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An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire. By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, France had expanded its dominion to the four corners of the earth. This volume examines how an official French visual culture normalized the country’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Essays analyze aspects of colonialism through investigations into the art, popular literature, material culture, film, and exhibitions that ...
French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Based on an ethnographic study of mobilisations of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille during political and cultural events, the book examines communitarisation in relation to three thematic areas, namely spaces, cultural markets and local politics. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, the author analyses mobilisations of postcolonial diaspora as part of a dispositif of communitarisation, that is, a set of discourses, practices, institutions and subjectivations of diasporic community. She argues that constructions of ‘community’ are both shaped by and shape ethnicised biopolitics, expressed by modes of governing diasporic groups along ethnicised divisions and a marking of et...
The toppling of statues in the name of anti-racism is disconcerting, as is the violence sometimes displayed towards others in the name of gender equality. The emancipation movements of the past seem to have undergone a subtle transformation: the struggle now is not so much to bring about progress but rather to denounce offenses, express indignation, and assert identities, sometimes in order to demand recognition. The individual’s commitment to self-definition and self-appreciation, understood as the exercise of a sovereign right, has become a distinctive sign of our time. Elisabeth Roudinesco takes us into the darker corners of identity thinking, where conspiracy theories, rejection of the...
Arguing about Empire analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe's two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing about Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes in question have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances. These include the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881-2, which saw France and Britain establish new ...
Contact between cultures has been understood in various ways and this particular volume considers the European cultural, social, scientific, philosophical and political contexts framing encounter. All of the essays thus look at the different ways in which individuals and institutions work these contexts into their representations of contact settings. In Part 1, the conventional stance is adopted where encounter is understood as taking place elsewhere and not on European soil. The chapters examine contact far afield and focus on how public and private contexts act upon ensuing interpretations and representations of inter-cultural interaction. Part 2 considers ‘contact within’, positing in...
"This is the first comprehensive study of contemporary German literature's intense engagement with German colonialism and with Germany's wider involvement in European colonialism. Building on the author's decade of research and publication in the field, the book discusses some fifty novels by German, Swiss, and Austrian writers, among them Hans Christoph Buch, Alex Capus, Christof Hamann, Lukas Hartmann, Ilona Maria Hilliges, Giselher W. Hoffmann, Dieter Kühn, Hermann Schulz, Gerhard Seyfried, Thomas von Steinaecker, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, and Stephan Wackwitz. Drawing on international postcolonial theory, the German tradition of cross-cultural literary studies, and on memory studies, the book brings the hitherto neglected German case to the international debate in postcolonial literary studies"--Publisher website, July 5, 2013.
Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Crafting Allure: Beauty, Culture and Identity explores the complexity of physical beauty, the kind we can see in human beings, their representations, and in nature. From the self-presentations of eighteenth-century English ladies, to that of Civil Rights era African-American protestors, Afro-French women, and contemporary Asian-Indians; to the meanings of mannequins, retail beauty work, eating disorders, and hair; to a reconsideration of naturalised beauty in architecture, the embodiment of truth as a beautiful women, and what the appearance of Amerindians symbolised for Europeans of the Age of Exploration, culture and identity thread their way through the book. Written by scholars from a range of disciplines that reflect the book’s diversity as well as the complexity of visual beauty itself, Crafting Allure consists of eleven chapters divided into four parts: Fashioning Beauty Cultures, Beauty Workers, Racialising Beauty, and Beauty in Architecture and Allegory
World Literature is an increasingly influential subject in literary studies, which has led to the re-framing of contemporary ideas of ‘national literatures’, language and translation. World Literature: A Reader brings together thirty essential readings which display the theoretical foundations of the subject, as well as showing its conceptual development over a two hundred year period. The book features: an illuminating introduction to the subject, with suggested reading paths to help readers navigate through the materials texts exploring key themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, post/trans-nationalism, and translation and nationalism writings by major figures including J. W. Goethe, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Longxi Zhao, David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova and Milan Kundera. The early explorations of the meaning of ‘Weltliteratur’ are introduced, while twenty-first century interpretations by leading scholars today show the latest critical developments in the field. The editors offer readers the ideal introduction to the theories and debates surrounding the impact of this crucial area on the modern literary landscape.