Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant (review)

Reviewed by:

• Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noémi Tousignant
• Akwasi Kwarteng Amoako-Gyampah (bio)

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal By Noémi Tousignant. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 224.

Grounded in ethnographic research and using history as a heuristic device, Noémi Tousignant in Edges of Exposure provides a riveting and stimulating account of efforts at doing public interest toxicological science in postcolonial Senegal. She recounts both the history of attempts at creating public facilities needed to monitor toxins and the modest efforts by scientists at three public institutions in Senegal at different periods to analyze the impact of toxins on human life. Tousignant's central concern seems to be examining the imbrications of the political and economic conditions of postcolonial Senegal in shaping and conditioning the practice of toxicological science and the regulation of toxins. In doing so, Tousignant directs attention to questions regarding capacity, future imaginaries, and possibilities in the doing and the undoing of toxicological science. She thus presents capacity as a dynamic concept that is relational, rhythmic, and cadenced by the fluctuating postcolonial visions of Senegal. Tousignant skillfully weaves the complexities involved in doing toxicological science in Senegal with the lived experiences and narratives of toxicological scientists, including Europeans and Africans, to unpack capacity and its corollaries; that is, "scientific virtue, the advancement of knowledge and careers and public [End Page 716] service protection" (p. 20). She demonstrates how the rhythms of capacity, punctuated by shifting hopes and constrained by limited resources, illumine both the loss and capacity of "good science."

Tracing the historical evolution of toxicological research in Senegal from the 1960s to the 1980s, Tousignant demonstrates the imprint of French neocolonial ties as exemplified through the period called la coopération, after Senegal's independence. She tells the story of progressive deterioration and wreckage of leftover laboratory equipment, nonfunctioning or stagnant machines, and the lack of some laboratory materials (ch. 1). Following the life stories of individual scientists, she recounts the living memories of those who worked in the lab, their feelings of nostalgia, and their ambitions for advancement (ch. 2). After 1980 and until 2000, toxicologists at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD)—despite many efforts at effectively regulating toxins—succeeded only in pursuing a regulatory fiction rather than effectively regulating poisons. Reminiscing on leftover and often aged equipment and leveraging their individual networks, locally and internationally, Senegalese toxicologists based at UCAD could only perform intermittent toxicological tests (ch. 3). Taking together and placing these developments in their dynamic politico-economic context, Tousignant demonstrates how austere economic conditions caused by the implementation of structural adjustment policies in Senegal—thrust upon the country by the IMF and World Bank during the 1980s (similar to many other sub-Saharan African states)—constrained the capacity of the postcolonial Senegalese state to support toxicological science. The state's withdrawal, in many ways, imperiled the ambitions and expectations of the African toxicological scientists who replaced French expatriates following the end of the period of la coopération. In this way, Tousignant poignantly presents the problem of capacity as a problem not limited only to nonfunctioning lab materials and equipment but as an imbrication of temporal, social, economic, and political realities that constrain the dynamics of doing toxicological science in Africa. Her analysis, in many ways, implicates and exposes the many socioeconomic challenges that characterized and continue to impede many higher education institutions in postcolonial African states from effectively delivering techno-scientific education.

Nonetheless, shifting the analysis to Project Locustox—a Food and Agriculture Organization–and Dutch-sponsored project that started as a three-month pilot project to evaluate the environmental effects of locust and grasshopper control in southern Senegal—Tousignant demonstrates the ways in which Locustox embodied persistent hopes of reactivating and animating capacity (ch. 4). Involving several international partners at different times, the project was extended many times. It was embroiled in contentious infrastructural politics that stressed the "temporal, epistemological, material, and sociopolitical conditions" needed for deploying ecotoxicology to protect the environment (p. 121). Tousignant argues that the project's many extensions enabled the development of some accumulated capacity building...