The pervasiveness of colonial identity in Lucie Cousturier’s travels to West Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the travel narratives by the French painter and writer Lucie Cousturier, Mes inconnus chez eux: Mon amie Fatou, citadine and Mes inconnus chez eux: Mon ami Soumaré, laptot (1925). Critical scholarship has recently excavated Cousturier’s travelogues from oblivion, but it has neglected to connect her writing to discourses on the imaginary female figure termed the coloniale, a model citizen of French Empire. I argue that Cousturier exposes the tensions within imperial ideology through direct criticism of the feminine role of a coloniale that she was expected to inhabit. Focusing on the contradictions of her status as a white woman with an official mission in the colonies, Cousturier depicts a traveller coming to a gradual but inevitable awareness of her own whiteness. This realisation leads Cousturier to represent herself as a bad “coloniale” throughout the narratives and subvert the power dynamics underpinning interracial relations in French West Africa.