Visions and representations of french empire

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 77, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 701-721

  Jennings, Eric T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646697345     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/497721     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), 5.
2. See, e.g., Jacques Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisième République (Paris, 1954), 2:142.
3. See Raoul Girardet, L'idée coloniale en France, 1871-1962 (Paris, 1972);
4. Charles-Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris, 1978), 297-98.
5. This literature includes Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, 2000);
6. John Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1984),
7. and Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, 1986);
8. Antoinette Burton, "Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travelers in Fin-de-Siècle London," History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 127-46.
9. On French colonial themes in children's literature, see Philip Dine, "The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to Tintin," Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques 23, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 177-204;
10. and Ruth Carver Capasso, "La bibliothèque rose, Children, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France," French Review 77, no. 2 (December 2003): 274-85.
11. On colonial motifs in songs, see Claude Liauzu and Josette Liauzu, Quant on chantait les colonies: Colonisation et culture populaire de 1830 à nos jours (Paris, 2002);
12. and Alain Ruscio, ed., Que la France était belle au temps des colonies . . . Anthologie de chansons coloniales et exotiques françaises (Paris, 2001).
13. Frances Gouda, Colonial Practices in the Netherland Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), 194-236.
14. For some examples of exciting scholarship in this field, see Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, 1992);
15. Rikke Andreassen, "The 'Exotic' as Mass Entertainment: Denmark, 1878-1909," Race and Class 45, no. 2 (2003): 21-38;
16. and Deborah Kaspin, ed., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley, 2002).
17. The book contains many references to Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and James Clifford, in particular.
18. See Charles-Robert Ageron, "L'exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial," in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1984);
19. Frances Gouda, Colonial Practices, 194-236;
20. Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 14-33;
21. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 51-97;
22. Catherine Hodeir, "Être indigene aux expositions, Paris 1931, Paris 1937," in L'autre et nous: Scènes et types, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Stéphane Blanchoin, Nicolas Bancel, et al. (Paris, 1995), 157-62,
23. and "Decentering the Gaze at French Colonial Exhibitions," in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (Berkeley, 2002);
24. Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L'exposition coloniale, 1931 (Brussels, 1991);
25. Catherine Hodeir, Michel Pierre, and Syviane Leprun, "Les expositions colonials, discours et images," in Images et colonies, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Laurent Gervereau (Paris, 1993), 129-39;
26. and Elizabeth Ezra, "The Colonial Look: Exhibiting Empire in the 1930's," Contemporary French Civilization 19, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 33-47.
27. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995), 72-80.
28. The French and Vietnamese pejoratively called these highland minorities "Moï," meaning "savage" in Vietnamese.
29. While Mortem suggests that there were 30 million visitors, two of the other books under review speak of 8 million. This more plausible figure was advanced by Hodier and Pierre (L'exposition coloniale, 1931, 101), who drew it from a 1931 report on the exhibit. The report specified that 4 million visitors came from Paris and surroundings, 3 million from the provinces, and 1 million from abroad.
30. Ellen Furlough, "Une leçon des choses: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France," French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441-73.
31. Charles-Robert Ageron, "L'exposition coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impérial?" in Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, La République, 571.
32. Translation by Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 168.
33. Walter Langlois, André Malraux: The Indochina Adventure (New York, 1966).
34. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 1887-1954 (Copenhagen, 1995).
35. Norindr notes that these three feature films are some of the most expensive French productions of all time, featuring price tags of 25 to 30 million dollars apiece (133).
36. See, e. g., "Polémique sur l'histoire coloniale," in Manière de voir 58 (July-August 2001);
37. and Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Laurent Gervereau, Images et colonies (Paris, 1993).
38. The notable exception to this trend is Alice Bullard and Joël Dauphiné's chapter, which defines and contextualizes the term "Canaque" or "Kanak" (118 n. 2).
39. Young, Colonial Desire.
40. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Palo Alto, CA, 1976), 6, 485-96.
41. Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World's Fair (Albany, NY, 1998).
42. In July 1931, at the height of the Vincennes exhibit, the following colonial ministry circular was distributed: "Several energetic protests have reached the ministry complaining about the exhibition of natives from our overseas territories.... These spectacular exhibits, organized by private associations or even by individuals under the guise of colonial propaganda or the pretense of some humanitarian or philanthropic goal, constitute in reality commercial enterprises that too often bring out unhealthy curiosity in visitors. Aside from the effect of novelty, these shows (which, incidentally, display mostly inferior types of humanity) can offer no documentary or pedagogical interest whatsoever. They can only contribute to deforming, in the eyes of the crowds that rush to consume this diversion, the very goals of our civilizing mission in the colonies and discredit the results of our action.... I have thus decided henceforth to ban any recruitment of natives for such sorts of attractions." National Archives of Madagascar, Antananarivo, D 756 file on "Exhibitions d'indigènes, 1931." Translations mine throughout this article.
43. Jean Camp and André Corbier, A Lyauteyville: Promenade humoristique et sentimentale à travers l'exposition coloniale (Paris, 1931), 90-91.
44. Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (Hanoi, 1961), 2:53;
45. Michael Vann, "White City on the Red River: Race, Power and Culture in French Colonial Hanoi, 1872-1954" (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1999).
46. The best treatment of this revolt remains Stephen Ellis, The Rising of the Red Shawls: A Revolt in Madagascar, 1895-1899 (Cambridge, 1985).
47. Philip Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge, 1998), 177.
48. Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiers-mondismes: Colonisés et anticolonialistes en France, 1919-1939 (Paris, 1982), 99-136.
49. Marta Scroczynska's master's thesis, "Le Paria: Surveillance, the Politics of Exclusion, and Republicanism Betrayed" (University of Toronto, 2001), uses archival sources to follow the exporting of Le Paria to the colonies.
50. Clifford Rosenberg, "Republican Surveillance: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Police in Interwar Paris" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2000);
51. Clifford Rosenberg, "The Colonial Poli tics of Healthcare Provision in Interwar Paris," French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 637-68.
52. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 106-62.
53. Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895-1960 (Oxford, 1999).
54. Daniel Sherman had already shed light on "catalog" monuments in metropolitan France. Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999).
55. Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (London, 2005).
56. On the terrifying violence of the Voulet-Chanoine mission to Chad in 1899, see "La colonne infernale de Voulet-Chanoine," Le Monde, September 27, 1999;
57. and Colonel Klobb and Lieutenant Meynier, A la recherche de Voulet: Sur les traces sanglantes de la mission Afrique centrale (Paris, 2001).
58. Although it probably only became available after Slavin's book was in press, the following article would have shed further light on the filmed Citroën rallies that Slavin rightly describes as tourist promotion schemes (Slavin, 61): Alison Murray, "Le tourisme Citroën au Sahara, 1924-1925," Vingtième Siècle, Revue d'Histoire 68 (October-December 2000): 95-107.
59. Panivong Norindr, "(Post)Colonial Screens" (keynote address given at the conference "Indochina, India, and France: Cultural Representations," Newcastle, UK, September 6, 2003).
60. A group of essays published under the rubric "Food, Music, and Dance" in a recent volume edited by Martin Evans has begun to address some of these issues. See Erica Peters, "Indigestible Indochina: Attempts to Introduce Vietnamese Food in France during the Interwar Period";
61. Dana Hale, "The 'Ballet blanc et noir' : A Study of Racial and Cultural Identity during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition";
62. and Tom Cooper, '"Frenchmen in Disguise': French Musical Exoticism and Empire in the Nineteenth Century," in Martin Evans, ed., Empire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830-1940 (London, 2004).
63. White, Children;
64. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA, 1997);
65. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley, 2000);
66. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA, 1998).
67. To take only one example, a recent wave of very exciting dissertations has managed to bridge the gap between Southeast Asian and French history with respect to French colonial Indochina. See Vann, "White City";
68. Penny Edwards, "Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945" (PhD thesis, Monash University, 1999);
69. Søren Ivarsson, "Bringing Laos into Existence: Laos between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945" (PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen, 1999);
70. Erica Peters, "Negotiating Power through Everyday Practices in French Vietnam, 1880-1924" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000);
71. Agathe Larcher, "La légitimation française en Indochine: Mythes et réalités de la 'collaboration franco-vetnamienne' et du réformisme colonial" (PhD thesis, University of Paris VII, 2001);
72. David Del Testa, "Paint the Railroads Red: Labor, Nationalism and the Railroads in French Colonial Indochina, 1898-1945" (PhD thesis, University of California at Davis, 2001).
73. On metropolitan matters played out in the colonies, see, e.g., J. P. Daughton's outstanding thesis, which focuses on Madagascar, Tahiti, and Indochina: "The Civilizing Mission: Missionaries, Colonialists and French Identity, 1885-1914" (University of California at Berkeley, 2002).
74. On the reverse phenomenon, see the excellent work of Mali specialist Gregory Mann, "Immigrants and Arguments in France and West Africa," Comparative Studies of Society and History 45 (2003): 362-85.