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Anthropologie et Sociétés

L'aura d'Amadou Bamba. Photographie et fabulation dansle Sénégal urbainAllen F. Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts

Afrique revisitéeVolume 22, Number 1, 1998

URI: id.erudit.org/iderudit/015520arhttps://doi.org/10.7202/015520ar

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Département d’anthropologie de l’Université Laval

ISSN 0702-8997 (print)1703-7921 (digital)

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Roberts, A. & Roberts, M. (1998). L'aura d'Amadou Bamba.Photographie et fabulation dans le Sénégal urbain. Anthropologie etSociétés, 22(1), 15–40. https://doi.org/10.7202/015520ar

Article abstract

ABSTRACT

The Aura ot Amadou Bamba : Photography and Fabulation in UrbanSénégal

Since 1988, urban Senegal has seen a flowering of popular arts, withone subject standing out in number and prominence : Amadou Bamba(1853-1927), a Senegalese Sufi saint around whom the Mouride Wayhas been created. Ail images of Bamba are based upon a singlephotograph taken in about 1913, the particularities of which provideendless opportunities for recognition of hidden meanings andmessages through Sufi epistemology. The authors' Senegaleseethnography and a discussion of theories of representation rangingfrom Susan Sontag's notion of the surrealism implicit to photographyto Jacques Derrida's sense of catachresis as producing new rules andmeanings, allow Walter Benjamin's notion of thé "aura" of art works tobe challenged and extended to provide an understanding of the impactof images of Bamba. Recent proliferation of wall paintings depictingBamba contributes to deconstruction of the "monolithic memory" ofcolonial and early-postcolonial régimes and thé fabulation of analtogether new mnemonic collage.

Key words : Roberts, Nooter Roberts, représentation, photography,aura, Mouridism, Islam, Sénégal

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