Claire Griffiths  (University of Hull)
Post/colonial gender and development: gender and the development discourse in francophone West Africa

This is an interdisciplinary/interdiscursive approach to postcolonial research bringing French and francophone African social history into a frame more traditionally occupied by (Anglophone) literary texts and philosophical discourse.

It explores the extent to which postcolonialism can be 'exported' from one context to another, in this case from colonial French West Africa in the late 1930s to the contemporary francophone African development context.

This paper explores conceptual and chronological boundaries separating the colonial from the postcolonial in studies of gender and development in francophone Africa. Building on a paper presented at the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies annual conference in November 2003 in which it was argued that perspectives currently perceived as 'postcolonial' were present in French West Africa before the Second World War, it draws on postcolonial theory to uncover parallels between the role of the 'international development partners' and the role of their colonial forebears and considers to what extent relations between the subject populations/West African nations and these 'development providers' has changed over the period of colonisation and post-colonisation.

By bringing political sociology into francophone postcolonial studies, the paper seeks above all to respond to the main objective of the conference, namely to chart new directions in the field of postcolonial studies.