Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia

Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.

This volume pays tribute to the work of Professor Kate Marsh (1974-2019), an outstanding scholar whose research covered an extraordinarily wide range of interests and approaches, encompassing the history of empire, literature, politics and cultural production across the Francophone world from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Each of the chapters within engages with a different aspect of Marsh’s interest in French colonialism and the entanglements of its complex afterlives — whether it be her interest in the longevity of imperial rivalries; loss and colonial nostalgia; exoticism and the female body; decolonization and the ends of empire; the French colonial imagination; the policing of racialized bodies; or anti-colonial activism and resistance. As well as reflecting the geographical and intellectual breadth of Marsh’s research, the volume demonstrates how her work continues to resonate with emerging scholarship around decoloniality, transcolonial mobilities and anti-colonial resistance in the Francophone world. From French India to Algeria and from the Caribbean to contemporary France, this collection demonstrates the persistent relevance of Marsh’s scholarship to the histories and legacies of empire, while opening up conversations about its implications for decolonial approaches to imperial histories and the future of Francophone Postcolonial Studies.

Until the mid-20th century, France saw itself as a great power with universalist aspirations and global ambitions. But the Second World War and decolonisation irrevocably changed France's place in the world. Despite attempts to restore the country's 'grandeur' in the 1960s, the French have been forced to reconcile themselves to their modest place at the heart of a changing Europe. What impact has this had on political life? How have the French reimagined the revolutionary, republican and reactionary ideologies that have been so crucial to their history? How has the arrival of hundreds of thousands of postcolonial migrants transformed politics? These are just some of the questions at the heart of France since the 1970s. With contributions from leading specialists on topics as varied as the legacy of empire and neo-liberalism, it explores how the French have dealt with the pervasive sense of uncertainty that has become a defining feature of contemporary European politics.

This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism: the conquest of Tahiti, and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations, as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked, were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized, and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of ‘colonizer’ versus ‘colonized’. In doing so, it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer, or between colonial centre and periphery, and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism, drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis. In exploring how the notion of the French empire overseas was construed and how it was infused with meaning at three different historical moments, 1784, 1835 and 1938, it demonstrates how precarious the French empire was perceived to be, in terms of both European rivalry and resistance from the colonized, and how the rhetoric of a French colonisation douce was pitted against the inscribed excesses of the more powerful British empire. Rather than employing the sorts of recuperative agenda which focus on how the colonized were elided (viz., Subaltern Studies) or on the writings of the formerly colonized (viz., Francophone Studies), the study concerns itself specifically with how French colonialism and imperialism were perceived, and thus offers a further corrective to any generalizations about European colonialism and imperialism. More particularly, by examining how the representational strategy of nostalgia is used in these texts, the study demonstrates how perceived loss, and nostalgia for an imperial past, played a role in dynamically shaping the French colonial enterprise across its various manifestations.

In the late nineteenth century, the first wave of female journalists began writing in the French daily press. Yet, while they undeniably opened doors for the next generations of educated women, sexist hiring practices, assumptions about women’s aptitudes as reporters, and more subtle gender biases continued to saturate the industry in the decades that followed. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 investigates the careers and written work of ten women who regularly reported in the national, Paris-based dailies. Addressing the role of mentorship, family connections, gendered behaviours, reporting styles, and subject matter, Mary Lynn Stewart debunks lingering essentialist notions about women’s entry into journalism. She shows that struggling newspapers, attempting to reverse declining circulation, hired women to cover subjects that expanded to include international relations, colonial conflicts, trials, local politics, and social problems. Through content analysis, deixis, and systematic comparisons of several women and men reporting on the same or different events, she further queries claims about a feminine style, finding more similarities than differences between masculine and feminine reporting. Documenting the persistence of gender discrimination in the hiring, assigning, and assessment of women reporters in the French daily press, Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 demonstrates that, through the support of their female colleagues, women managed to succeed despite a variety of challenges.

This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity.

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Italy’s colonial past was a largely neglected topic in historical studies. Before then, only a handful of historians had shown any inclination for rescuing it from the dusty shelves of history, to which it had been relegated. With a few exceptions – most notably Angelo Del Boca – not many had the courage to venture into such treacherous territory. Colonial studies experienced a resurgence at the start of the new millennium, with remarkable progress in the quantity and quality of research, along with the wider public’s newfound interest, as evidenced by an important conference held in Milan in 2006 and the large audience it attracted. This book addresses the relationship between national identity and colonial culture in Italy. The centrality of the construction of Otherness in the identity formation of the colonizer has been extensively reported, both in Europe and elsewhere, and the relevance of colonial heritage has also been attested. In Italy, however, this relationship has been neglected in existing historiography, and the colonial experience has traditionally been side-lined and marginalized. This volume is divided into several sections, each organized around an underlying theme. Within each theme, a broad array of topics and methodologies reflect the authors’ approach in analysing the role of colonialism in the process of Italian identity formation. The rather heterogeneous works contained in this book, which attest the vitality and complexity of the debate on Italian colonialism, are clustered around one central theme: the reconstruction of un-comfortable memories, and a past that will not pass – which overlap the challenging present circumstances of rigidity, racism and rejection. As such, this book is a work of critical reflection, assembled using varied resources and scientific tools in order to shed light on a common past that is still so near and vivid in the minds of Italians, but at the same time so denied, distorted and forgotten in the collective memory.

Under Italian Fascism, African-Italian mulattoes and white Italians living in Egypt posed a particular threat to the pursuit of a homogenous national identity. This book examines novels and films of the period, showing that their attempts at stigmatization were self-undermining, forcing audiences to reassess their collective identity.