The French Empire in Africa and Asia
Fall 2009
This seminar approaches the study of French imperialism as a multivalent process, through the study of actions, words, and visible signs that shaped the encounters of colonizer and colonized. We begin by considering how conceptual categories may mask the complexity of colonialism, and so critique distinctions usually made by scholars between formal empire and informal imperialism, public and private, and cultural and political spheres. Of particular concern is the unequal power wielded by the parties to colonial encounters. Can historians formulate a new conceptual language that does not privilege European experience as normative or modern?
We bring theory and methodological questions to bear in our reading of major recent texts on French colonial encounters with the peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa and Indochina.
Readings include: Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Fabian, Time and the Other; Said, “Orientalism”; Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”; Wilder, “Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies Beyond National Identity”; al-Jabarti, Napoleon in Egypt; Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade; Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania; Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa; Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Students will prepare a presentation for class, write a short midterm paper, and a long final paper on a question of historiography.
