French Colonial Research Articles

Interrogating the Algerian Folkloric Identity in Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night

This paper is an attempt to explore Folkloric material in Yasmina Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night, to reconsider folklore, not as a remnant of the past, but as an artistic vehicle to locate cultural belonging. It examines the different elements by which folklore shapes individual and collective identity in colonial Algerian literature. The novel of Yasmina Khadra represents material and spiritual folk constituents of the Algerian national and cultural identity during the French colonization, mainly the moral struggle of the protagonist between his Algerian cultural heritage and the French-acquired culture. The novel is rich in cultural, artistic, and folkloric elements of the Algerian individual and collective identity. It also exhibits the contrast between the local, and everyday French habits, causing a chasm between the two cultures the protagonist is struggling to bear and fill. This research indicates that the protagonist’s internal conflict reflects the larger struggle that nearly all Algerians went through during French colonization by imposing the colonial culture on their own. Research findings demonstrate that folklore is a popular material that springs out from recurrent situations of everyday life. Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night expresses verbal art as academic parlance to encounter identity issues. Khadra effectively captures the essence of Algerian society and its diverse cultural fabric through vivid descriptions and storytelling, shedding light on the intricate nature of identity in a colonized nation.

MÜASİR DÖVRDƏ FRANSIZ DİLİNİN QLOBAL VƏZİYYƏTİ

The Global Situation of the French Language in Modern Times Summary The French language, which was widely used in diplomacy until the middle of the 20th century, is now under serious pressure. The French language, which resisted the English language until recently, has now entered into competition with regional languages. Former French colonies are gradually giving preference to local languages. As a result, the use of French is declining. The article analyzes the current state of the French language and the challenges it faces, and provides statistics on the use of this language at the global level. At the same time, the reasons for the narrowing of the area of the French language are also explained. Key words: France, Africa, language, francophonia

David Burton: French Colonial Cookery

David Burton: French Colonial Cookery

The Morality of Schooling: Women's Education as an Arena for Social Tension in Cabo Delgado

In this article, I reflect on education as a continuing arena of tension for people in Cabo Delgado. The tension between formal (state-sponsored) and religious education as a backdrop of the conflict in Cabo Delgado has been widely mentioned but largely misunderstood. Scholars have consistently mentioned poverty and people's lack of access to formal education as drivers of the disenfranchisement that has led to violent extremism in the province. There are also references to how the insurgent movement has shunned formal education in favour of Islamic teachings. The existing literature about the insurgent's rejection of state-sponsored education, especially for girls, fails to address a trajectory whereby formal (state-sponsored) education has been a field of tension for a long time. Similar tensions happened across the Swahili coast in both English and French colonies. From interviews focused on women's relationships and experiences with both the colonial and postcolonial state, it emerged that Muslim populations in Cabo Delgado, particularly on the coast, have a long history of suspicion towards state-sponsored education. This includes showcasing a locally established practice for women's education that predated and existed alongside formal education. This follows that cultural and religious dynamics do not preclude women's influence in society, particularly education. In fact, it relies on her active participation. At the same time, despite potential violent cooptation, in the context of the conflict, the insurgent movement is able to tap into the existing tensions, including that around state-sponsored education. Evidence from the field indicates that, despite the disadvantages of resisting formal education, religious education remains central to most people, not just those following the extremist movement. What may appear to be an extremist rupture from mainstream practice should be understood within a logic operating on shared and familiar values.

Memorialisation and Identity in Mahé, India: Revealing French Colonial Legacies

Memorialisation and Identity in Mahé, India: Revealing French Colonial Legacies

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

ABSTRACT Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.

The Declaration of Independence (1945) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its Role in the Struggle for Independence of the People Worldwide

In the journey of fighting for the independence of people around the world, the Vietnamese people courageously stood up and fought against the invasion of the colonial French, which lasted more than 80 years, to regain independence for the nation through the general uprising in August 1945. On September 2, 1945, at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, in front of tens of thousands of compatriots nationwide, on behalf of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, President Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence, giving birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. With core values about national rights and human rights, the Declaration of Independence is the crystallization of the highest of these values for humanity and contains contemporary significance and a profound strategic vision. Using historical methods, comparative methods, and analytical methods, the article focuses on solving four issues: (1) clarify the historical context of the Declaration; (2) clarify the basic content of the Declaration of Independence; (3) evaluate and affirm the meaning and value of the Declaration in the process of fighting for the independence of people around the world; and (4) draw some conclusions about the research problems. Received: 30 March 2024 / Accepted: 30 June 2024 / Published: 02 July 2024

From colonialism to international aid: Social protection in former French colonies in sub‐Saharan Africa, 1890–2020

AbstractThis article examines social protection pathways in the former French colonies in sub‐Saharan Africa. We identify five steps to understanding the patterns and dynamics of social protection in these countries that provide evidence of its exogenous construction. First, we characterize the main developments in social protection systems and policies from their inception, covering the colonial era to the present, underlining the role of colonial legacy and the global social policy framework. Second, we document the similarity of national social protection trajectories and lack of national ownership of the policy problem markedly that characterizes social protection pathways.

The role of the labor movements in the colonial spaces: trade unionism in Palestine and Lebanon in the colonial era (1920-1948)

ABSTRACT This article aims to demonstrate how the working class evolved and was organised in Palestine and Lebanon between 1920 and 1948. Palestine and Lebanon, which share characteristics such as being a part of the Ottoman Empire and being governed by mandates, also share similar experiences in combating sectarianism based on nationality or religion. The establishment of British rule in Palestine and French administration in Lebanon after World War I also influenced the trade union movement in these two countries: Nationalism flourished, trade unions became tools of politics, and the divide and rule policy of the colonial administration made organization difficult. Although these administrations were referred to as ‘mandates’ of the League of Nations, they actually experienced a colonization process and its effects similar to those in Africa. In this study, particularly the concept of colonization will be used, and the activities of trade unions in colonial regions will be examined through two Middle Eastern countries. While the Palestinian trade unions, which struggled against both British colonization and settler colonialism, were effective in preserving Palestinian identity, the Lebanese trade unions, dealing with French colonization as well as sectarianism, also managed to significantly preserve working-class unity.

Muslims for and Against Slavery: Debates on the European Abolitionism Within the Muslim Elite of Saint-Louis, Senegal (1844)

ABSTRACT This article explores the efforts of an inquiry in Saint-Louis, Senegal to abolish slavery in the nascent French colony between 1842 and 1844. It discusses the perspectives of a professional Muslim elite and highlights those who resisted slavery and those resisting abolition. The article thus demonstrates the complex positions Muslims took in facing emancipation and their implications for relationships between them and French colonialism. On the one hand, those Muslims in favour of the ransoming of enslaved people cited the Quran to assert the conditions under which slavery was permitted or denied, stressing the illegality of the current practice in Saint-Louis. On the other hand, those resisting emancipation claimed that abolitionism would destroy their society and traditional ways of living. Debates revolved around the organization of labour markets and the indemnity proposed by the French government to release captives from African or European masters. Those for and against slavery both drew their arguments on Islamic tenets, which shows that different ideas of liberty and society were mostly grounded in social classes rather than a single Islamic discourse.

Spatial planning in post-colonial Morocco: an institutional design for decolonization

ABSTRACT In recent times, the decolonization of planning systems has garnered significant scholarly attention encouraging the consideration of more diverse contexts. This study uses a historical institutionalist approach to reconstitute the history of planning institutions in the context of Morocco as a former French colony and builds an institutional understanding of the current framing of its practices. It then uses an institutional design approach to propose potential trajectories for the gradual decolonization of its systems. This paper discusses the Moroccan planning tradition as a dual-level approach: formal planning conducted by planning professionals and informal urban governance implemented by the state. Thereby, the study suggests that a potential way towards the decolonization of the practice is to create a trajectory where planning professionals are encouraged to cultivate a more systematic interaction with informality.

Citizenship of Algerians During the French Colonial Period Between 1865 to 1919

Citizenship of Algerians During the French Colonial Period Between 1865 to 1919

The Franco-Algerian War: Narrating the Failure of the French Imperialist Project in Norman Lewis’s Darkness Visible (1960)

This article examines the political attitude towards representing French colonialism to Algeria during the Franco-Algerian war (1954-1962) in Darkness Visible (1960) by the Welsh-British Norman Lewis. It probes how Lewis’s novel portrays French colonial project, which was intended to bring civilization to Algerians, as a failure through raising an anti- colonial thought. In the novel, the Mission does not only fail to achieve the goals of its agenda, but also fails in the sense that it exposes more negative consequences of exploitation, oppression, and cultural destruction of the colonized people. The paper also scrutinizes Lewis’s use of immediacy of the narrative and Manicheanism in characterization as literary device to critique French colonial practices against the natives; while, in parallel, Lewis highlights the aspect of nationalist mobilization to unearth the legitimacy of the Algerians fighting for liberty. Therefore, this article ventures thematically into Darkness Visible within anti- colonial discourse parameters. Keywords: Darkness Visible, Franco-Algerian war, immediacy and Manicheanism, nationalist mobilization, Norman Lewis

Rachel Jean-Baptiste. Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste. <i>Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship</i>.

A Study of the August Revolution of 1945 and its Impact on Colonial French and Japanese Rule in Vietnam

The August Revolution of 1945 posed a significant challenge to colonial French and Japanese rule in Vietnam. This paper aims to examine the extent of this challenge and its impact on the dynamics of power in the region. Through an analysis of historical events and primary sources, the paper seeks to shed light on the revolutionary forces at play and their role in shaping the trajectory of Vietnam's struggle for independence. The August Revolution of 1945 challenged French and Japanese colonial rule through long-term planning, internal support, OSS influence, and the establishment of an independent government by the Viet Minh guerrilla troops. The Vietnamese people took advantage of the power vacuum left by the Japanese coup d'état against French officials in Indochina. This, combined with the determination and anticolonial spirit of the Vietnamese people, led to the success of the August Revolution. The Viet Minh further consolidated their power by garnering support from the rural population and receiving military aid and training from the United States OSS.

The “Détente to Step Forward” Diplomatic Strategy and Efforts to Save Vietnam’s Fragile Peace from March 1946 to December 1946

The historical period 1945–1946 occupies a particularly prominent position in modern Vietnamese history. It was a period full of challenges for the Communist Party, the newly formed government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese people. It was also a period with many historical events including the diplomatic struggle of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to protect and strengthen the revolutionary government in the face of imperialist countries’ plot to monopolize Vietnam. The current study set out to describe the art of the diplomatic struggle of the Government of Vietnam and the Communist Party in the fight against the sabotage of the Preliminary Agreement of March 6, 1946, by Chiang Kai-shek’s army and his henchmen, and the violation of the same agreement by the French colonialists using historical research, logic, analysis, and listing. The diplomatic struggle was “firm in objectives, flexible in strategies and tactics.” Study findings on Vietnam’s revolutionary and modern diplomatic art revealed the plot of France and Chiang, and how the Vietnamese peacefully protected their territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

Implication of institutional informality in the historical urban evolution of Morocco: Case studies of Fes and Oujda

This paper is concerned with the role of informality in the spatial and institutional development of post-colonial cities. The study uses a historical institutionalist approach to trace the historical evolution of Morocco's Fes and Oujda as two former French colonies. It analyzes the historical urban growth of both cities through archival research, policy analysis, and complements its findings with semi-structured interviews. This study explores the different interactions between formal policies and the informal spatial and institutional urban practices, and discusses the processes of incremental institutional change that informal institutions introduce and sustain without disrupting the status-quo. This paper argues that in post-colonial contexts, informality prevails over formality as a stronger feedback mechanism to path dependence. Finally, the paper makes the case for the importance of mapping informal practices within and in relation to formal planning institutional structures for more comprehensive understandings of the role and the impact of spatial planning as a practice.

Historical discourse as evidence of violence: middle year 3 textbook

This article strives to highlight the vocabulary relating to the discourse of violence through the historical narrative of testimony. Through the school manual of the 3rd middle year, we will try to make an inventory of texts of this kind of speech, by focusing our analysis on a historical text whose vocabulary depicts the real suffering of the Algerian people from the repression of French colonialism. The objective of this analysis is to try to understand the role of the exploitation of the discourse of violence as testimony in the awareness of the learner of the 3rd year average. The analysis of the historical text revealed to us that this kind of discourse allows the FFL learner to better soak up his history and national identity.

(Re-)invented Chan Lineage, Unique Vietnamese Meditation School, or Both? Thích Thanh Từ’s “Revived” Trúc Lâm Tradition of Thiền Tông

This study explores how images of the past have been deployed to set up current arrangements of leadership and institutional identity by considering the career and teachings of Thích Thanh Từ in connection with his “revived” Buddhist tradition in Vietnam. Promoted as a continuation of the unique and pure Vietnamese Buddhist meditation tradition and associated with the Vietnamese national identity, the contemporary Trúc Lâm (Bamboo Grove) is a pride of many Vietnamese Buddhists. The original Trúc Lâm is claimed to be founded by the heroic King-turned-monk Trần Nhân Tông in the thirteenth century. The tradition was supposedly transmitted through the next two generations and died out. In the twentieth century, a Southern Vietnamese monk, Thích Thanh Từ (1924–), who had quit Pure Land (Tịnh Độ, C. Jingtu 淨土) Buddhism to self-learn and practice meditation, decided to reinvent the medieval Trúc Lâm tradition and became the founder of the contemporary Trúc Lâm. Despite growing up during French colonization and American war, Thanh Từ was not politically involved; instead, he focused on setting up new monasteries, taught meditation, and discouraged his followers from political and social engagement. This paper examines how successful Thích Thanh Từ and his disciples are in popularizing Trúc Lâm in Vietnam, given that the majority of Vietnamese Buddhists follow Pure Land devotional practices. More importantly, it describes how Thích Thanh Từ combines the teachings attributed to Trần Nhân Tông and two Chinese Chan masters, Huike 慧可 (the Second Patriarch) and Huineng 惠能 (the Sixth Patriarch), to form Trúc Lâm’s philosophical views and meditation techniques. With the clear-cut distinction between the delusional mind of sentient beings and the perfect mind of enlightened beings, Thích Thanh Từ presents the goal of Trúc Lâm practice as attaining the state of no-thought and sharpening it to perfection to perceive the “buddha nature” (phật tính, S. buddhadhātu, C. foxing 佛性) understood as the pure mind of nonduality and nonform. Outlining that process, he emphasizes the importance of “sudden awakening” (đốn ngộ, C. dunwu 頓悟) followed by “gradual cultivation” (tiệm tu, C. jianxiu 漸修). His meditation manual for ordinary practitioners with no experience of sudden awakening contains key techniques of (1) stabilizing the mind by counting and then observing breaths, (2) recognizing the “true mind” (chân tâm, C. zhenxin 真心) through practicing “no abiding in thoughts” (biết vọng không theo), “no mind for the externals” (đối cảnh vô tâm), “no dualistic discrimination” (không kẹt hai bên), and then proceeding to the stage of permanently abiding in the nature of true mind. These meditation methods are pertinent to Trúc Lâm’s view that all phenomena that emerge via speculative thoughts are unreal and illusory, and that only the true mind is real. The first section of this paper explores historical connections between Vietnamese and Chinese forms of Buddhism, shedding light on why Trúc Lâm embraces Thiền Tông, which is transmitted from Chinese Chan zong, and how Thích Thanh Từ builds connections between Thiền Tông and the Vietnamese national identity. The second section focuses on Thích Thanh Từ’s own life story, on how he practiced meditation and suddenly experienced “unlearned wisdom” (trí vô sư/vô sư trí, C. wushi zhi 無師智, an alternative term for true mind and buddha nature as a result of his practice) and how he succeeded in spreading the “revived” Trúc Lâm. With the first two sections as a background, in the third section, this paper explores Thích Thanh Từ’s views and practices and critically analyzes those views and practices in the conclusion. Overall, I argue that Thích Thanh Từ’s instructions on meditation are closely intertwined with his view of reality, which in turn is based on the mainstream Chan zong ideas.

Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux: Disentangling the Narrative of French Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Iran

AbstractThis paper investigates the impact of two French architects, Andre Godard and Maxime Siroux, in early twentieth-century Iran using postcolonial methodology to challenge the reductive prevailing narrative of these architects as representatives of Western imperial powers. Furthermore, this paper argues for the existence of a distinct local modernism in Iran, highlights the enduring presence of Iranian architectural traditions throughout different historical periods, and argues against the narrative of modern architectural works in Iran as simplistic hybrids of pre-Islamic Iranian architecture and Western modernism. In addition, this research underscores the role of Iranian intellectuals in shaping the cultural and social movements that led to the broader modernization of Iran and modernism in Iranian architecture.