Revisiting the history of science in a colonial context. Actors, actresses and archives of the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire – ArchIFAN

The ArchIFAN project aims to revisit the history of scientific knowledge in a colonial context, based on the case of the Institut français d'Afrique noire (IFAN), a multidisciplinary institute founded in Dakar (Senegal) in 1936, with local centers set up in various West African colonies from 1942 onwards. This project brings together researchers from different disciplines (anthropology, history, art history) as well as curators and archivists from several institutions holding collections linked to IFAN (Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire-Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux) to identify dispersed bodies of archives, documentary resources and publications, to study their production, circulation and materiality, and then to examine their current legacies. The aim is to examine how IFAN's colonial status generated and maintained its subaltern status in the scientific context of the time, and affected both its documentary policy and the careers of its staff and their publications. This research will help to bring to light the logic of long-invisible actors, whether African auxiliaries or women - researchers, technicians or wives - who contributed in various ways to the production of knowledge about and from Africa. They will also enable us to retrace the editorial history of IFAN and the role played by its many journals in the creation of networks of scholarly sociability and in the emergence of African research professionals. The aim is to examine the extent to which these alternative spaces for the production of knowledge about Africa and in Africa, operating within the framework of networks at different scales, were marked by processes of invisibilization in the imperial, trans-imperial and international scientific fields. ArchIFAN is therefore proposing, in collaboration with its African colleagues and the Persée portal team, to digitalize IFAN's two main journals and to analyze their textual and iconographic content. Some of the knowledge produced by IFAN researchers during the colonial period will thus be made freely available on Persée, consistently with the values of Open Science. With this in mind, an important part of the project will be concerned, in a transversal and reflexive way, with the ethical issues and the consideration of the societal impacts of such a re-circulation of historical sources and scientific data produced in a colonial situation, likely to be the subject of numerous reappropriations today, at a time when the question of the digital return of knowledge is being raised crucially and has echoes well beyond the scientific and academic field.