This essay examines the intersecting histories of tourism, colonialism, and national identity during the interwar period It analyzes the 1931 Colonial Exposition, guidebooks to the colonies, and organized tours sponsored by the Touring Club de France to argue that French tourism helped to perform the ideological work of legitimizing the goals and ideology of Greater France While colonial tourism invited and propelled French people to travel to the colonies—whether on a simulated journey at the exposition, through the imagined geographies and cultures depicted in tourist guidebooks, or in actual travel to the colonies themselves—an important effect was to showcase "touristically relevant" sites and the pleasures of consumer-oriented evasion Hence, as demands for independence accelerated and were realized, the French tourist industry shed any mention of these destinations as part of the nation and represented the former colonies as exotic yet safe and culturally comfortable (ie, sufficiently "French") destinations

Une lecon des choses : Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France

Despite being central to the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been closed to researchers since the late 1960s and thus remains virtually unknown to scholarship. Based on long-term fieldwork, The Value of Disorder is an original and in-depth account of the area and its Tubu majority inhabitants. Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele examine trans-border connectivity and trade; civil war and rebellion; wealth creation and dispersal; labour and gender relations; and aspirations to moral autonomy in northern Chad from an internal point of view - a point of view that in turn participates in a dynamic process of regional interdependence. Vividly ethnographic, the book gives precedence to local categories of value, while asking broader questions about the nature of non-state regional political organisation. Questions that inform current political developments in the Sahara more widely, and have the potential to challenge key concepts in Saharan studies and the social sciences.

The Value of Disorder: Autonomy, Prosperity, and Plunder in the Chadian Sahara

“The Whole World Within Reach”: Travel Images without Borders

Tricks of the Trade

This article examines the migration of women for prostitution around the Mediterranean Sea, particularly to and within the Middle East and North Africa, in the interwar period. Reading League of Nations’ reports on traffic in women and children along with other published and archival sources, it situates women’s mobility within three significant waves of migration at the time: of south European men and women to Europe’s colonies in North Africa; of east European Jews westwards and southwards; and of Syrians outside of Mt. Lebanon. It shows how women’s migration can be explained and traced by following such temporary travelers as tourists, sailors, and soldiers and such more permanent migrants as settlers, refugees, and labor migrants. By using the category of migration, this article argues that “traffic in women” is insufficient as an analytical category in accounting for the geography of prostitution and prostitutes’ international mobility in the interwar Mediterranean.

Women's Migration for Prostitution in the interwar Middle East and North Africa

Le projet CEGETAF/CITRACIT, un grand projet touristique conceptualise et mis en place par Andre Citroen en 1924-1925, fut un echec total. Les hotels construits en plein Sahara furent revendus a l'armee sans avoir jamais servi a l'accueil des touristes automobiles pour lesquels ils etaient destines. Cependant, la conception et la mise en place de ce projet nous fournissent une etude de cas revelatrice des enjeux politiques et culturels d'une tentative de maitrise a la fois geographique et symbolique de l'espace colonial francais. Meme si la realisation de CITRACIT se revela trop ambitieuse, finalement, pour permettre une reussite dans les conditions existantes, son histoire courte nous revele la capacite de Citroen de s'emparer de la psychologie coloniale du moment. Mettant l'accent sur la rationalisation technique, plutot que militaire, de l'Empire, et y attachant une part de reve susceptible d'attirer un tourisme naissant, Citroen arriva a recevoir un soutien important de l'Etat francais pour son projet de liaisons automobiles a travers le Sahara. Le silence qui suivit l'annulation de ce projet prestigieux et son occultation complete par une autre mission Citroen de la meme epoque, la Croisiere noire, confirment egalement a quel point le capital symbolique attache a l'espace colonial pouvait etre facilement manipule selon les besoins metropolitains du moment, parce que la realite de l'Empire restait, pour la majorite du public francais, inconnue.

Alison Murray

Papers

Le tourisme Citroën au Sahara (1924-1925)