French Colonial Rule Research Articles

Postface

With this research, our first ambition was to describe and analyse the respective positions and purpose of gymnastics and sports in Madagascar during the French colonial era [1896–1960]. As a multifaceted activity that can be studied and defined from different viewpoints, sport is a choice subject for historical studies. The major idea, which guided our ten-year study, is that the history of sports is another – and, we hope, a novel – approach to the analysis and drafting of the history of Madagascar under French colonial rule. Far from being limited to simple and entertaining physical practices, Western sports imported by the colonists brought deep transformations in the educational, political, social and cultural spheres, and left their mark long after the departure of the French.

Resource War, Civil War, Rights War: Factoring Empire into French North Africa’s Second World War

This article considers the Second World War’s socio-economic impact on the colonized populations of French North Africa’s three adjoining territories: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It suggests that the war’s significance for the long-term political future of French colonial rule was markedly different from that typically ascribed to it both by contemporary French and Allied observers and by subsequent historians of the conflict. This argument will be developed by contrasting the signpost events usually assigned to north-west Africa in strategic histories of the Second World War with the internal episodes, socio-political trends, and local changes in the fabric of colonial rule that, arguably, held greater importance for the region’s people.

‘A new world rising’: Albert Camus and the absurdity of neo-liberalism

This article investigates the writings of Albert Camus in light of neo-liberal governmentality. Camus, a pied noir born in Algeria, was a key figure in the debates regarding the trajectory of French colonial rule. While his absurdist sensibility denounced absolute conceptions of justice and history, his cosmopolitan humanism rejected the possibility of an independent Algerian nation-state. By examining his literary and political writings, this article sheds light on his conceptions of the individual, natural limits, and legitimate violence. In so doing, it identifies assumptions common to Camus’ notion of the absurd and neo-liberalism while also arguing that the current neo-liberal climate has shaped many of the recent discussions of his work.

Identity and Identification in Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé

"Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him [...] It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend." (Fanon 216-17)The dependence of one’s “human worth and reality” on mutual recognition, highlighted by Frantz Fanon in his seminal text Black Skin White Masks, first published in 1952, plays a central role in the construction of identity in Azouz Begag’s first two novels, Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé, published in 1986 and 1989 respectively. Using contemporary post-colonial criticism to carry out a close reading of these two texts, this article will take into account the memory of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), which marked Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule, and its connection to France’s current attitude towards ethnic difference. Subsequently, the effect of these factors on considerations of contemporary Franco-Algerian selfhood will be examined, and the analysis will go on to demonstrate how an Algerian presence in France, forty-eight years after the end of the Algerian War, continues to come into conflict with the French Republic’s constitutional definition of nationhood, which favours unity of the nation by uniformity rather than an embracing of multiple identities.

Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and French Sovereignty

This essay situates a recent French marriage annulment scandal in the context of debates about Islam, gender, and immigration; the relationship between the secularism of French law and Catholic marriage law; and the history of Muslim law under French colonial rule.

AMADOU HAMPÂTÉ BÂ AND THE WRITER ROBERT ARNAUD (RANDAU): AFRICAN COLONIAL SERVICE AND LITERATURE

This article explores the possible links between the literary works of the writer and colonial administrator, Robert Arnaud (1873–1950; better known by his literary pseudonym Robert Randau) and Amadou Hampaté Bâ. The author of Wangrin and Oui, mon commandant! was well-acquainted with Arnaud who, following a career devoted largely to Islamic issues, became in 1924 an inspector of administrative affairs in Upper Volta and, in 1927–28, served as acting governor of this territory. The personal papers of Arnaud both shed new light on certain administrative incidents that are also described in the works of Hampâté Bâ and also allow us to think in new ways about the role played by Africans in French colonial rule.

Tunisia, Contested: Italian Nationalism, French Imperial Rule, and Migration in the Mediterranean Basin.

This article explores the contradictions in Italy’s relationship with the Mediterranean basin, taking Tunisia as a focal point. Tunisia was a paradoxical case at the intersection of Italy’s foreign policy: it was a former Roman imperial colony with a strategic location, but it also possessed a large and vibrant Italian emigrant settlement, like the Italian “colonies” of Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, New York, and San Francisco. This situation caused much confusion in debates over how Italy should develop its international influence. Faced with a choice of priorities, the Italians of Tunisia called for Italy to concentrate on establishing territorial colonies in the Mediterranean, rather than cultivating Italian emigration worldwide. In 1881, France surprised Italy by seizing control of Tunisia, skewing Italian policy and fomenting a sense of weakness and insecurity. Italy’s “loss” of Tunisia encouraged the belief that Italian imperial motives were more deserving and more sincere, and Nationalists used the wealthy and successful Italian community of Tunisia as a model of what Italians would be able to achieve in neighboring Libya. Fascist representations of Italians in Tunisia, however, finally discredited the Italian expatriates’ claims to rights and representation under French colonial rule. This case study thus illustrates how Mediterranean Europe and North Africa became enmeshed in multiple layers of competition and integration through trends in colonialism, migration, and the formation of transnational communities.

Identity in Algerian politics: the legacy of colonial rule

Introduction. French Colonial Rule and Its Enduring Legacies. Algerian Nationalism and the War of Liberation. Independence and the Challenges of Nation Building. Economic Crisis and the Descent into Violence. National Identity and the Ongoing Struggle.

Hanoi's Ancient Quarter Traders: Resilient Livelihoods in a Rapidly Transforming City

Within the rapidly transforming city of Hanoi, Vietnam's capital, lies the Ancient Quarter, home to a broad array of small entrepreneurs and traders since the 13th century. Utilising a longitudinal study approach, supported by a livelihoods framework, this paper investigates the impacts of both historical political and economic policies and current market economic reforms on Ancient Quarter trader livelihoods. Drawing on oral histories with elderly residents and interviews with current traders, it analyses the influence of French colonial rule and the First Indochina War, before turning to ascertain the consequences of the socialist period and the Second Indochina War. By doing so, the paper reveals the diverse livelihood strategies that traders have put in place to survive through these turbulent times.

Entente Cordiale ou Enquête Coloniale? Margery Perham Hands Down Her Suspended Judgement

Dame Margery Perham, acclaimed as the foremost academic expert on British colonial administration, also gained much experience and showed much interest in its French counterpart. Her thoughts on this, however, were never published in her lifetime. This article, based her diaries (published posthumously under the editorship of the article's author) and other previously little-known material, reconstructs her views on French colonial rule and how she felt the two colonial services compared with one another. It also summarises the author's own perspectives on the latter issue.

프랑스 식민지배기 북베트남 향촌사회에서 여성의 토지 소유 : 하동(Hà Đông)성 메찌(Mễ Trì)사 사례

This paper tries to understand the Vietnamese local people's reaction against the French colonial rule during the first half of the 20th century in the rural society of Tonkin. Based upon the primary sources of the Vietnam National Archives and local field research, upon the statistic and static ana...

Algeria: anger of the dispossessed

After liberating itself from French colonial rule in one of the twentieth century's most brutal wars of independence, Algeria became a standard-bearer for the non-aligned movement. By the 1990s, however, its revolutionary political model had collapsed, degenerating into a savage conflict between the military and Islamist guerillas that killed some 200,000 citizens. In this lucid and gripping account, Martin Evans and John Phillips explore Algeria's recent and very bloody history, demonstrating how the high hopes of independence turned into anger as young Algerians grew increasingly alienated. Unemployed, frustrated by the corrupt military regime, and excluded by the West, the post-independence generation needed new heroes, and some found them in Osama bin Laden and the rising Islamist movement. Evans and Phillips trace the complex roots of this alienation, arguing that Algeria's predicament--political instability, pressing economic and social problems, bad governance, a disenfranchised youth--is emblematic of an arc of insecurity stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. Looking back at the pre-colonial and colonial periods, they place Algeria's complex present into historical context, demonstrating how successive governments have manipulated the past for their own ends. The result is a fractured society with a complicated and bitter relationship with the Western powers--and an increasing tendency to export terrorism to France, America, and beyond.

'Being as Good Muslims as Frenchmen': On Islam and Colonial Modernity in West Africa

In contrast to many previous studies that follow the perspective of colonial administrators and portray Muslim religious leaders or marabouts as essentially political actors who seek political and economic advantage, this paper proposes a new perspective on marabouts under French colonial rule. Focusing on three prominent representatives of the Tijaniyya Sufi order, Seydou Nourou Tall (d. 1980) and Ibrahima Niasse (d. 1975) from Senegal, and Sidi Benamor (d. 1968) from Algeria, the present study shifts the emphasis to the religious motivation behind marabouts' activities. Against the dominant perspective that reduces their activities to mere reactions to colonialism or strategies to gain followers or resources, we show how the three Tijani leaders engaged with colonial modernity. They worked to spread Islam and toward other specific religious objectives within the Islamic sphere. After accepting the reality of French rule and having established a good rapport with the administration, they were able to pursue some of their own religious agendas beyond the purview of the colonial state, French colonial attempts to control their activities notwithstanding.

From Bac Le to Haiphong: Local Officials, Miscommunication and Sino-French Conflict in Vietnam

In June 1884,in the midst of the Sino-French War, a column of French and colonial soldiers marched along country roads in northern Vietnam on their way to occupy the town of Lang Son. En route they encountered a larger Chinese force near the village of Bac Le, where a brief but bloody firefight took place. In March 1946, 62 years after the 'Bac Le Incident', Chinese and French forces again clashed in northern Vietnam. This time, Nationalist forces of Jiang Jieshi's [Chiang Kai-shek] Republic of China exchanged fire with French ships arriving at the port city of Haiphong in an attempt to restore French colonial rule to Vietnam after the Japanese occupation during the PacificWar.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean, by Peter Hawkins

Reviewed by: The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean Karen U. Lindo The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean By Peter Hawkins Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007. xvi + 205 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-7391-1676-0 cloth. In The Other Hybrid Archipelago, author Peter Hawkins charts onto the postcolonial landscape a long overdue analysis of the rich and complex literatures of the francophone Indian Ocean. Scholars and newcomers to this body of work will appreciate Hawkins's pedagogical approach in mapping out both the vast literary production in this region as well as the detailed historical narratives that are specific to Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, the Comoros, and the Seychelles, and the extent to which the diverse cultural production of these territories (with the exception of the Comoros) continue to reflect alternating French and British colonial rule of the not so distant past. The Comorian archipelago, located in the Mozambique Channel between the African mainland and Madagascar, is distinct in that this region has remained predominantly Islamic since the tenth century; and even Mayotte, which is today an Overseas territory (TO M, or Territoire d'Outre-Mer) attached to the French Republic, bears witness in its literary output to its adherence to Islamic tradition. Nerf de boeuf, Le calvaire des baobabs, and La fille du polygame, by Nassur Attoumani, provide insightful examples of the ways in which Muslim practices are negotiated within a French legal and linguistic system. The Creole language, a legacy of the plantation years, ardently defended as part of the cultural specificity of the Seychellois, Reunionese, and Mauritians, does not inform the cultural production of Mayotte and far less so the other islands in the Comorian Union, for whom their involvement with slavery remains a taboo subject. Hawkins further explores the different territories through the musical production and instruments used to make the sounds of salegy, sega, and maloya. In this work, music elaborates on cultural heritage and the exportation or else insularity of sounds produced are equally indicative of the relations among these islands and their former colonial masters. In the case of Mauritius, described as [End Page 217] an example of an island that is "outward-looking" (167), sega, the musical heritage of former slaves, is today integrated into the global economy as part of an enticing tourist package to this region. The fact of the internal rivalries among the different ethnic communities who continue to wrestle with the legacies of both slavery and indentured labor does not impede the pride of place of cultural performance for incoming visitors. The final chapter, "Trouble in Paradise," nevertheless provides a sobering perspective on what might have otherwise read as an ode to "cultural métissage." Undoubtedly, this convergence of the many different ethnic groups and cultural and religious practices do offer a complex mosaic that yields a remarkable cultural output. Yet, as Hawkins makes clear, the issues stemming from nationalism, communalism, and parochialism also shape the political landscape of these islands in the Indian Ocean such that they too are implicated in the larger questions of multiculturalism and ethnic integration that are today global concerns. The anglophone community will discover in The Other Hybrid Archipelago a welcome introductory work and an important resource for future scholarly endeavors. Karen U. Lindo Bowdoin College Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press

The Colony Writ Small: Vietnamese Women and Political Activism in Colonial Schools During the 1920s*

French colonial rule in Vietnam (1858-1954) resulted in, for the first time, the formal education of Vietnamese girls. By the 1920s a small percentage of young Vietnamese women were enrolled in colonial schools where they learned, in addition to home economics and child rearing, the French language, French history, and French literature. As a result, they were able to read newspapers, novels, and other writings on a variety of subjects and issues. This ability thrust them into the public sphere of political debates in colonial Vietnam. A significant number of these young women were politicized in the process and expressed their political views in a number of ways, including student protests and strikes.

The Frontier and the Affrontier: French-Language Algerian Comics and Cartoons Confront the Nation

Abstract Algerian and Algerian-French cartoonists have often thematised national identity in their art. Their interest in this subject has created problems for them when they have crossed the 'affrontier', a line of demarcation whose nature and place have been determined to a considerable degree by the military regime. The analysis of some of its key dimensions - political, religious, spatial, historical and symbolic - allows us to understand how it operates. By studying striking examples of cartoons and comics, their production and consumption, we can come to an understanding of how the affrontier has functioned since 1962, when Algeria gained its independence. The year 1988, when the Algerian regime killed and tortured hundreds of young rioters, stands out as a watershed, because cartoonists then began to redefine their relationship to the military regime, the nation and the affrontier. Draw Me the Nation: The Affrontier2 In spite of the increasing globalisation of the market, and despite the revival of those universalising religions that had seemed to have been supplanted by nationalism,3 it is clear that national identity is still, even today, a defining constraint for the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet. It can be felt in the very concrete restrictions that are imposed on us whenever we travel or settle abroad, in the demands made by the process of integration, and in what Etienne Balibar has called the fictive ethnicity of the nation.4 In this article, I will analyse a number of aspects of national symbolism in French-language newspaper illustrations, cartoons and comics by artists and scriptwriters who are Algerian or of Algerian origin: Aider, Boudjellal, Dahmani, Daiffa, Dilem, Fares, Gyps, Khelif, Malek, Masmoudi, Melouah, Saladin, Slim, Tenani, etc. Algerian artists have repeatedly been asked to draw the Algerian nation, literally and figuratively; that is to say that if they choose to touch on issues that concern the nation, it is always insisted that they should demonstrate their allegiance to national ideology and their support for the government, or at least that they should avoid stepping over certain boundaries. In fact, not only are they urged to talk about the nation, but almost everything comes under that heading under this military regime which, furthermore, presides over a country that has had to wrench its identity back after French colonial rule. This does not mean that they (always) comply, or that they do so without protest, but obedience can confer certain benefits, and disobedience can lead to serious difficulties, including fines and imprisonment. This point is currently best exemplified by the case of Ali Dilem, an Algerian press cartoonist. Whenever he is the subject of legal action in his country, a very frequent occurrence, it is on the basis of clauses added to the penal code in 2001, and sometimes referred to as 'Dilem laws' in Algiers.5 It is true that for the last few years, Algerian cartoonists have dared to target members of the government and Islamic leaders and their followers, even if they usually avoid specific attacks on the Algerian nation or the Muslim religion as such.6 They have often paid a heavy price when they have stepped over the limit of the acceptable affront - I will call this the 'affrontier'.7 For example, Chawki Amari was sent to prison for a press cartoon which compared the national flag to political dirty linen.8 The affrontier is, then, the frontier, or the limit, beyond which a cartoon or a comic is perceived or treated as an affront to the nation, its symbols and its essential components, including the army, the government and religion. But it is very rarely the case that there is a real anti-nationalist or anarchist attack on the Algerian nation itself (in fact, is such an attack actually conceivable?). On the other hand, what is sometimes at issue here is whether an artist has gone too far in relation to characteristics widely considered or decreed to be nationally defining, in areas like religion or sexuality. …

Francophone postcolonialism from Eastern Europe

This article draws from recent research that makes an argument for studying literature from what David Chioni Moore calls the post-Soviet sphere under the rubric of postcolonial theory. It contends that conceiving of countries formerly under Soviet rule as having some characteristics in common with countries once under French colonial rule can yield productive results. It is quite possible that the concentration in literary studies on relations between the First and Third Worlds has left a void with respect to the Second World, at least with respect to francophone writers. We can begin to fill this void by studying texts in French by writers from places formerly under Soviet domination, and this article examines the fictional and theoretical works of Julia Kristeva, Agota Kristof, Milan Kundera, Andre Makine and Brina Svit. Their insights are used here to explore the extent to which intellectuals from small Central and Eastern European countries find themselves in a postcolonial position politically and linguistically similar to that of francophone scholars and writers from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa or the Antilles.

The Vietnamese American 1.5 generation: stories of war, revolution, flight, and new beginnings

Part I: Historical Overview 1. Vietnam before the Mid-nineteenth Century 2. French Colonial Rule and Vietnamese Resistance 3. Communism and Nationalism 4. The 1945 August Revolution 5. The First Indochina War 6. The American Involvement in Vietnam 7. The Fall of Saigon and Its Aftermath 8. The Plight of the Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam 9. An International Refugee Crisis 10. Ending the Indochinese Refugee Exodus Part II: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings 11. A Tragedy: From Vietnam to America 12. A Journey Called Freedom 13. My Autobiography 14. How It Feels to be an Asian American 15. Integrity Through Change 16. A Place to Call Home 17. The Coming of Age of a Chinese-Vietnamese American 18. My Father and I 19. The Pain in My Heart 20. The Never Ending Struggle 21. An Unfinished Journey 22. From Vietnam to Germany to the United States 23. Vietnam Memories in America 24. My Transition to Being an Asian American 25. At That Time in My Life Epilogue