In his 1935 novel Invasion 14, Maxence Van der Meersch painted a nuanced picture of the German invasion and occupation of northern France during World War I. Despite local controversy, Invasion 14 won national and international praise, losing the Prix Goncourt by a single vote. Though neglected in the wake of World War II, when the author's treatment of Franco-German relations between 1914 and 1918 ran headlong into evolving myths of widespread resistance between 1940 and 1944, Invasion 14 has garnered renewed attention as a window onto the occupation of World War I. Heretofore unappreciated, however, is Van der Meersch's use of colonial themes of race and empire. Based on research in the Archives Maxence Van der Meersch, this study explores the author's treatment of colonial motifs, demonstrating their centrality to the novel and the debate it generated.
Search Results
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 47–66 (20 total)
Caroline Bressey
Though a substantial and groundbreaking book, the comprehensiveness of E. P. Thompson's narrative in The Making of the Working Class highlighted its many absences. This article considers the potential for examining the black presence within a Thompsonian framework of class in eighteenth-century England. It focuses on the politics of multiethnic solidarity, considering why black history remains so marginalized when key organizations and political moments, such as the Cato Street Conspiracy and the London Corresponding Society, both present in The Making, were multiethnic in their political ambition and their membership. Through the discussion of a Victorian multiethnic community of antiracist activists, this article also examines how research focusing on the intersecting geographies of race and class can contribute to the foundations of scholarship of English history provided by The Making.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 70–82 (13 total)
A White Race Blindness?
Abstract Universalism and the Unspeakable Making of Race
Sarah Mazouz
seminal work, historian Joan W. Scott sheds light on how abstract universalism was an ideological mystification in the case of gender equality. 4 In the case of race, far from being an ideology of inclusion, abstract universalism allows one to
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 116–135 (20 total)
Obscuring Race
Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism after World War II and the Making of Colorblind France, 1945–1950
Emily Marker
In 1945, the first significant cohort of African, Caribbean, and Malagasy deputies were elected to the French National Assembly, where they participated in special parliamentary commissions tasked with colonial reform. This article traces the contours of postwar conversations about colonial policy, race, and racism that took shape in those commissions, as metropolitan and colonial deputies confronted these issues face-to-face, as ostensible equals, for the first time. Deputies of color tried to force frank discussions about racial inequality in their campaigns to reform political representation, working conditions, education, and compensation for Africans. Their metropolitan counterparts responded, however, by developing new code words and rhetorical strategies that deflected accusations of systemic racial inequality in postwar Greater France. The competing understandings and ways of talking about race and racism produced in this encounter helped consolidate a postwar speech regime of “colorblindness” that obscured the way racial logics were inscribed in the new institutions of the postwar Republic.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–23 (23 total)
Adeel Hamza and John Gannon
textual exegesis of the Legend of Abraham. At the same time, it provides insights into the intellectual and discursive milieu of the European interwar period, in particular helping to bring out conflict over the idea of race and Mauss’s place within this
In Durkheimian Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 47–57 (11 total)
Laura Frader
An American scholar is often struck by the absence of race in France as a category of analysis or the absence of discussions of race in its historical or sociological dimensions. After all, “race” on this side of the Atlantic, for reasons having to do with the peculiar history of the United States, has long been a focus of discussion. The notion of race has shaped scholarly analysis for decades, in history, sociology, and political science. Race also constitutes a category regularly employed by the state, in the census, in electoral districting, and in affirmative action. In France, on the contrary, race hardly seems acknowledged, in spite of both scholarly and governmental preoccupation with racism and immigration.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2000
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–4 (4 total)
‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’
Alfred Métraux, American Social Science and UNESCO's Anti-Racist Campaign in 1950s Paris
Alice L. Conklin
accept a position at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as head of a new bureau on race relations, and he was wondering what books to buy to help him in his new job. Hardly an expert on race matters himself
In Durkheimian Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 107–132 (26 total)
“White” Guadeloupeans of “Mixed” Ancestry
Complicating Analyses of Whiteness and White Supremacy
Ary Gordien
racialization process it reveals originate in the former French Caribbean colonies where slavery took place, most discussions on blanchité (and more generally on race) tend to focus on the racial dynamics at play on the mainland. Based on a retrospective
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 95–115 (21 total)
Richard S. Fogarty
During the First World War, more than 500,000 colonial subjects served in the French Army. As these men, known as troupes indigenes, helped defend France from invasion, many of them had sexual and romantic relationships with French women. Such intimate contacts across the color line transgressed strict boundaries that separated the non-white colonized from white colonizers, boundaries that helped construct and sustain colonial rule. Thus these interracial relationships produced acute anxieties in the minds of French officials, who worried that their failure to control the passions and desires of colonial men and metropolitan women would ultimately undermine the French empire.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 50–72 (23 total)
Tyler Stovall
Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995)
Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2000
- Article Type:
- Review Article
- Pages:
- 137–142 (6 total)