Recent Articles
Postcolonizing France
Postcolonial paradigms and politics have become relatively prominent on the French academic scene during the past decade. But somehow the flare of interest in le postcolonial or postcolonialisme has been accompanied, rather than followed, by even more…Racial France, or the Melancholic Alterity of Postcolonial Studies
A certain amount of anxiety seems to dominate all the essays in this special issue. Jean-François Bayart’s is obviously the most polemical. Even as he acknowledges the heterogeneity of the field — indeed, berates it as careless — he is nonetheless…The Return of the Native: Postcolonial Smoke Screen and the French Postcolonial Politics of Identity
Although many scholars have attempted to avoid lapidary formulations, much of the postcolonial conversation that takes place in France is a reconfigured formulation of old questions, with a taste of déjà vu.Mirror, Mirror, Tell Me Who I Am: Colonial Empire and French Identity
Twenty years ago, at a party held in a New York suburb, a French woman, who had been brought in by her American friend, said to me, “Why are you objecting to French colonialism? After all, if we had not colonized Algeria, another country would have.”Bayart’s Broken Kettle
It is always a depressing moment when a respected scholar launches into a blanket denunciation of a new field that appears to him or her to be in some way threatening.