My current research focuses on the relationship between artists and power in Sékou Touré’s Guinea between 1958 and 1984. By linking published literature, private archives, and press records, I aim to trace the intellectual and artistic networks and radical militant cartographies of the 1960s and 1970s. In a context profoundly marked by France’s diplomatic and economic violence, the aim is to trace the hopes of the young Guinean regime, as well as its dark side. “Reparation” here is as much a question of method—the archives are mostly kept in private homes in Guinea, Senegal and France—as it is of writing a postcolonial history that is still largely obscured.
ELARA BERTHO
CURRICULUM VITAE
Elara Bertho is a research fellow at the CNRS’s Les Afriques dans le monde laboratory in Bordeaux. Her work focuses on the relationship between literature and politics in West Africa. Her publications include Sorcières, tyrans, héros (Honoré Champion, 2019), Essai d’histoire locale de Djiguiba Camara: L’œuvre d’un historien guinéen à l’époque coloniale/The Work of a Guinean Historian during the Colonial Period (Brill, 2020, with Marie Rodet) and a biography of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Presses Universitaires de France, 2023). She is the director of the Lettres du Sud collection at Karthala and is a member of several journal committees (Multitudes, Cahiers de Littérature Orale, Études Littéraires Africaines).
