The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid

By Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Dominic Thomas

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253026514

Book preview

PART I

COLONIAL FRACTURE / 2005

1.1. THE EMERGENCE OF THE COLONIAL

1

THE REPUBLICAN ORIGINS OF THE COLONIAL FRACTURE

Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard

THE LINKS BETWEEN colonization and the Republic remain of utmost importance and relevance to contemporary debates in French society. Might colonization, in fact, represent the inevitable reverse side of what stands as a universal utopia, one that invariably becomes less and less pure as one moves away from the center (the metropole), and as the color of the people who are theoretically placed under its protection becomes darker? Such complex questions are no doubt impossible to answer definitively. However, they do have the merit of clearly setting out an issue that has, until now, often been avoided or, at times, even distorted.

In order to better understand these issues in all of their complexities, we will begin by examining an article we published in a special report devoted to the question in 2005,¹ a report in which editors Patrick Simon and Sylvia Zappi undertook a broad reflection on republican politics and identity. A diverse and balanced array of contributions served to highlight the urgency of the discussion, despite what some might call its paradoxical nature. In their introduction, the editors explained