Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, ^The Seduction of the Mediterranean argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s. Episodes of exile, murder, drug-taking, wild homosexual orgies and court cases are woven into an original study of a significant theme in European culture. The myth of a homoerotic Mediterranean made a major contribution to general attitudes towards Antiquity, the Renaissance and modern Italy and Greece.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of 'sites of memory' in France connected to the history of French imperialism and colonialism, and the ways that the French have remembered or forgotten their colonial past. Through a study of monuments, memorials, museum collections and other 'sites of memory' in France connected with France's overseas empire this book analyzes the way in which French authorities marked the Paris and provincial landscapes with these reminders of France's colonial 'mission' during the period of imperial expansion, and the fate of these sites in the post-colonial period and what that evolution reveals about French memory and amnesia of the colonial epoch.
Collective Memory examines the difficult transmission of memory in France of the Algerian War of independence (1954-1962). Emphasizing the current lack of transmission of memories of this war through a detailed case study of three crucial vectors of memory-the teaching of school history, coverage in the media, and discussion in the family- author Jo McCormack argues that lack of transmission of memories is feeding into contemporary racism and exclusion in France. Collective Memory draws extensively on interviews with historians, teachers, and pupils, as well as on secondary sources and media analysis. McCormack proposes that a greater "work of memory" needs to be undertaken if France is to overcome the division in French society that stems from the war. There has been little reconciliation of divisive group memories, a situation that leaves many individuals without a voice on this important subject. "Memory battles" dominate discussion of the topic as many issues periodically flare up and cannot yet be overcome. Book jacket.
In the Museum of Man offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. Alice L. Conklin takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the discipline and its practitioners under the German Occupation and its immediate aftermath. Conklin addresses the influence exerted by academic networks, museum collections, and imperial connections in defining human diversity socioculturally rather than biologically, especially in the wake of resurgent anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and in the 1930s and 1940s. Students of the progressive social scientist Marcel Mauss were exposed to the ravages of imperialism in the French colonies where they did fieldwork; as a result, they began to challenge both colonialism and the scientific racism that provided its intellectual justification. Indeed, a number of them were killed in the Resistance, fighting for the humanist values they had learned from their teachers and in the field. A riveting story of a close-knit community of scholars who came to see all societies as equally complex, In the Museum of Man serves as a reminder that if scientific expertise once authorized racism, anthropologists also learned to rethink their paradigms and mobilize against racial prejudice—a lesson well worth remembering today.
How does a nation come to terms with losing a war—especially an overseas war whose purpose is fervently contested? In the years after the war, how does such a nation construct and reconstruct its identity and values? For the French in Indochina, the stunning defeat at Dien Bien Phu ushered in the violent process of decolonization and a fraught reckoning with a colonial past. Contesting Indochina is the first in-depth study of the competing and intertwined narratives of the Indochina War. It analyzes the layers of French remembrance, focusing on state-sponsored commemoration, veterans’ associations, special-interest groups, intellectuals, films, and heated public disputes. These narratives constitute the ideological battleground for contesting the legacies of colonialism, decolonization, the Cold War, and France’s changing global status.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of 'sites of memory' in France connected to the history of French imperialism and colonialism, and the ways that the French have remembered or forgotten their colonial past. Through a study of monuments, memorials, museum collections and other 'sites of memory' in France connected with France's overseas empire this book analyzes the way in which French authorities marked the Paris and provincial landscapes with these reminders of France's colonial 'mission' during the period of imperial expansion, and the fate of these sites in the post-colonial period and what that evolution reveals about French memory and amnesia of the colonial epoch.
The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.
Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.
What made France into an imperialist nation, ruler of a global empire with millions of dependent subjects overseas? Historians have sought answers to this question in the nation?s political situation at home and abroad, its socioeconomic circumstances, and its international ambitions. But all these motivating factors depended on other, less tangible forces, namely, the prevailing attitudes of the day and their influence among those charged with acquiring or administering a colonial empire. The French Colonial Mind explores these mindsets to illuminate the nature of French imperialism. ø The first of two linked volumes, Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encountersøbrings together fifteen leading scholars of French colonial history to investigate the origins and outcomes of imperialist ideas among France?s most influential ?empire-makers.? Considering French colonial experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia, the authors identify the processes that made Frenchmen and women into ardent imperialists. By focusing on attitudes, presumptions, and prejudices, these essays connect the derivation of ideas about empire, colonized peoples, and concepts of civilization with the forms and practices of French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors to The French Colonial Mind place the formation and the derivation of colonialist thinking at the heart of this history of imperialism.
