Colonial Aphasia: Race and disabled histories in France

Public Culture

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 121-156

  Stoler, Ann Laura ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955923200     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2010-018     Document Type: Article

References (232)

1. This essay references only the U.S. scholarship on French empire, a field that too has exploded in the past decade, where it is directly related to my argument. While it would make sense to examine the circulation between French colonial historians in the United States and France for a comprehensive review of this literature, that is not my subject here.
2. For a fine English-language review of what Henry Rousso called the "Vichy syndrome," see Rosemarie Scullion, "Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23 (1999): 11 - 26.
3. Examples of the use of "amnesia" and "forgetting" are many.
4. See, e.g., Helene Champagne, "Breaking the Ice: A Burgeoning Post-colonial Debate on France's Historical Amnesia and Contemporary 'Soul Searching,' "Modern and Contemporary France 16, no. 1 (2008): 67 - 72.
5. André Gide, Voyage au Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).
6. There were many others I do not quote here. For a history of French "anticolonial" writing and the different forms it took, see Jean-Pierre Biondi and Gilles Morin, Les anticolonialistes, 1881 - 1962 (Paris: Laffont, 1992).
7. This article's epigraph is taken from an unfinished essay, titled "The Need for Roots," that Weil was writing just before her death in 1943 and is quoted from Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, ed. and trans. J. P. Little (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 124.
8. Henri Alleg, La question (Paris: Minuit, 1961).
9. La gangrène (Paris: Minuit, 1959).
10. The book was seized and banned in France by the government and subsequently translated by Robert Silvers and published in English as The Gangrene (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960).
11. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, "Guerre et mutation sociale en Algérie," Études méditerranéennes 7 (1960): 25 - 37.
12. Bourdieu, "Les sous-prolétaires algériens," Les temps modernes 199 (1962): 1030 - 51.
13. Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
14. Anne Mathieu, "Jean-Paul Sartre et la guerre d'Algérie: Un engagement déterminé contre le colonialisme," Le monde diplomatique, November 2004, 31 - 32.
15. Abdelmajid Hannoum, "The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once Became French," History and Anthropology 19 (2008): 92.
16. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially 1 - 9.
17. See Anne Donadey, "Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-membering the Fractures of Colonial History," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23 (1999): 111 - 16.
18. See also Todd Shepard's excellent study, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).
19. Especially "Forgetting French Algeria," 101-35.
20. Benoit de L'Estoile, "L'oubli de l'héritage colonial," Le débat 147 (November-December 2007): 91 - 99.
21. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 8 - 9.
22. David Swinney, "Aphasia," in The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 31 - 32.
23. Jonathan D. Rohrer, William D. Knight, Jane E. Warren, Nick C. Fox, Martin N. Rossor, and Jason D. Warren, "Word-Finding Difficulty: A Clinical Analysis of the Progressive Aphasias," Human Molecular Genetics, at http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/1/8.full (accessed October 7, 2009).
24. "Aphasia," Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia (accessed October 15, 2009).
25. Harold Goodglass, Understanding Aphasia (San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1993).
26. The Free Dictionary, s.v., "aphasia," medical-dictionary. thefree dictionary.com/aphasia (accessed November 3, 2010).
27. For special issues of journals devoted to these questions see "Réflexions sur la postcolonie," Rue Descartes 58 (2007).
28. "La question postcoloniale," Hérodote 120 (2006).
29. "Postcolonialisme et immigration," Contretemps 16 (2006).
30. "Pour comprendre la pensée postcoloniale," Esprit, December 2006.
31. "Empire et colonialité du pouvoir," Multitudes 26 (2006).
32. "Relectures d'histoires colonials," Cahiers d'histoire 99 (2006).
33. "Qui a peur du postcolonial? Dénis et controverses," Mouvements des idées et des luttes 51 (2007).
34. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944 - 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 174 - 75, 179 - 89, 282 - 88, 330-31.
35. To gain some sense of the intensity of the responses to this law and the range of those who mobilized against it, see "Un appel à l'abrogation de la loi du 23 février 2005, initié par la LDH et rendu public le 13 avril 2005" and the archived articles available at www.ldh-toulon.net/article.php3?id_article=592 (accessed January 10, 2006).
36. Philippe Bernard and Catherine Rollot, "Les interrogations des manuels scolaires," Le monde dossières et documents 357 (2006): 1.
37. Claude Liauzu, "Une loi contre l'histoire," Le monde diplomatique, April 2005.
38. Sandrine Lemaire, "Une loi qui vient de loin," Le monde diplomatique, January 2006.
39. Julio Godoy, "Recasting Colonialism as a Good Thing," July 5, 2005, Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2005/0705empgood.htm.
40. As reported in the international press, see "France Orders Positive Spin on Colonialism," Associated Press, October 21, 2005, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/148.html.
41. Among the many who have since written about the proposed law and the controversies around it, see Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d'empire: La controverse autour du "fait colonial" (Paris: Croquant, 2006).
42. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l'histoire coloniale (Marseille: Agone, 2009).
43. Robert Aldrich, "Colonial Past, Post-colonial Present: History Wars French-Style," in History Australia 3, no. 1 (2006): 14.1 - 14.10.
44. Riva Kastoryano also notes that "nothing is new with the last riots in France, they just lasted longer.".
45. Riva Kastoryano, "Territories of Identities in France," Riots in France, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Kastoryano (accessed October 22, 2006).
46. James Graff, "Why Paris Is Burning," Time, November 2, 2005, at www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1125401,00.html.
47. Eric Maurin, Le ghetto français: Enquête su le séparatisme social (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
48. Étienne Balibar, "Uprisings in the 'Banlieues,' "Constellations 14 (2007): 60, 48.
49. For an ongoing discussion of responses to the 2005 events in the banlieues and critiques of these responses, see www.ldh-toulon.net.
50. Among others, Achille Mbembe's response, "La république et sa bête," http://www.ldh-toulon.net/spip.php?article971 (accessed January 8, 2010).
51. See also Theodore Dalrymple, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris," City Journal 12 (2002), www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html.
52. Rémy Herrera, "Three Moments of the French Revolt," Monthly Review 58 (2006), www.monthlyreview.org/1005herrera.htm.
53. The emergence of anglophone colonial studies has been recounted many times by French scholars in recent years, and there is no need to do so here.
54. For one version, see Marie-Claude Smouts, ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les "postcolonial studies" dans le débat français (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007).
55. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 41.
56. Paul A. Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault, "Postcolonial Urban Apartheid," SSRC, Items and Issues 5 (2006): 8 - 15.
57. Alec G. Hargreaves, "An Emperor with No Clothes?" Riots in France, SSRC, riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Hargreaves (accessed October 22, 2006).
58. Loïc Wacquant, "L'état incendiaire face aux banlieues en feu," Combats face au sida: Santé drogue société 42 (2005), www.combatenligne.fr/article/?id=589.
59. Didier Fassin, "Riots in France and Silent Anthropologists," Anthropology Today 22 (2006): 1 - 3.
60. See the movement's 2005 manifesto, "Nous sommes les Indigènes de la république!" www.indigene-republique.org/spip.php?article1 (accessed May 14, 2006).
61. See Mbembe, "La république et sa bête.".
62. See, for example, Nirmal Purwar, "Sensing a Post-colonial Bourdieu: An Introduction," Sociological Review 57, no. 3 (2009): 371-84.
63. Tassadit Yacine, "Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War: Notes on the Birth of an Engaged Ethnosociology," Ethnography 5, no. 4 (2009): 487-509.
64. See Sudeep Dasgupta's interview with Jacques Rancière, June 2, 2008, at http://ranciere/blogspot.com/2008/06/sudeep-dasgupata-interviews-jacques.html (accessed October 24, 2009).
65. Jacques Rancière, "Racism, a Passion from Above," at http://www.mediapart.fr/node/92825 (accessed October 24, 2010).
66. Among the many books published in the late 1980s and 1990s on the rhetoric of the Front National and the appeal of Le Pen's "national preference," see Pierre Jouve and Ali Magoudi, Les dits et les non-dits de Jean-Marie Le Pen (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
67. Pascal Perrineau, Le symptôme Le Pen (Paris: Fayard, 1997).
68. Hubert Huertas, FN: Made in France (Paris: Autres Temps, 1997).
69. Harvey Simmons, The French National Front (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
70. Ann Laura Stoler, "Racist Visions for the Twenty-First Century: On the Cultural Politics of the French Radical Right," in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002), 108.
71. An earlier version of that paper was given as the keynote address for the "Making History, Constructing Race" conference at the University of Victoria in May 1999.
72. See Pierre Tevanian and Sylvie Tissot, Mots à maux: Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits (Paris: Dagorno, 1998).
73. See also Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, ed., La république mise à nu par son immigration (Paris: La Fabrique, 2006).
74. Michel Foucault, "Society Must be Defended": The Lectures at the Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
75. George Balandier, "The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach" (1951), in Immanuel Wallerstein, ed., Social Change: The Colonial Situation (New York: Wiley, 1966), 38, 45.
76. Alfred Métraux, "Race and Civilization," UNESCO Courier 3, nos. 6 - 7 (1950): 8.
77. Bronislaw Malinowski, "Dynamics of Culture Change" (1946), reprinted in Wallerstein, Social Change, 14 - 15.
78. Michel Leiris, "L'ethnographe devant le colonialism," Les Temps Modernes 58 (1950), reprinted in his Cinq études d'ethnologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 85.
79. Among the most prominent of these exceptions was Claude Meillassoux, who in 1958 - 59, under Balandier's supervision, undertook a six-month collective research project in central Côte d'Ivoire that dealt in part with the "most profound" effects of a "particularly brutal" policy of dispossession and "regroupement" of the Gouro ethnic group that was carried out under French colonial rule in 1928 and destroyed 3,271 settlements in one district alone. As Meillassoux wrote at the time, their study of change worked off the descriptive (if not the interpretive) ethnographic baseline offered by Louis Tauxier in 1924, carried out "only eleven years after the conquest.".
80. See Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d'Ivoire (Paris: Mouton, 1964), 9.
81. Georges Balandier, "The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach" (1951), reprinted in Wallerstein, Social Change, 45.
82. Originally published as "La situation colonial: Approche théorique," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44 - 79.
83. See Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1 - 56.
84. Marxism, which in some strands of U.S. and British anthropology generated an intensive turn in the 1970s and early 1980s to ethnographic histories of the "colonial legacies" that shaped the world capitalist system, had a wholly different career in France, where it was called on more often to query theories of exchange, class, and social evolution.
85. See, e.g., Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and Primitive Societies (New York: Monthly Review, 1972).
86. Maurice Godelier, Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie (Paris: Maspéro, 1973).
87. David Seddon, ed., Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology (London: Frank Cass, 1978).
88. Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
89. "Je ne vais pas faire une sorte de bilan masochiste mais je dirai que j'ai appris à mon compte, à mon débit et avec peine d'une certain manière que la présence B l'Histoire n'est pas une presence facile, qu'elle coute de l'effort, qu'elle coute de la désillusion, qu'elle coute des désenchantements, mais qu'elle contrainte à continuer, à 'faire.' ".
90. Une anthropologie des moments critiques: Entretien avec Georges Balandier (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1996), 8.
91. I thank Janet Roitman for helping me think through the subtleties of Balandier's phrasing.
92. Michel Foucault, "For an Ethics of Discomfort," in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 135 - 45.
93. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
94. One such personal account that became a public event and an opportunity to express shocked ignorance and innocence by those who read it was General Paul Aussaresses's newspaper interview in 2001 and subsequent best-selling book describing his participation in systematic torture of Algerians during the Algerian war - and, more important, his defense of the torture tactics he and others used.
95. See "L'accablante confession du général Aussaresses sur la torture en Algérie," Le Monde, May 3, 2001.
96. "Les aveux du général Aussaresses réveillent les cauchemars des anciens d'Algérie," Le Monde, May 21, 2001.
97. Others, such as General Maurice Schmitt, ancien chef d'état-major des armées (former chief of staff of the armed forces), pronounced several years later that the accusation of torture used in Algeria was "pure affabulation" (pure fabrication).
98. See "Le général Schmitt nie toute torture à Alger en aôut 1957," Le Monde, March 22, 2005.
99. Albert Camus, Chronique algériennes, 1939 - 1958 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002): 28.
100. Marguerite Duras, Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes (Paris: POL, 2006).
101. Duras, The Sea Wall, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), 135 - 36.
102. Bourdieu, Images d'Algérie.
103. See, e.g., Tassadit Yacine, "Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War: Notes on the Birth of an Engaged Ethnosociology," Ethnography 5 (2004): 487 - 509.
104. Enrique Martin-Criado, Les deux Algéries de Pierre Bourdieu (Bellecombe-en-Bauges, France: Croquant, 2008).
105. Paul A. Silverstein and Jane E. Goodman, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
106. Silverstein and Goodman, too, note, The theoretical constructs that Bourdieu developed in [his] work, most notably, habitus, misrecognition, and symbolic domination... have entered the mainstream of social thought independently of the North African and French political and social contexts in which they were initially developed.... the colonial location of [his] work is nearly impossible to discern from the Outline [of a Theory of Practice], the primary ethnographic study in which the notion of habitus was brought to maturity. (Bourdieu in Algeria, 1 - 2).
107. Among the trenchant interventions on this subject, see those already cited.
108. For a brief discussion of the "forgotten history" of Muslims in Algeria, see Patrick Weil, Liberté, egalité, discriminations: L'identité au regard de l'histoire (Paris: Grasset, 2008), 151 - 58.
109. Daniel Lefeuvre claims that the turn to the colonial past has been embraced as a "repentant" gesture alone in his Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).
110. Marc Ferro, Le livre noir du colonialisme, XVIe - XXIe siècle: De l'extermination à la repentance (Paris: Robert Laffront, 2003).
111. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's review of it in Cahiers d'études africaines 44 (173-74): 455 - 63.
112. Benjamin Stora offers his sharpest critique of what cannot be claimed to be "new" or "forgotten," in his La guerre des mémoires: La France face à son passé colonial (Paris: L'Aube, 2007).
113. On colonial citizenship demands, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787 - 1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
114. See Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La république coloniale: Essai sur une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).
115. That unease is reflected in an essay by Emmanuelle Saada, who argues for "a better understanding of what colonial relations were and a need to make those results available to those whose personal and family histories have been marked by colonization.".
116. Emmanuelle Saada, "Il faut distinguer travail historique et positions militantes," Le Monde, January 21, 2006.
117. See Bertrand, Memoires d'empire.
118. Jean-François Bayart, "Les études postcoloniales: Une invention politique de la tradition?" Societés politiques comparées 14 (2009): 11.
119. See also Saada, "Il faut distinguer travail historique et positions militantes.".
120. See Jean-Francois Bayart, in this volume, 65.
121. Bayart, "Les études postcoloniales," 7, 15.
122. Rada Ivekovic, "Langue colonial, langue globale, langue locale," Rue Descartes 58, no. 4 (2007): 29.
123. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et l'état colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005).
124. I take that term from Thomas Brudholm, Resentment's Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusal to Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
125. Vincent Crapanzano, "From Anger to Outrage: The Harki Case," Anthropologie et sociétés 32, no. 3 (2008): 126.
126. See "La recidive: Sarkozy invite 'ceux qui n'aiment pas la France' à partir," June 24, 2006, www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2008).
127. "La recidive: Sarkozy invite 'ceux qui n'aiment pas la France' à partir," June 24, 2006, www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2008).
128. See the outpouring of responses to Sarkozy's comments, most notably, Achille Mbembe, "Nicolas Sarkozy's Africa," www.africaresource.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=376:a-critique-of-nicolas -sarkozy& catid=36:essays-a-discussions& Itemid=346 (accessed December 29, 2007.
129. Other responses can be found at www.liberation.fr/rebonds/discoursdesarkozydakar.
130. For the full French text of Sarkozy's speech, see www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print/79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2009).
131. Ann Laura Stoler, "Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination," Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191 - 219.
132. At www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print/79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2009).
133. François Cusset, La décennie: Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 104.
134. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 108.
135. For a discussion of Sartre's understanding of the politics of mauvaise foi (bad faith), see Ann Laura Stoler, "Imperial Dispositions of Disregard," in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 237-78.
136. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900 - 1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 57.
137. Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français: Histoire de l'immigration, XIXe - XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 16.
138. Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe - XXe siècle): Discours publics, humiliations privées (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 16.
139. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15.
140. Lazreg offers an assiduously documented analysis of the militarization of the French colonial state and torture not as an "epiphenomenon" but as an explicit and central feature of policy.
141. Achille Mbembe, personal communication with the author, November 6, 2009. I thank Achille Mbembe for making this point to me and for referring me to Jospin's speech.
142. On Papon's trial and his defense attorney's efforts to have the American historian Robert O. Paxton's testimony struck from the record as "irrelevant," see "Robert Paxton donne une accablante leçon d'histoire," L'Humanité, November 1, 1997.
143. See François Maspéro, "Les mensonges grossiers de M. Papon," in Ratonnade à Paris, by Paulette Peju (Paris: Maspéro, 1961), 195 - 200.
144. Maspéro's postface originally appeared in Le Monde, February 24, 1990.
145. Sartre's attempt to publish a piece on the "pogrom" in Les temps modernes was blocked by Papon, who had the volume seized.
146. See Charles Masters, "Papon 'Ordered Secret Paris Massacre of 1961,' "Sunday Times (London), October 12, 1997, www.fantompowa.net/Flame/algerians_sunday_times.htm.
147. This is not because historians had no access to this information. World War II - period departmental and national archives became available in the 1990s.
148. See Marc Bernardot, Camps d'étrangers (Paris: Croquant, 2008), 51n15.
149. Jacques Duquesne, "Torture en Algérie: Un témoignage inédit," L'Express, November 30, 2000, 56 - 61.
150. Maurice T. Maschino, "L'histoire expurgée de la guerre d'Algérie," Le monde diplomatique, February 2001, 8 - 9.
151. Maschino, "L'histoire expurgée de la guerre d'Algérie," 8.
152. Among his many efforts to rewrite that history, see Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
153. Stora, Le transfert d'une mémoire: De "l'Algérie française" au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: La Découverte, 1999).
154. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
155. Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 5.
156. Arif Dirlik placed the onus elsewhere, attributing the surge to the increased presence of self-identified postcolonial intellectuals in England and the United States seeking to "constitute the world in [their own] self-image.".
157. See Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 329.
158. Indochine, directed by Regis Wargnier (Paradis Films, France, 1992).
159. L'amant, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Films A2, France, 1992).
160. Didier Fassin, "Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France," Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005): 362 - 87.
161. Swinney, "Aphasia," 31 - 32.
162. Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," in Studies in Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 121.
163. Emmanuel Todd, Le destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
164. Nancy Green, "Le Melting-Pot: Made in America, Produced in France," Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1205.
165. Green writes that "there is one category that has been conspicuously absent from most French discourses about minorities: race.".
166. Green, "Le Melting-Pot," 1205.
167. Green, "Le Melting-Pot," 1205.
168. Caché, directed by Michael Haneke (Les Films du Losange, France, 2005).
169. See the following reviews of Caché: Jake Meaney, January 27, 2006, www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/movie_review/cache.htm.
170. Bill Long, "Living (and Dying) with Our Secrets," May 1, 2006, www.drbilllong.com/CurrentEventsVII/Cache.html.
171. Wesley Morris, "'Cache' Keeps Its Secrets Brilliantly," January 13, 2006, www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie@id=8349.
172. Faizan Rashid, "Dubai Film Festival 2005, Day 4: Cache," movies.theemiratesnetwork.com/diff/2005/review.php?mv=REVIEW-1164 (accessed April 24, 2007).
173. Kevin Yeoman, April 17, 2006, www.thecelebritycafe.com/reviews/cache.
174. Noiriel, French Melting Pot, 3.
175. Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 4 vols., vol. 2, La nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1984 - 86) 275 - 319.
176. After a public exchange between Noiriel and Nora on the absence of any reference to immigrants in either of these first two volumes, Nora invited Noiriel to contribute an essay to the third volume (a decade after the first two appeared).
177. See Gérard Noiriel, "Français et étrangers," in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (condensed version) (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 2:2433 - 65.
178. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3.
179. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, personal communication with the author, New York, May 2001.
180. Pierre Nora, Les Français d'Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1961).
181. Charles-André Julien, introduction to Nora, Les Français d'Algérie, 8 - 9.
182. Nora, Les Français d'Algérie, 83.
183. Sigmund Freud, Contribution à la conception des aphasies (1891; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 51, 61.
184. I thank the psychiatrist and anthropologist Richard Rechtmann for discussing aphasia with me.
185. For an incisive use of Freud's notion of "denial" with reference to race in France, see Didier Fassin, "Du déni a la dénégation: Psychologie politique de la représentation des discriminations," in De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française, ed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 133 - 57.
186. A similar argument - that French colons were not really French - informs Charles-André Julien, preface to Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution Française et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1961).
187. In his preface to Toussaint Louverture, published in the same year as Nora's Les Français d'Algérie, Julien notes that the "préjugés racistes" of white habitants in Saint-Domingue were those of men who "did not transport their patrie on the soles of their shoes," men who spoke of Louis XVI not as "their sovereign 'but' with the same indifference they would have to a foreign prince.".
188. Julien, preface to Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 9.
189. See Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain's National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940 - 1944 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
190. Hee Jung Ko, "Nazis in the French-Indochina War: The Vichy Syndrome and the Politics of Memory" (paper delivered at the "Mass Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia" conference, University of California, Berkeley, March 2001).
191. I thank Ko for sharing with me this part of her dissertation in progress.
192. Philippe Arnoulz de Pirey, "Operation-Gachis," Les temps modernes 92 (July l953): 100.
193. Quoted in Ko, "Nazis in the French-Indochina War," 21.
194. Ko, "Nazis in the French-Indochina War," 23.
195. On the part Vichy played in colonial politics, see Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 141 - 49.
196. With respect to labor policy in French colonial Africa, Cooper notes that Vichy ideology "had a longer life than Vichy's four years," with "considerable overlap in personnel as well as ideas" (142).
197. For a more comprehensive study of Vichy's colonial politics, see Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics.
198. For earlier efforts to make these connections, on Vichy's unrealized program to stage a "revival of France through maritime and colonial resources, alongside a great continental Germany," see Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940 - 1944 (New York: Norton, 1972), 114.
199. On implementation of the Jewish quota system in 1941, in which the French Ministry of Colonies, like other ministries, voiced "no objections," see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1983), 125.
200. Green, "Le Melting-Pot," 1205.
201. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
202. Especially "Toward a Genealogy of Racisms: The 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France," 55 - 94.
203. Michel Foucault, "Faire vivre et laisser mourir: La naissance du racisme," Les temps modernes 535 (1991): 37 - 61.
204. Michel Foucault, "Il faut défendre la société": Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997).
205. "Michel Foucault: De la guerre des races au biopouvoir," ed. Yves Charles Zarka, special issue, Cités: Philosophe, politique, histoire 2 (2000): 9 - 96.
206. Penser avec Michel Foucault: Théorie critique et pratiques politiques, ed. Marie-Christine Granjon (Paris: Karthala, 2005).
207. Foucault, "Il faut défendre la société," 53.
208. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008): 142.
209. Serguei Oushakine, "In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia: Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia," Europe-Asia Studies 52 (2000): 991 - 1016.
210. The discussion of symbolic substitution is from an e-mail exchange with Oushakine on the similarities and differences we found in our use of aphasia, August 26, 2001. I thank him for allowing me to quote from our correspondence.
211. Fassin and Fassin, De la question sociale à la question raciale.
212. See in particular Étienne Balibar, "Y a-t-il un 'neo-racisme'?" in Race, nation, classe: Les identités ambiguës, by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (Paris: La Découverte, 1988), 27 - 41.
213. Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 191 - 204, originally delivered in 1988 at the New School for Social Research.
214. Balibar, "Le droit de cité ou l'apartheid," in Sans-papiers: L'archaïsme fatal, by Étienne Balibar, Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, and Emmanuel Terray (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 89 - 116.
215. All the essays in Balibar, Droit de cité: Culture et politique en démocratie (Paris: L'Aube, 1998).
216. Balibar has been among the few to draw on both Marx and Foucault to distinguish between the state's imposition of sécurité (security) and popular entitlements to civic sûreté (safety) and thereby to underscore how much that distinction determines from whom French "society must be defended" today.
217. On that distinction see Balibar, Droit de cité, 29.
218. See, e.g., Dominique Vidal, "Casser l'apartheid à la française," Le monde diplomatique, December 2005, 20 - 21.
219. Balibar, Droit de cité, 24.
220. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
221. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 10.
222. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. James Harkness (New York: Vintage, 1994).
223. The French text reads, Il paraît que certains aphasiques... forment, en cet espace uni où les choses normalement se distribuent et se nomment, une multiplicité de petits domaines grumeleux et fragmentaires où des ressemblances sans nom agglutinent les choses en ilôts discontinus.... Mais à peine esquissés, tous ces groupements se défont, car la plage d'identité qui les soutient, aussi étroite qu'elle soit, est encore trop étendue pour n'être pas instable; et à l'infini, le malade rassemble et sépare, entasse les similitudes diverses, ruine les plus évidentes, disperse les identités, superpose les critères différents, s'agite, recommence, s'inquiète et arrive finalement au bord de l'angoisse.
224. (Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 10).
225. Fernando Coronil, "After Empire: Reflections on Imperialism from the Américas," in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 245.
226. Emmanuel Terray, Face aux abus de mémoire (Paris: Actes Sud, 2006).
227. Terray, Face aux abus de mémoire, 43.
228. See Achille Mbembe, "Décoloniser les structures psychiques du pouvoir," Mouvements 51 (2007): 142 - 55.
229. Stoler, "Imperial Debris.".
230. Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (New York: Semiotexte(e), 1997), 32.
231. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson, (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 12 - 13.
232. For a trenchant analysis of the creation of "the immigration problem" in France and Europe more broadly, see Eric Fassin, "L'immigration, un 'problème' si commode," Le monde diplomatique, November 2009, 22.