This article offers reflection on how Gramscian theories can be useful for critically analyzing the political significance of the actions and resistances of urban subaltern Africans. It interrogates the potential of subaltern political forms to profoundly transform society and to thus prepare for the African "future city". It merges a theoretical analysis of Gramsci's concepts relating to the città futura-and its relation to concepts of city, subalternity, political initiative and cittadinanza-with a comparative critique of urban theory applied to Africa and especially relating to the politicization of the city in Mauritania. Our reflections are based on Mauritania and the case of Nouakchott, its capital, where we have carried out our research for over a decade. We will interrogate the re-appropriations or resistances, as well as the autonomous construction of modes of living and of citymaking, made by marginal inhabitants, in order to consider their political potentialities.

This article inquires into the relationship between the state and the Fulaaɓe, a Fulani community with pastoral and nomadic origins in Mauritania. First, it shows the statedriven process of Fulaaɓe marginalization by analyzing elites' discourses on these "bushmen" and their hegemonic forms of government (administrative control, patronage relationships, "ethnic" persecutions, and so forth). Then, it discusses how the Fulaaɓe have found spaces for agency and political mobilization. By recasting the analysis into the Gramscian theoretical framework, the article aims at participating in the political anthropological reflection on hegemony and resistance and in the dialogue on state-society relationships in Africa.

This article retraces the parallel and contrasting developments of state formation and of citizenship in Mauritania, recasting the reflection on postcolonial and anthropological debates on citizenship and state and civil society. In this perspective, cultural, ethnic and even “racial” differences – such as the Arabs/Africans or White/Black peoples dichotomies – have alternatively been considered as a social resource for consolidating a postcolonial nation or a threat to social harmony and to political development. The article deconstructs both of these positions in order to show their common features in their tendency to reduce state and civil society relationships to a matter of “horizontal” interactions between social groups. The hypothesis is that these visions have historically played a depoliticizing role, hiding the “vertical” dimension of relationships between hegemonic governing elites and social groups that are economically and socially fragmented, hierarchized, and even discriminated against. The article proceeds in three steps. First, it shows the way in which issues of identity are highly sensitive in contemporary Mauritania, relying particularly on a recent case of ethnic discrimination during a census campaign. It then retraces the evolution of political and intellectual debates on identities in Mauritanian society, putting them in perspective with the evolution of political power or of the political interests and views of social and political actors. Finally, it relies on historical and ethnographic records about a particular social group (a pastoral Fulani lineage), which does not fit into usual ethnic categories and dichotomies, and by that ultimately shows the political value of discourses on identity.

Stemming from a Gramscian approach, this article engages with the anthropological debate about subaltern groups’ forms of resistance by using the case of marginalized Fulani groups of pastoral and nomadic origins in northwest Benin. Their experiences seemingly confirm contemporary theories on resistance, which emphasize subaltern people’s capacities to tactically circumvent exploitation and exclusion and to handle contradictions between different “moral economies.” Nevertheless, one should question the impact of small-scale reactions that remain on the infrapolitical level and the emancipatory role that political theories give to tactical forms of resistance of dispersed subjectivities while refusing collective strategies. Grounding Gramscian theories in ethnography, this article wonders about the possibilities and limits of margins to turn into the scene of an “autonomous political initiative” of a subaltern group.

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