Working Against the State in Port-Gentil: Refining National/Transnational Identities in the City at the Center of Gabon's Oil Industry

This dissertation examines the lived experience of Gabonese citizens and transnational migrants in the city of Port-Gentil: Gabon's economic capital and the center of its lucrative oil industry. This dissertation demonstrates that the idea of a Gabonese national identity is frequently rejected by the citizenry despite being clearly observable in the performances that structure everyday life. I argue that this national identity is rooted in two areas. First, it is defined by a shared connection to and ownership of the rich national soil and subsoil. Second, Gabonese national identity is constructed in opposition to the impressions surrounding foreign Africans in Gabon and in alignment with the ways Gabonese imagine and understand their former colonizers, the French.;By virtue of membership in the nation, this dissertation asserts that Gabonese understand themselves to be entitled to place demands both on the state and on the foreigners in their midst. Following Mamdani, I argue that such feelings of entitlement emerged out of the post-independence inversion of the power relationship between those who are foreign and those who are native. During the colonial era, those who were native were controlled by foreign groups and individuals and only foreigners had access to rights and power. Gabonese understood independence as the moment at which the roles were reversed. Following independence, those who were native to Gabon could control those who were foreign to their soil. Feelings of entitlement intensified further within the environment of a wealthy petro-state where the citizenry perceives that having rights and power means (or should mean) having access to tremendous wealth.;The dissertation asserts that ultimately, a Gabonese national identity is publicly rejected due to the perceptions of the actions of the state. It is widely perceived throughout Port-Gentil that the state has stolen the national terrain and the fruits of the soil from the legitimate owners---the members of the nation---severing the connection between the citizenry and the soil/subsoil. I will argue that in severing this connection, which is the very basis for Gabonese national identity, the idea of a Gabonese nation is destabilized and discarded.