  • Quote ([28:24]):

    "The fact that he gives both of these [words for 'chef']... you realize what he did know about the history of Central Africa and colonial rule... this separation, creation of illegitimate leaders is just one example of that."

5. Ambiguous Politics and the “Bridge Generation”

• Not Always Anti-Colonial
  • Many figures (e.g., Éboué) believed in improving, rather than abolishing, colonial systems, while their intellectual work informed future generations ([31:03]).
  • Generation as "bridge": connected past and future; enabled later anti-colonial movements even if not fully part of them.
  • Fanon’s embrace of Éboué as symbolic despite political differences ([32:50]).
  • Quote ([33:42]):

    "These stories of this generation... tell us in some ways, maybe a bit more about the subsequent generation too, that their politics were always not always so easy to pin down."

6. Methodology: Poetry, Archives, and Researcher Reflexivity

• Archival Discovery: Jean Louis’ Suitcase

  • Discovered in Martinique: suitcase of 2,000+ poems by Henri Jean Louis, a Caribbean administrator and poet ([36:42]).
  • Dated poems allow tracing his physical and intellectual journeys.
  • Example: Shift from empire reform advocacy to support for African independence and socialism ([41:47]).
  • Powerful metaphor of the suitcase as both archive and symbol of mobility.
  • Quote ([41:47]):

    "You could... use his poems to track his physical trajectory, but I could also use them to track his intellectual trajectory."

• Author’s Rethinking of Historical Practice

  • Reflexive, inserts himself in narrative, discusses emotions and research process.
  • Moves away from strictly biographical or archival perspectives ([46:09]).
  • Quote ([48:00]):

    "For me, that trajectory was part of the process of writing this book. It was that realization...about how we can do research on colonialism and how we can use colonial archives or what their limits really are..."

• Embracing Speculation and Imagination in History

  • Uses "informed conjecture" to fill archival silences, inspired by Natalie Zemon Davis.
  • Cites the usefulness of providing richly contextualized, plausible narrative glue for the reader ([50:26]).
  • Quote ([52:46]):

    "Those kind of moments are useful, I found, for adding in some of that context, imagined context, but real context to frame some of the important moments in the book."

7. Future Research Directions

• Next Project:
  • Interested in "the writing of history in the period of decolonization" (1950s–70s), focusing on debates about history’s role (Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Eric Williams, etc.).
  • Struggles with narrowing scope but sees potential in pairing figures for intellectual comparison ([54:02]).

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Notable Quotes and Moments with Timestamps

• On the Unformed Map ([14:48]):
  “It’s a peculiar adjective... [it] points to this sort of disintegration... but there’s this implicit futurity in this word that suggests... something could be formed again.”

• On Double Marginalization ([11:51]):
  “It’s almost more than double marginalization. It’s sort of triple or quadruple because there’s all these different tensions at play.”

• On Language and Diaspora ([25:00]):
  "How was diaspora practiced in languages other than French and English?"

• On the Limits and Possibilities of Colonial Archives ([48:00]):
  “That trajectory was part of the process of writing this book... about how we can do research on colonialism and how we can use colonial archives or what their limits really are.”

• On Poet Jean Louis’ Suitcase ([41:47]):
  “You could... use his poems to track his physical trajectory, but I could also use them to track his intellectual trajectory.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:25] – Introduction & author’s background
• [03:28] – Origins of the book and initial research
• [06:50] – Who the Caribbean migrants to Africa were, and why they left
• [09:41] – Discussion of in-betweenness and multiple marginalizations
• [13:01] – Meanings behind the title "An Unformed Map"
• [19:29] – The book’s intervention in diaspora scholarship and the metropole
• [25:00] – Diaspora in languages beyond French/English; methods
• [28:24] – Wordlist example: translating “chef”
• [31:03] – The generational role and ambiguous politics
• [36:42] – Jean Louis, suitcase discovery, and poetry as archive
• [46:09] – Reflexive methodology and ‘breaking the fourth wall’
• [50:26] – On speculation, narrative, and the historian’s voice
• [53:38] – Next research directions

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Conclusion

This episode is essential listening for scholars of African, Caribbean, or imperial history, as well as anyone interested in diaspora, language, and the challenges of reconstructing marginalized pasts. Janzen’s careful attention to methodology, language, and the emotional experience of research offer a model for writing history that is globally connected, methodologically transparent, and attuned to the silences and ambiguities of colonial archives. The episode balances intellectual rigor with engaging storytelling, making it relevant for research, teaching, and methodological reflection.

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Transcript

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[Eliza Prosperetti]

Hello everybody and welcome back to the New Books in African Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Eliza Prosperetti, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Philip Jansen about his new book, An Unformed Geographies of belonging between Africa and the Caribbean. Phil, welcome to the podcast.

[Phil Jansen]

Thank you very much for having me. I'm delighted to be speaking with you about the Boy today.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

Oh, and I am too. It's really an incredible book. So let's start by having you introduce yourself to us.

[Phil Jansen]

Sure. Well, as I said, my name's Phil Jansen. I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of Florida where I teach and study African history and Caribbean history. I've been here about six years now, and I'm delighted that this book has finally come out, and as I said, delighted to be talking with you about it.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

So from what I understand about from the first page, first sentence of this book is that this book is essentially an extension of a paper that you wrote in your first semester of graduate school, which is amazing. I wish my first paper in my first semester of graduate school had been anywhere closer to my own research project. Took me a while to get there. So tell me how this idea came about and about that very special first paper.

[Phil Jansen]

Sure, yeah.

Yeah. That first semester was a seminar on Equatorial Africa. And I had come into graduate school excited about French Caribbean, MA cesaire, African Diaspora. And then all of a sudden I was in a class on Equatorial Africa. And my. My instructor for that class, Florence Bernoul, she mentioned these two names, you know, the two people from the Caribbean who had worked in, in Central Africa for the French. And she said maybe, you know, you might be interested in learning a bit more about them. And they're two fairly well known figures. There's bibliographies on them. So it was easy to pull together some information. And, you know, I wrote a paper. I think if I went back and read it today, I would find all kinds of problems with it. So on one hand I joke that I'm still writing the same paper and revising the same paper that I started with many years ago. On the other hand, I was very fortunate to have the professor, a mentor who was not holding back on the problems with it. And that really allowed me to grow from it. It became the basis for an MA thesis. And then around that time is when I found out from another historian, Corinna Ray, that there was a whole Anglophone side of this story that I didn't know about. I had been starting on this French Caribbean angle. And so all of a sudden I learned that West Indians who worked in West Africa. So that's where it grew from a seminar paper that wasn't very good to all of a sudden the bones of a dissertation project that really built into something and then from there into his book.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

It reminds me of Michael Gomez's book African Dominion. He starts in the acknowledgment saying that this was basically a riposte to an instructor gave him a C on one of his papers in graduate school. And 20 years later or 30 years later, he wrote the book, the big Princeton University Press tome. So anyone who's listening, who's writing in paper in the early part of graduate school, this can be something that brings you to book form. So, okay, you mentioned that you started thinking about these two Caribbean people who were working for the French in French colonies in Africa, which were Rene Marin and Felice Boet. But These are only two of more than 500 people who made that kind of trajectory from the French or British Caribbean to the French or British African colonies. And they worked as administrators or teachers or in other kind of quasi official or totally official roles. And these people, you're focusing on the period between 1880 and 1940, so really just before the scramble for Africa, but then really the early part of colonial rule. And so I wanted to ask you first, why these people who you look at, why would they leave the Caribbean to take these very precarious, very uncertain journeys to go work in Africa?

[Phil Jansen]

Yeah, good question.

There are a few different factors. One, the economic factor. Late 19th century Caribbean is very tough economically. And there are all kinds of labor migrations happening that other scholars have written about, whether those who moved from the West Indies to Panama or Costa Rica, or to Cuba in some cases, or to the United States. So in some ways this was part of a larger wave of labor migration. It was unique in other ways because there was a different kind of motivation on the part of people, the workers, these migrant workers themselves, if you want to call them that, There was an appeal, not just of going and getting a three year contract or a five year contract and getting significant salary compared to what was available. There was also an ideological element, this attraction to an imagined homeland for most who were two or three generations removed from slavery. These ideas about Africa were totally informed by, on one hand, their colonial education, on the other hand, the residues of slavery in the late 19th century. So from their side, that was this two side, motivations from an economic motivation and a cultural or ideological motivation. From the other side, from the side of the British and the French, there was a need for people to administer these new colonies, growing colonies in west and Central Africa. And the language that they use is that they thought Antillian, West Indian People would be ideally suited for this kind of work. They could be paid less because they weren't from Britain and France, but they wouldn't get sick because they were sort of, quote unquote, acclimatized and all these other sort of late 19th century racial ideologies. So the British and French side had their interests. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, there was sort of economic but also cultural interest in going to Africa rather than to Cuba or to Costa Rica or something else.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

So you mentioned that these people were a few generations removed from slavery in the Caribbean. And then they kind of go to Africa mostly representing these empires. And you talk about how they are in this double marginalization space because they're black people.

And they're part of this formal administrations of the colonies, but they're certainly not the white colonizers. And they themselves have experienced racism and marginalization. So talk about this kind of really profound in betweenness and ambiguity and ambivalence that, that they experience.

In these spaces that they're in.

[Phil Jansen]

You know, they grow up in these very artificial colonial societies of the late 19th century Caribbean, and they go to British schools and French schools where they, you know, sing God Save the Queen or King, depending on who was in power. They learn to recite, you know.

There'S all kinds of stuff written about that. The structure of colonial education in the late 19th century Caribbean that gave them sense of belonging to the British or to the French empires, thinking of themselves as being British or being French. There's a historian, James, who writes about the logic of the empire and the logic of the Metropole, that if you were in the empire in Caribbean or somewhere in West Africa or New Zealand for that matter, you could feel like you really belonged to that empire. But when you arrived in the Metropole, suddenly you realized, oh, I'm not quite British, I'm not quite French. In this case, it's a little different, sort of borrowing his structure, his argument, transferring it instead to West Africa and Central Africa, where people from the Caribbean are suddenly realizing, oh, you know, I might wear a pith helmet, I might wear cargo shorts, but I'm not being treated the same way by this. You know, the manager of the Nigerian Railway is putting me in segregated quarters, paying me less than my white British colleagues and so on. And so there's. There's that tension, that racism from other colonial officials. But then there's also a great deal of tension with Africans. For Caribbean people who come to us in Central Africa, they see themselves as very different, civilized compared to the supposed barbaric Primitive African people they encounter. Meanwhile, Africans view them, you know, in. In some of the best terms as turncoats or as colonial officials, no different than. Than any other British or French official. And so there. There's. It's almost more than double marginalization. It's sort of triple or quadruple because there's all these different tensions at play.

And what most interested me, I think, about these stories when I first started writing about Eboue and Marin and continuing to others, is what were the effects of that, of being in between like that? And slowly, you know, how did people react to these really, some cases, debilitating effects of racism and assimilation and dislocation.

So that's really what drove a lot of the research for me, was trying to understand that experience as best I could and what people made out of that.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

I think that speaks to the title that you chose. An Unformed Map. The unformedness.

This idea of this in betweenness, that the contours.

Are really not fully traced. Right. There's possibility, but there's also absence or. Or not having that certainty, that specificity of one's location. An Unformed Map. But I'd be interested in having you explain to us a little bit more where this term and vocabulary comes from and how you think about the title.

[Phil Jansen]

Titles are tough. I had trouble finding a title. I went through a lot of different titles. When I settled on this one, I thought the reason I liked it so much is that it. It captured both, at least, I think captured the experiences of the people I was writing about, but also.

Some of the challenges and methodological tensions that I experienced while trying to write this book. So it did both. As far as the background of the word itself, it comes from.

The return to the native land. There's a section he added in a revised version of the poem where he's writing about the fragmentation of the Caribbean. He describes the islands as being frums, as broken pieces of shredded paper scattered in the water. The sort of fragmented geography of Caribbean islands. And then at the same time talks about the possibility of joining those islands, creating form out of fragmentation. And the word he uses, the French adjective, he uses infor. It's one of those words that really separates Francophones from Anglophones. And you try and say, I have a tough time with it. A form is a word you could translate as without form or formless or shapeless. It's probably a reference to any of the Bible book of Genesis. The world was without form.

What's interesting about it is that 20 years later, in the early 1980s, two scholars came and translated the poem. And many people have tried to translate.

This poem of Cesaire's. And they translated that French adjective infong as unformed. And I remember reading that word later on, coming back to that translation and thinking, well, there's really something in here because it's a, a peculiar adjective because on one hand, as you were saying in your question, it points to this sort of disintegration, something that had form, that has fallen apart. And then at the same time there's sort of this implicit futurity in this word that suggests, oh, there's actually something that could be formed again or that will take form, that will take shape. And I thought that captured something about the experiences of. And the other people I'm writing about because they grew up in this, as I was describing earlier, this colonial society of the Caribbean, where the map they're a part of is an imperial map. It's the one, you know, in their classrooms. And yet as they move through their, their life trajectories in West Africa and Central Africa, these realizations about where they really fit or don't fit or don't belong in this imperial structure, that map starts to disintegrate, it starts to fragment. And at the same time they begin to create their own new maps that aren't quite fully formed. It's not like they're part of some great wave of anti colonial resistance or this totally coherent thing. It's not quite fully formed yet, but there's sort of this bridge generation that began to explore new forms of solidarity between each other, between different islands, these fragments. And also with Africans that they met through marriage, through learning languages, through sharing meals, even, you know, very mundane things. It was a way of that word unformed. Again, to reiterate it, it captured that experience of disintegration, but also, and fragmentation, but also this possibility for creating something new.

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[Eliza Prosperetti]

Come back to that idea, but just within the the notion of diaspora is always both the tension of the past, you know, the roots and then the future. What you make of this identity or this being in the world that is ever further from its origins. So I think that the tension of the past and the implicit future coming together in that word really give it heft.

So to speak, of diaspora here. One of the major contributions I think historiographically of the book beyond, let's say kind of the history 1.0 saying these people were there, which many people don't know, that we had so many of these people from the Caribbean who were interested for some reason or some constellation of reasons of having this trajectory, this geography. Then kind of historiographically I think you're also speaking to literature that has focused a lot and very productively on the imperial diaspora or the African diaspora coming together in these kind of anti colonial nodes of empire that are the metropoles, black London, Paris noir, even outside of Europe.

In Egypt or Mecca of Revolution, I'm thinking of. Or other places where.

There is kind of this centrality that the periphery of the empire comes together in this central point. And there this whole kind of anti colonial action and consciousness is activated or flourishes. And you are writing something about people who, sure, they pass through the metropole, but your focus is on all of the time that they are not in the quote unquote center of the empire, and how that shapes their thinking about themselves and about different types of geographies. So I'm interested in how you think about how your work relates to.

This other literature.

[Phil Jansen]

That was really a starting point for me because I'd read all this stuff about this amazing scholarship describing the meetings of people from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from the United States, meeting in Paris, in London and other, in other parts of Europe, but especially in Paris and London. There's so much good work on that. And it's fascinating because you have these major capital cities, capitals of the empire, and yet in those very spaces you have people coming together and challenging the basic tenets of those empires. Ideas about citizenship, ideas about nation and so on. And I read that material, it was so important to me. And yet the stories I was writing about right from the get go didn't quite fit that model because it's a very different experience to be traveling from the Caribbean, passing through London or Paris or Southampton or wherever.

Route your boat was taking. It's very different than to arrive in a colony in Africa, than to be, you know, a student in Paris or a dock worker in Marseille or something. It is a different environment. And trying to make sense of that, that added mobility. I, I started thinking about it, as you were saying, this sort of history 1.0 version. Yeah. To say, okay, their experience was different.

Their realizations, I think, about empire and the effects of colonialism and the similarities between the Caribbean and West Africa and Central Africa, I think came more quickly than being in this space in the metropole where you're experiencing racism. You know, many of these books highlight that in detail, but it's different to see how you are linked then with a wider colonial economy. So that was really significant to me. Beyond that, though, I think there was also frustration with some of that scholarship that reinforces a particular imperial lens. If everything is. Even if you're trying to focus on how people are undoing these structures of empire by centering everything in Paris, in London, in some ways implicitly, in some ways explicitly, some of that scholarship built up in an aggregate can reinforce this sort of Metropolitan focus that takes away or not quite erases, but takes a focus, refocuses this imperial center in a way that I don't think is a good thing, especially because of how it.

Can overlook a lot of important histories like the one I'm writing about and many other people who moved through the world and didn't pass through these, these metropolis.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

So we are still deprovincializing Europe.

But what you do here, which I think goes beyond simply saying, okay, you know, there were these, let's say, trans imperial circulations that were happening in Africa and not simply in Europe, is. And listeners will have, will have noted it in your answer discussing the title. Your real.

Laser attention to all of the different in Italians say sfumature, like the different.

Meanings or shades of meaning of a word and what it can mean. And so you are extremely attentive to language. And one of the questions that you ask in your chapter, which is devoted to Felice Bouet and his, let's say, ethnographic work and linguistic work, he tried to curate word lists of different African languages where he was working with French. You ask, And I wrote this down because I thought this question was so fundamental and it hasn't been. It really, it has been examined, thinking maybe more about the Caribbean than about Africa, which is how was diaspora practiced in languages other than French and English. So you're not only trying to move our focus away geographically from Europe, but also, as we know, language is all about, you know, it's a densely packed system of ideas, culture, society, history. So you're also trying to move the idiom of diaspora out of French and English. And of course, that's not the whole book there, but there are really productive places in the book where you do this. So in this chapter about Eboue, you look at these word lists and you isolate a couple examples. And I wanted you to pick one that you discuss and try to talk to us a little bit about.

The different meanings. The one that remained with me was your discussion of chef, how Eboue tried to translate chef for people or societies who didn't have a long standing.

Tradition or custom of centralized leadership for a long time. But you can choose whatever example you like. I just thought if you could talk a little bit about your method of how you thought through his pairings. That was really an interesting part of the book for me.

[Phil Jansen]

I think I'll get to the word list, but I want to respond a bit to the first part of your question there, which is about this idea of practicing diaspora outside of London. Or Paris.

The cue for that is Brent Edwards, widely cited for good reason book, the Practice Diaspora. This amazing text, I think it's maybe 2003, about these meetings of Antillian and African American and African intellectuals and students and dog workers and so on in veterans in Paris and in France. And he's at great pains to make clear that his argument could be applied anywhere where this would happen. He points out, this could be in Dakar, this could be in the Fall de France, in the Caribbean, it could be elsewhere. And yet a lot of the scholars that followed him kept it in Paris because a lot of them are working with French and English. And so I tried to take my key from him and say, hey, you could make the same argument in other places. And then I found that dictionary that Ebo A published in 1918. And I remember sitting and trying to read through it and think about what words did he choose to include, for one thing, and what words didn't he include. But then getting into his own papers and his rough drafts of the dictionary, you could really get a better sense of why he picked things, how he is translating them into other words. It's a really fascinating source, maybe one of my favorite sources, because.

It'S almost impossible to really know, because it's not a dictionary where he's explaining in great detail his choices. It's sort of a, a vocabulary where you have a French word and then you have his translations in Sango or Banda and four, three other languages.

But you can make guesses based on all the other information he shares all this other ethnographic work. So the example you brought up to finally come back to your question after that long meandering introduction, the word chef in French, which you could translate as chief or leader, Chief, probably in a colonial context. He gives two words in Sangala. One is biya, one is makuji, and the second one is borrowed from Lingala language south in Barusa in Belgian Congo. That was specifically a word applied to the colonial appointed leaders. Africans use this word to say, okay, these are these not fictitious but totally illegitimate leaders who are backed by the colonial state. And that he gives this other word that has a much longer history, that has a very different meaning, a word that was applied in different circumstances, that wasn't sort of a permanent centralized position. And the fact that he gives both of these, he doesn't explain why, he just gives a little bit of space for both these terms. Then you read his other ethnographic work in his private papers and you realize what he did know about the history of Central Africa and colonial rule. And you start to open up and see, okay, there were debates he was having with the people who helped them write his dictionary, their ideas. He was learning he was not supportive of anti colonialism or independence. He believed in colonial rule and believed in forced labor. That's not what I'm suggesting, but I am suggesting that by tracing this language and how he understood Central African languages, you get a sense of how he started to understand himself and his position in this world and the effects that colonialism did have in Central Africa. This separation, creation of illegitimate leaders is just one example of that.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

It brings up an interesting question because you say he's doing all of this incredibly deep intellectual work with people, his wives.

Or other people he's talking to, and yet he's not exactly coming to the anti colonial conclusions that maybe we want to see. It's more gratifying to think, oh yeah, you see the system and then you want to fight against it. And the pictures of Eboue and de Gaulle are so shocking and surprising. If you don't know, the history students of mine are always so surprised to know that that happened, right, that there was Brazzaville and all this. But.

He'S so deeply engaged in the history, society and cultures of the places where he's working as a colonial official. But he retains his sense of colonialism as a productive in the end system. And he gets in the pantheon, as you say. But what I find so interesting about the second part of the argument that you're making is that these people, this idea of the bridge generation, they're not really the people who are.

Going to be the Senghors or the Cesares or the Nkrumahs, but they are creating and facilitating an exchange, a conversation that, as you say, kind of lays the foundations for a new political horizon. So generation is really implicit in your understanding of them. As we said before, they're. They're somehow speaking to the past and they're somehow speaking to the future. And Ebo is a great example of this because he becomes in touch with this next generation when he goes back to France, I think, especially, or maybe also while he's still in Africa. I'm thinking of Philida Bo Sisocor, but he's also kind of representing.

A colonialism that they are going to be ever more strongly critiquing. So I wonder how you thought about this kind of generational aspect.

Of these people, that their politics aren't the kind of more gratifying anti colonial ones that we see in the later 30s, and especially after World War II. But they're playing this role that has kind of been. Has been more underground, I think, and your work is really trying to bring to light.

[Phil Jansen]

I think the best example with Eboue is his connection with Fanon. Fanon embraces Eboet. He describes him in glowing terms, even though Eboue's ideas about, you know, creating a native bourgeoisie are exactly the kind of thing that Fanon castigates in his writing. And yet there was something about Eboue that captured Fanon. So I think in some ways, these stories of this generation, this middle generation, if we're calling it that abridged generation, they tell us in some ways, maybe a bit more about the subsequent generation too, that their politics were always. Not always so easy to pin down, either or so straightforward.

I think that the Ebue Fanon connection is fascinating because of that. Eboue and many others become these symbols in some way that are more powerful than what they actually were.

For Eboue, this long history of working in Central Africa.

And for others, too, this connection with Africa became very important in the Caribbean of the 1940s and 1950s. Many came back to the Caribbean and made speeches, gave lectures about their experiences there. And Caribbean were taken by this. So there is a real element to the symbol of some of these figures, like Eboue, who became almost Pan African symbols later, after they died.

For another generation. But as I said, I think it also tells you a little bit more about that independence era generation whose politics were also not quite so. So easy to pin down.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

As we're speaking, I'm thinking about Frederick Cooper's work on development, and I'm remembering how his work with Thomas Holt, kind of as my understanding of it, has kind of focused. This idea that the British developed the Colonial Welfare and Development Acts in The very early 40s is a kind of. Also because of the disruptions of the labor protests in the 30s in the Caribbean. And I'm kind of thinking how that work, which I guess is about 20 years ago now, is more a kind of political, economic analysis of the ricocheting of imperial crisis in the Caribbean and then with African colonies and now 20 years downstream. Your work is almost like the intellectual.

Ideological, social, maybe component of these kind of.

Movements, let's say. But these are just. My musings aside, another aspect of this generational point. I was really surprised to find this out that. So your final chapter, which is really masterful, is about this man, Jean Louis, and he shows up in La Ventur Ambigu as the old man at the end, walking by the sun. And I've read that many times and I didn't know it was based on a real person. And that's really. It's such a presence in this book which so launches so many of these fundamental ideas of critique of colonial education and ideology. And so I wanted to ask you to talk to us about the story of his suitcase and how you. So let's start with the suitcase because it's really just an incredible source and experience. And then I want to ask you more about your methodology.

[Phil Jansen]

Well, yeah, it's a story I love to talk about to anyone who will listen. So I'm happy you asked me the question. You know, I had read about Jean Louis. There's a great book by Verni Calenon called French Caribbean's in Africa. And it's all about. It's this very broad overview of this same story. I tried to then focus on a few more particular people. So I had read about him, I knew a little bit about him. Seemed like someone worth following up on. I found his personnel file in Aix en Provence in the colonial archives. And great, I've got good material on Jean Louis. Czech and then I remember going to the Bibliothec Nacional and finding out that there was some scholar in the Caribbean in Martinique working on Jean Louis. I said, wow, that sounds great, I should get in touch with him. So I did. His name is Charles Schiel. I think he's now retired, but he was working at the university in Martinique and he had been, he is remains an expert on Henri Jean Louis son, Victor Jean Louis, who became a fairly well known French novelist. And Charles Shield became, I'm telling this in a convoluted way, I think Charles Shield. They had become friends with the Jean Louis family. And after death of Victor Jean Louis he had, and some years later had been looking through the. Their apartment basement storage unit of their old family Paris apartment. And they'd been looking for material on Victor Jean Louis. And then Charles tells the story of finding this suitcase under some old ski equipment in the corner. And it wasn't about Victor Jean Louis the sun. It was this suitcase full of poems written by Henri Jean Louis, the father that I'm writing about. And so all of a sudden they had, you know, been able to organize this, transfer it to the archives in Martinique and organized them. And this had just happened like a year before simply. And I got in touch with him, he said, you're welcome to come and look through this collection. So I did. It was this breath overwhelming and breathtaking collection because it's sprawling. You know, there's more than 2,000 pieces of paper, all these hundreds and hundreds of short poems, but they're mostly poems. There's not detailed diary entries. There's not, you know, letters. It's poems mostly. Almost 90% of them never published. And that was the hustle that I had to. That I had to work with there.

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[Eliza Prosperetti]

So you use this very unique archive, let's say.

And you analyze it and you'll tell us how. But the overarching question that you had when you encounter something like this because is that you really, as you said, you. You started learning in the, you know, the. The Ministry of the Colonies, basically, those files. And you wanted to get out of the confines of the narrative that still centered the kind of colonial gaze and the colonial surveillance apparatus. And you used the suitcase to try to do something different.

[Phil Jansen]

Yeah, the really useful thing about.

These columns is that he dated it. He wrote the date on each helm and the place where he was. And fortunately, Charles, who had gone through all these poems, had written this out carefully. Analyzed it already. So you could trace his geographical movements, because he could travel frequently between West Africa, Central Africa, Paris, around the Caribbean, back to Europe, back around the Caribbean, on and on through his life. From roughly when he first goes to Africa in 1923 until his death in 1958, he is constantly in motion, which is why the suitcase is such a great metaphor. And you can imagine him just filing away these poems. And since some years, he's writing 50, 60 poems. They're short, or. I'm not as qualified to comment on the literary quality, but they're very basic structure. You know, sonnets, Abab, very simple, rhyming, and yet as much. I could use his poems to track his physical trajectory, but I could also use them to track his intellectual trajectory. You know, before, in the 30s, he's writing poems about transforming the French empire into something more equitable, but not getting rid of that empire. And then by the end of World War II, he's moving totally in a different direction. He starts, but in towards the 40s and 50s, he's certainly drawing on Bandung and on Nkrumah and on independence movements around Africa and around the Caribbean. And he starts imagining this Republic of Africa that will unite into a great socialist republic with China and Russia and India and Africa and so on. There's lots more to say about that. But what was fascinating to me was seeing this trajectory and then using these poems, coming back to this frustration and excitement of having only poems, because if you only followed the personnel file, he could have a nice compartmentalized history of Jean Louis. But all of a sudden, enter all this poetry and it throws that totally out. You can see how limiting that view is, that perspective is. And all of a sudden, this world of poetry, his imagination about his ancestry comes into focus. And there's so much more to say about. More than could be written about, more than I can say. But it was, for me, a powerful thing to see him exploring his politics through poetry.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

Well, this book has something of the poetic to it, and I don't know if that's because you read so many Caribbean poets as you were thinking about writing it, but you really have a deep attention to language. And maybe also because some of your source material, like we just said, was those poems. You know, it's how Jean Louis processed the world. He didn't do it in a diary. He did it with his. With his poems. But they still show you kind of the way that he navigated his world. And the story that you've just told us, usually in New Books Network Podcasts. One of the interesting thing is that we kind of get the backstory that isn't in the text when we get to talk to authors. But actually that's not true with you because in your text you have lots of different places where you explain what archive you want to, you know, to get this information or this source, or you talk about your process of tracking things down. You really, not in a arrogant or self centered way, but you insert yourself as the researcher in the narrative and you even sometimes talk about your emotions as you're researching. You know, it's not just saying, oh, I was here and I was there. You, you talk about how you yourself are processing the research experience. And that's a very breaking the third wall kind of move, which I think is obviously much more common now than it used to be, but it certainly still takes a lot of reflection and care to do so. I'd be interested in hearing more about how you thought about that and when you started to feel confident enough to put your kind of research experiences in the text. Because I imagine in that, that first year seminar paper, you're not there yet.

[Phil Jansen]

No, certainly not. When I turned that seminar paper into a dissertation, none of that kind of reflection was in there at all. It was, here's an example. Here's my analysis, here's my argument. Oh, you wanted another example? No. Well, you're going to get four more. Here we go. That dissertationitis, you just want to show everyone what you did. All this research I did and one of the best pieces of feedback I got about that later on was you're, you're trying to move away from, you know, all these structures, all these, these imperial structures. You're talking about it, your methodology, but actually what you're doing is just recreating a very simple biographical mode of intellectual history. You might want to challenge that a little more. And I'd have that frustration when I was writing my dissertation and finally now I had some freedom to revise that work and to put in the stuff that, as you say, doesn't normally get into published material. It certainly didn't make its way into the dissertation. And that was really exciting for me because so much of how I was writing was directly related to frustrations I had either with a research experience or with my own inability to climb out of certain, all the sacks and intellectual dead ends of realizing through the process of writing or through the process of researching. Oh, I'm just, I'm recreating the same problem I'm claiming to take down. I'm Part of it, what's going. And so for me, it felt very important to be open about my own shortcomings as a researcher and as a writer, because for me, that that trajectory was. Was part of the process of writing this book. It was that realization.

Or these realizations about how we can do research on colonialism and how we can use colonial archives or what their limits really are and how we read and write.

So it was. I don't want to say it happened organically, I'm not sure what that means, but it sort of came through the process of revision and getting a little bit more confidence about sharing that side of it. And, you know, it's not. It's not just graduate school residues of graduate school angst or anything like that. It is real frustration with the intellectual limits of writing histories of empires and the narrowness that can bring and the importance of stepping outside those barriers, whether that's not being on this metropole trajectory or thinking even epistemologically about how you are writing a narrative.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

And for that reason, I think this book is really, really interesting and productive to assign in a kind of methods or theory kind of course. One thing I was surprised by, I suppose, because it's unusual, is to see so much, let's say speculation or informed conjecture or surmising.

In the text. You know, lots of perhaps is lots of jumping off from a source and clearly being very consummate in your professionalism of using other corroborated information but still allowing some kind of interpretation, imagination to suffuse the text. And it really reminded me of the return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zeman Davis's kind of masterwork in which she talks about this story that happened In, I think, 16th century Basque France. But she kind of broke the third wall in her kind of micro history masterpiece by really saying maybe this character thought bad and maybe, you know, Protestantism was whatever. But I thought that was part of what you were doing, but in a very 20, 25 way. And so I think it would be super interesting to teach this idea of what are the possibilities and limits that historians have when they face sources. And also can we push those limits a with this kind of very productive informed conjecture?

[Phil Jansen]

Yeah.

It'S a great question. You know, for me, when you mention Natalie Davis, it reminds me of this YouTube video. It sounds like I'm going down a weird rabbit hole here. It's with Natalie, Zima Davis and Amitav Ghosh, and they're both. There's. It's a talk they're both giving it's one of these videos of a lecture that probably there's 37 views and probably 35 of them are mine because it's so fascinating hearing them talk. On one hand you have this historian who's limited by saying perhaps and may have. And then you have a novelist who is deeply committed to doing historical research for these amazing novels, but the Indian Ocean. And he doesn't have to say perhaps, may have. He can, but he still feels limited by the research he does. It's highly recommend. Bump the views up to 38 or 39 views in any case. I remember watching that is from maybe 2012 or 13 and feeling really inspired by that. You know, someone who's limited to not using the word I in a. In a say or something. You know, for me, in the, in the book, it was important to do some of that, not to make an argument based on the speculation. I think any historian, I think any scholar would rightly shy away from imagining something and then making an argument based on that. That's not what I've tried to do. Instead, I've tried to read as much as possible about context, the place from other primary sources around this person, and then give some of that atmosphere and context to set a stage for a place and a time that readers may not know much about. And so yeah, you don't. I don't know exactly.

What a man was thinking about when he was driving back from Kingston to northwest Jamaica after the death of his brother, but I do know what he wrote about it later on, and I do know all these other connections. And so maybe he didn't think about any of this stuff while he was making this journey, but he thought about it at some point. And those kind of moments are useful, I found useful for adding in some of that.

Context, imagined context, but real context to frame some of the important moments in the book.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

Well, I have just redesigned the beginning of my methods course. I will be pairing Natalie Zeman Davis with sections of your book and we'll be watching, watching the Amitav Ghosh, Natalie Zeven Davis conversation, maybe assigning this podcast. And that's basically the first four weeks of the course done. So tune in to New Books Network, not just for new books, but also for course planning.

Okay, so I guess we're coming to a close here. And so I'd be interested to hear where you go from here. I mean, you're not going to be back in graduate school writing another first year paper. So how are you thinking about your next project? You've lived with this one for quite a while.

[Phil Jansen]

I'm excited that it's out. I'm excited for people to read it and get feedback on it. But you're right, I have been working on this in some way or another for as joked earlier, I've been writing this paper for 15 years, so it's nice to finally be done. What am I working on now? One thing I'm just getting started on and I don't know what to do with is.

A project I'm thinking about that has to do with the writing of history in the period of decolonization. And my problem is that I can't narrow it down to any person or place or time. Well, time maybe 50s to 70s, let's say I got started thinking about this reading, rereading the conclusion in Black Skin, White Masks and Fennel. He writes all about history, which I not, you know, oblivious me. You read books in one way or another way and then you start thinking about it, you reread it. Suddenly you see a word everywhere. And here's a lot of evocative passages in this very short conclusion about history. I'm not a prisoner of history, he says. And it's a famous line about, you know, who cares if we find a black play? D'oh. Doesn't make any difference. For the children working in cane fields in Martinique and Guadeloupe, he's writing that in the early 1950s, 1952. And then you pair that with someone like Sheikh Antediop, who's writing his first big book in 1955 about Egypt, about the history of West Africa. And the introduction to that book, he's writing about all the same problems of alienation and racism and colonialism that Fanon is writing about. But for Chikantha Diop, the solution is precisely in history, in studying history in the knowledge and self knowledge that will come because you can't trust trust these Western scholars who are claiming that no African civilization existed, et cetera, et cetera. So there you have this tension of the writing of history, the importance of history. So that's one pairing I'm working with. Another one I really would like to work on is Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of Trinidad, but before that, major important historian of the Caribbean and of capitalism and slavery. It's major book. He has this idea of the university at Woodford Square in Port of Spain. What were his ideas about history? How did those differ from other notable Trinidadian intellectuals like C.L.R. james, for that matter? Other people have been working on this topic because there's quite a bit about the radical campus of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the 60s and tensions between expats and the government and so on. So my challenge right now is narrowing and trying to figure out which people, which time, which ideas I'm going to focus on. But the general ideas about decolonization and the writing of history in Africa and the Caribbean.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

Well, as your book showed and.

Everyone'S experience has showed, wherever you have problems, you have a productive tension. So I know that once you the more you sit with it, the solution will reveal itself. Maybe not a suitcase of poems under some ski equipment, but you'll find it. Of course. You'll get there. Very exciting stuff. Well, thank you so much, Phil, for taking the time to speak with me. I really enjoyed this book and really recommend it, not simply for what it's about, but also how it's written and how it rethinks kind of the possibilities of writing a history that is connected to empire but transcends its forms.

[Phil Jansen]

Well, thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you and thank you for reading the book. It's really, really fun for me to chat with you about it. And I think what you said there captured the spirit of the book better than in anything I said. So thank you for your very nice conclusion.

[Eliza Prosperetti]

Thanks.

[Phil Jansen]

Sam.