Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-ruled West Africa, 1914-1956

Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 PDF Author: James Eskridge Genova
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820469416
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 offers an innovative and provocative reassessment of the history and legacies of French colonial rule in West Africa between the First World War and the late 1950s. Making critical use of postcolonial and cultural theory, James E. Genova argues that the colonizers and the colonized were locked in a struggle for authority increasingly structured by competing notions of what it meant to be French or African. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the centrality of the cultural question in the imperial encounters between France and West Africa. It maps the emergence of the French-educated elite as a social class in French West Africa as a window into the complex relationship between agency and structural context in the making of history. A disjunction developed between decolonization and liberation in the colonial liaison of France and West Africa that left colonizers and colonized trapped in a neocolonial cultural framework actualizing Frantz Fanon's deepest fears about the postcolony.

Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-ruled West Africa, 1914-1956

Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 PDF Author: James Eskridge Genova
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820469416
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity, and the Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914-1956 offers an innovative and provocative reassessment of the history and legacies of French colonial rule in West Africa between the First World War and the late 1950s. Making critical use of postcolonial and cultural theory, James E. Genova argues that the colonizers and the colonized were locked in a struggle for authority increasingly structured by competing notions of what it meant to be French or African. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the centrality of the cultural question in the imperial encounters between France and West Africa. It maps the emergence of the French-educated elite as a social class in French West Africa as a window into the complex relationship between agency and structural context in the making of history. A disjunction developed between decolonization and liberation in the colonial liaison of France and West Africa that left colonizers and colonized trapped in a neocolonial cultural framework actualizing Frantz Fanon's deepest fears about the postcolony.

The Colonial Politics of Global Health

The Colonial Politics of Global Health PDF Author: Jessica Lynne Pearson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989260
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
In The Colonial Politics of Global Health, Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as decolonization movements gained strength. After World War II, French officials viewed health improvements as a way to forge a more equitable union between France and its overseas territories. Through new hospitals, better medicines, and improved public health, French subjects could reimagine themselves as French citizens. The politics of health also proved vital to the United Nations, however, and conflicts arose when French officials perceived international development programs sponsored by the UN as a threat to their colonial authority. French diplomats also feared that anticolonial delegations to the United Nations would use shortcomings in health, education, and social development to expose the broader structures of colonial inequality. In the face of mounting criticism, they did what they could to keep UN agencies and international health personnel out of Africa, limiting the access Africans had to global health programs. French personnel marginalized their African colleagues as they mapped out the continent’s sanitary future and negotiated the new rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. The health disparities that resulted offered compelling evidence that the imperial system of governance should come to an end. Pearson’s work links health and medicine to postwar debates over sovereignty, empire, and human rights in the developing world. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.

The French Colonial Mind: Violence, military encounters and colonialism

The French Colonial Mind: Violence, military encounters and colonialism PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803220944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Violence was prominent in France?s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France?s empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

The French empire between the wars

The French empire between the wars PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.

Colonial Suspects

Colonial Suspects PDF Author: Kathleen Keller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496206185
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A Vietnamese cook, a German journalist, and a Senegalese student--what did they have in common? They were all suspicious persons kept under surveillance by French colonial authorities in West Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. Colonial Suspects looks at the web of surveillance set up by the French government during the twentieth century as France's empire slipped into crisis. As French West Africa and the French Empire more generally underwent fundamental transformations during the interwar years, French colonial authorities pivoted from a stated policy of "assimilation" to that of "association." Surveillance of both colonial subjects and visitors traveling through the colonies increased in scope. The effect of this change in policy was profound: a "culture of suspicion" became deeply ingrained in French West African society. Kathleen Keller notes that the surveillance techniques developed over time by the French included "shadowing, postal control, port police, informants, denunciations, home searches, and gossip." This ad hoc approach to colonial surveillance mostly proved ineffectual, however, and French colonies became transitory spaces where a global cast of characters intermixed and French power remained precarious. Increasingly, French officials--in the colonies and at home--reacted in short-sighted ways as both perceived and real backlash occurred with respect to communism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, black radicalism, and pan-Islamism. Focusing primarily on the port city of Dakar (Senegal), Keller unravels the threads of intrigue, rumor, and misdirection that informed this chaotic period of French colonial history.

Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms

Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms PDF Author: Ousman Kobo
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900423313X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
In this book Ousman Kobo analyzes the origins of Wahhabi-inclined reform movements in two West African countries. Commonly associated with recent Middle Eastern influences, reform movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso actually began during the twilight of European colonial rule in the 1950s and developed from local doctrinal contests over Islamic orthodoxy. These early movements in turn gradually evolved in ways sympathetic to Wahhabi ideas. Kobo also illustrates the modernism of this style of Islamic reform. The decisive factor for most of the movements was the alliance of secularly educated Muslim elites with Islamic scholars to promote a self-consciously modern religiosity rooted in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions. This book therefore provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of “Wahhabism.”

Cinema and Development in West Africa

Cinema and Development in West Africa PDF Author: James E. Genova
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301011X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
“Illuminates the enduring importance of political and economic dynamics not yet fully explored in the study of African cinema.” —Africa Cinema and Development in West Africa shows how the film industry in Francophone West African countries played an important role in executing strategies of nation building during the transition from French rule to the early postcolonial period. James E. Genova sees the construction of African identities and economic development as the major themes in the political literature and cultural production of the time. Focusing on film both as industry and aesthetic genre, he demonstrates its unique place in economic development and provides a comprehensive history of filmmaking in the region during the transition from colonies to sovereign states.

Empires in the Sun

Empires in the Sun PDF Author: Lawrence James
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681774992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The one hundred year history of how Europe coerced the African continent into its various empires—and the resulting story of how Africa succeeded in decolonization. In this dramatic (and often tragic) story of an era that radically changed the course of world history, Lawrence James investigates how, within one hundred years, Europeans persuaded and coerced Africa into becoming a subordinate part of the modern world. His narrative is laced with the experiences of participants and onlookers and introduces the men and women who, for better or worse, stamped their wills on Africa. The continent was a magnet for the high-minded, the adventurous, the philanthropic, the unscrupulous. Visionary pro-consuls rubbed shoulders with missionaries, explorers, soldiers, big-game hunters, entrepreneurs, and physicians. Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States exported their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems to Africa. The colonial powers imposed administrations designed to bring stability and peace to a continent that appeared to lack both. The justification for occupation was emancipation from slavery—and the common assumption that late nineteenth-century Europe was the summit of civilization. By 1945 a transformed continent was preparing to take charge of its own affairs, a process of decolonization that took a quick twenty years. This magnificent history also pauses to ask: what did not happen and why?

Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa

Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa PDF Author: Claire Griffiths
Publisher: University of Chester
ISBN: 1908258535
Category : African literature (French)
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
From Senegal in the west to the Comoros islands in the east, this collection of essays casts a critical eye over fifty years of 'independence' in former French colonial possessions of Africa and the Indian Ocean. With methods and perspectives that cross traditional disciplinary barriers, Contesting Historical Divides in Francophone Africa proposes fresh insights into the process of decolonisation in this part of the world.

Crises of Empire

Crises of Empire PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472531213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Crises of Empire offers a comprehensive and uniquely comparative analysis of the history of decolonization in the British, French and Dutch empires. By comparing the processes of decolonization across three of the major modern empires, from the aftermath of the First World War to the late 20th century, the authors are able to analyse decolonization as a long-term process. They explore significant changes to the international system, shifting popular attitudes to colonialism and the economics of empire. This new edition incorporates the latest developments in the historiography, as well as: - Increased coverage of the Belgian and Portuguese empires - New introductions to each of the three main parts, offering some background and context to British, French and Dutch decolonization - More coverage of cultural aspects of decolonization, exploring empire 'from below' This new edition of Crises of Empire is essential reading for all students of imperial history and decolonization. In particular, it will be welcomed by those who are interested in taking a comparative approach, putting the history of decolonization into a pan-European framework.