Europe after Empire is a pioneering comparative history of European decolonization from the formal ending of empires to the postcolonial European present. Elizabeth Buettner charts the long-term development of post-war decolonization processes as well as the histories of inward and return migration from former empires which followed. She shows that not only were former colonies remade as a result of the path to decolonization: so too was Western Europe, with imperial traces scattered throughout popular and elite cultures, consumer goods, religious life, political formations, and ideological terrains. People were also inwardly mobile, including not simply Europeans returning 'home' but Asians, Africans, West Indians, and others who made their way to Europe to forge new lives. The result is a Europe fundamentally transformed by multicultural diversity and cultural hybridity and by the destabilization of assumptions about race, culture, and the meanings of place, and where imperial legacies and memories live on.

Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture

This book is an original and sophisticated historical interpretation of contemporary French political culture. Until now, there have been few attempts to understand the political consequences of the profound geopolitical, intellectual and economic changes that France has undergone since the 1970s. However, Emile Chabal's detailed study shows how passionate debates over citizenship, immigration, colonial memory, the reform of the state and the historiography of modern France have galvanised the French elite and created new spaces for discussion and disagreement. Many of these debates have coalesced around two political languages - republicanism and liberalism - both of which structure the historical imagination and the symbolic vocabulary of French political actors. The tension between these two political languages has become the central battleground of contemporary French politics. It is around these two poles that politicians, intellectuals and members of France's vast civil society have tried to negotiate the formidable challenges of ideological uncertainty and a renewed sense of global insecurity.

A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France

This dissertation aims to put forward a thorough reflection on contemporary processes of identity constructions, both individual and collective, which are criss-crossed by experiences of migration inscribed within the Mediterranean space, which I consider in its heterogeneity. Through two specific case studies, approached from a comparative and gender perspective, I look at subjects who understand themselves as tied to (physical and symbolic) experiences of displacement claim fluid subjectivities. The works by Najat El Hachmi (Beni Sidel, 1979) and Dalila Kerchouche (Bias, 1973) present different factual dimensions and textual fabrics and are of a polyphonic nature. Because they pay attention to the multi-layered consequences that enfold from population movements, their nuanced considerations represent a precious guideline of sorts in understanding the syncretic fabric that shapes our world. I use the literary texts produced by these two authors of Maghrebi origin who grew up in Europe in order to filter my analyses, for I believe that the attentive regard that literature enables is of great value when it comes to problematizing rigid understandings of identity. Both El Hachmi and Kerchouche inherited an experience of migration, initiated by their fathers, that led them to embody and undertake different interstitial positions in Catalonia and France, where they respectively live. In their works, they dwell on all these “inbetween” positions that they, as writers, and the characters that they portray occupy. To do so, they use autobiographical essays first and, later on, fiction in order to delve into inherited cultural traditions, to contest clear-cut identity labels, and to explore the languages and experiences that have shaped their subjectivities. I thus read these texts as the tools that the authors use to enter into a dialogical relationship with their European societies, societies that, I argue, perceive them as an immigrant (in El Hachmi’s case) and as a harki (in the case of Kerchouche). As such, I critically consider El Hachmi’s and Kerchouche’s works as literary products and also as political artefacts that bespeak the authors’s agency. The thesis is divided into two sections, “In Between Labels” and “In Between Languages, Memories and Spaces” –each containing two chapters–, which account for the different elements playing a part in the construction of their individual and collective identities –a concept, that of identity, that I approach using epistemological cues borrowed from several disciplines, mainly those of postcolonial studies and the decolonial school, as I explain in the Introduction. In Catalonia and in France, El Hachmi and Kerchouche, and their characters, are encouraged to identify themselves as part of the societal tissue of these spaces. However, their belonging is hampered by the fact that they are perceived through the aforementioned “labels” of immigrant and harki, categorizations that place them in the terrain of alterity. At the same time, the familial communities of the authors and their characters want them to understand themselves in connection with their Maghrebi origins, which are differently nuanced in each of the cases. El Hachmi and Kerchouche have found in the literary space a mode of dwelling and a felicitous way to conflate the languages, cultural traditions and memories with which they interact. They use the written page to inscribe the imaginaries that conform them, which have to do with experiences that are traversed by manifold silences –connected with the Franco-Algerian war and its aftermath, in the context epitomised by Kerchouche. In such gestures of inscription the authors not only create ties of belonging within the communities they identify with but also put forward historical rewritings and countermemories that aim at contesting the hegemonic historical discourses that, in Europe, disavow the subjects conceived as immigrants or harkis. Ultimately, the intricate works by El Hachmi and Kerchouche studied in this thesis, whose rich intertextuality I put in dialogue with the theorizations of authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, Homi K. Bhabha or Helene Cixous, galvanize us to understand subjectivities as hybrid and fluid; always in process of translation, always “wounded” and hence open to the incorporation of enriching difference.

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Writing the In-Between: Transmediterranean Identity Constructions in the Works of Najat El Hachmi and Dalila Kerchouche

(i): The first part of this thesis questions the concept of ‘minority’, and the way it has been used to analyze French imperial policy in Syria (‘divide and rule’). Chapter 1 traces the concept’s emergence, showing that it is not self-evidently valid but rather depends on a set of wider social and political circumstances related to the existence of modern nation-states: the minorities of modern Syria cannot be mapped directly back onto the Ottoman millets or religious communities. Chapter 2 examines the term’s application in Syria between the wars: French imperial policy emphasised divisions in Syrian society, but the term ‘minority’ was only systematically attached to these divisions from the 1930s. The concept’s spread in Syria reflects its growing importance in international public discourse worldwide, as the nation-state became the standard state form after World War One. The second part of the thesis uses case studies of particular themes to show how the emergence of minorities illuminates processes of state-formation that have shaped the modern world. Chapters 3 and 4, on the question of ‘separatism’ and the definition of modern Syria’s northern border, examine the spread of effective state authority across a ‘national’ territory. This process bound culturally-divergent populations more tightly into the fabric of a centrally-controlled state, thereby constituting them as ‘minorities’. Chapter 5 examines the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty leading to Syrian independence, showing that this made the recently-established body of international law on ‘minorities’ in newly-independent states applicable to Syria: the term only became widespread in Syria at this time. Chapter 6 looks at French efforts to reform personal status law in the later 1930s, when the restructuring, on religious lines, of the institutional relationship between the Syrian state and its population created a new uniformity within communities at the national level (one condition for their developing the sense of being ‘minorities’). It also sparked opposition from groups now claiming to represent the ‘majority’. Other Syrians, though, understood their society in different terms.

The nation-state form and the emergence of ‘minorities’ in French mandate Syria, 1919-1939

In this study, I examine images of the black female and black male body and the female Spanish Gypsy by four artists – Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – that articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1862 and 1900. Notably, whiteness – made visible and raced – is also implicated in some of the images I analyze. I look closely at the visual stereotype of the seductive, dark-skinned female Spanish Gypsy and the primitive and debased black male, as well as at representations of the abject black female body. I also consider the construction of “whiteness” as an unfixed and complex notion of French identity, particularly as it applies to the bourgeois white female body. I analyze images in which representations of racial identity seem unproblematic, but I show that these images articulate a host of uncertainties. I contextualize each image through analyses of nineteenth-century French representations of the black person and Spanish Gypsy by modernist and academic artists, nineteenth-century racialist science, French fiction and periodicals, and entertainment spectacles such as the circus and human zoos. My methodology draws primarily on formalism, social history, and postcolonial and feminist theory. In my examination of representations of racial difference in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists and natural scientists to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the discourses on racial hierarchies and classifications. I explore nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity through the emerging science of anthropology, but I also expand my study to interrogate

Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture

Le Paris noir

La colonisation, la loi et l'histoire

1885, le tournant colonial de la république : Jules Ferry contre Georges Clemenceau, et autres affrontements parlementaires sur la conquête coloniale

Les harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites [Préface de Jean Lacouture. Paris, Les éditions de l'atelier, 2008]: Préface de Jean Lacouture. Paris, Les éditions de l'atelier, 2008

Le debat sur les « lois memorielles » n’a pas ete pose sur des bases pertinentes par l’appel « Liberte pour l’histoire » de decembre 2005, qui, au plus fort de la contestation de la loi sur la colonisation, l’associait a la loi Gayssot, a celle reconnaissant le genocide des Armeniens et a la loi Taubira. Il accusait, en bloc, des articles de ces quatre lois d’avoir « restreint la liberte de l’historien », de lui avoir « dit, sous peine de sanctions, ce qu’il doit chercher et ce qu’il doit trouver », de lui avoir « prescrit des methodes et pose des limites » et meme d’etre, toutes quatre, « indignes d’un regime democratique ». Malgre les travaux prestigieux de nombre de ses signataires, ce texte n’apparait pas comme une base de reflexion rigoureuse sur le sujet. Certes, ce n’est pas a la loi de dire la verite en histoire. Mais nous devons formuler autrement le probleme du role de la loi par rapport aux enjeux de memoire, et, plus generalement, le probleme des risques d’instrumentalisation de l’histoire. Pour ma part, je m’inscris dans le prolongement de la contestation de la loi de fevrier 2005, marquee par la constitution du Comite de vigilance sur les usages publics de l’histoire (CVUH). Il s’agit, tout en tenant compte de l’existence, voire du bien-fonde, des demandes memorielles, de defendre l’autonomie de la recherche.

Gilles Manceron

Papers

Le Paris noir

La colonisation, la loi et l'histoire

1885, le tournant colonial de la république : Jules Ferry contre Georges Clemenceau, et autres affrontements parlementaires sur la conquête coloniale

Les harkis dans la colonisation et ses suites [Préface de Jean Lacouture. Paris, Les éditions de l'atelier, 2008]: Préface de Jean Lacouture. Paris, Les éditions de l'atelier, 2008

Sur quelles bases aborder le débat sur la loi, la mémoire et l’histoire ?