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.

Debates about the legacy of colonialism in France are not new, but they have taken on new urgency in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Responding to acts of religious and racial violence in 2005, 2010, and 2015 and beyond, the essays in this volume pit French ideals against government-sponsored revisionist decrees that have exacerbated tensions, complicated the process of establishing and recording national memory, and triggered divisive debates on what it means to identify as French. As they document the checkered legacy of French colonialism, the contributors raise questions about France and the contemporary role of Islam, the banlieues, immigration, race, history, pedagogy, and the future of the Republic. This innovative volume reconsiders the cultural, economic, political, and social realities facing global French citizens today and includes contributions by Achille Mbembe, Benjamin Stora, Françoise Vergès, Alec Hargreaves, Elsa Dorlin, and Alain Mabanckou, among others.

What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.

France's Lost Empires brings together ten essays that collectively investigate the historical, cultural, and political legacies of French colonialism and, specifically, the endings of the French empire(s). Combining analyses of three "lost" territories (Canada, India, and Saint Dominigue) of the "first" French colonial empire, that of the Ancien Regime, with investigations of the decolonization of the "new" colonies of the "second" French overseas empire (specifically in North Africa), the essays presented here investigate the ways in whicih colonial loss has been absorbed and narrativized within French culture and society, and how nostalgia for that past has played a fundamental role in shaping French colonial discourses and memories. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution and its historicization during the 1820s and ending with an examination of the "postcolonial" republic at the end of the twentieth century, the chronological structure of the volume serves to reveal the extent to which the memories of territorial loss have been sustained throughout French colonial history and remain evident in current metropolitan representations and memories of empire. In analyzing the longevity of these tropes of loss and nostalgia, and their importance in shaping France's identity as a colonial power both during and after periods of colonization, France's Lost Empires reveals a basic premise: it is not simply successful conquest which creates a self-validating colonial discourse; failure can do so too. Indeed, the pervasive and tenacious nostalgia for past colonial glories, variously identified by the contributors to this volume, suggests that, for some, the emotional attachment to France's colonies has not waned and remians today as it was in nineteenth-century France.

The study examines cultural effects of various colonial systems of government in the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean in a little investigated period of transition: from the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1789–1886). The comparison of cultural transfer processes by means of literary production from and about the Caribbean, embedded in a broader context of the circulation of culture and knowledge deciphers the different transculturations of European discourses in the colonies as well as the repercussions of these transculturations on the motherland’s ideas of the colonial other: The loss of a culturally binding centre in the case of the Spanish colonies – in contrast to France’s strong presence and binding force – is accompanied by a multirelationality which increasingly shapes hispanophone Caribbean literature and promotes the pursuit for political independence.The book provides necessary revision to the idea that the 19th-century Caribbean can only be understood as an outpost of the European metropolises. Examining the kaleidoscope of the colonial Caribbean opens new insights into the early processes of cultural globalisation and questions our established concept of a genuine western modernity. Updated and expanded translation of Die koloniale Karibik. Transferprozesse in hispanophonen und frankophonen Literaturen, De Gruyter (mimesis 53), 2012

This study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Providing case studies from four parts of the French empire, the book draws on illustrative evidence from the French archives in Aix-en-Provence and Paris as well as local archives in each colonial location. The case studies, in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, each examine building projects to show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. Building the French empire gives a view of the French overseas empire in the early modern period not as a consequence or an outgrowth of Eurocentric state-building, but rather as the result of a globally interconnected process of empire-building.