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.

Empires of the Mind

Empires of the Mind PDF Author: Robert Gildea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715958X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea dissects the legacy of empire for the former colonial powers and their subjects.

Cultured Force

Cultured Force PDF Author: Barnett Singer
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299199005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Bridging gaps between intellectual history, biography, and military/colonial history, Barnett Singer and John Langdon provide a challenging, readable interpretation of French imperialism and some of its leading figures from the early modern era through the Fifth Republic. They ask us to rethink and reevaluate, pulling away from the usual shoal of simplistic condemnation. In a series of finely-etched biographical studies, and with much detail on both imperial culture and wars (including World War I and II), they offer a balanced, deep, strong portrait of key makers and defenders of the French Empire, one that will surely stimulate much historical work in the field.

The French Colonial Mind

The French Colonial Mind PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: France Overseas: Studies in Em
ISBN: 9780803238152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Volume 1: 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 mind-sets to illuminate the nature of French imperialism. The first of two linked volumes, this book brings 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. Volume 2: 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.

Beyond the Asylum

Beyond the Asylum PDF Author: Claire E. Edington
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173394X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

In this Remote Country

In this Remote Country PDF Author: Edward Watts
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807830461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Na

Beyond Papillon

Beyond Papillon PDF Author: Stephen A. Toth
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803244495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
A multilayered social and cultural analysis that focuses upon the will of civil society and the will of those who actually lived and worked in the bagne, or penal colony.

Vénus Noire

Vénus Noire PDF Author: Robin Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution

Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution PDF Author: Pascal Blanchard
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253010535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
This landmark collection by an international group of scholars and public intellectuals represents a major reassessment of French colonial culture and how it continues to inform thinking about history, memory, and identity. This reexamination of French colonial culture, provides the basis for a revised understanding of its cultural, political, and social legacy and its lasting impact on postcolonial immigration, the treatment of ethnic minorities, and national identity.

Decolonising the Mind

Decolonising the Mind PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0852555016
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu.

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa PDF Author: Andrew W.M. Smith
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911307746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
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.