Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (review)

Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds is a collection of essays, most of which were presented at a conference co-organized by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi at Stanford University in 2006. The focus of the conference and the present volume is the interconnections between francophonie and France and the later colonial and postcolonial histories. In her introduction to the volume, Boyi asks whether francophonie is set to replicate (neo)imperialist attitudes, or whether it can develop a “horizontal relation” (xvi), and help promote, or preserve, cultural diversity. Does it identify better with political institutions that France tries to utilize against American influence, or the predominantly North American academic discourse, which tries to escape the colonial binaries at the root of the spread of the French language outside of Europe? The ambiguities surrounding the term francophonie are also tackled in Alec Hargreaves’s and Mireille Rosello’s essays.

Fittingly, the book opens and closes with contributions from Assia Djebar and Michel Serres, both keynote speakers at the conference, both members of the Académie Française, both non-native speakers of French. Djebar examines what colonial loss means in two quasi-autobiographical narratives by Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras, canonical writers of the twentieth century, born in French colonies. Serres reminds us that until the decline of France’s peasantry in the middle of the last century, the diglossia often found in francophone spaces outside of France was widespread within France itself. Such positioning of France’s Other within and outside of France resonates throughout the volume.

The impact of postcolonial immigration in/on France is the common denominator of the first part, “Homogeneity Subverted.” The first two essays are concerned with Islam in France. Mireille Le Breton discusses the recent redefinition of laïcité in the French public school system (1989–2004), with the highly charged question of the so-called Islamic Veil. Jocelyne Dakhlia invites the French public to reintegrate Islam in the French narrative, especially for the precolonial period: she contends that colonial history erased these pre-1830 contacts, and that forgetting these early contacts precludes our recognizing the Christian polemist roots of many discourses critical of Islam, which do not see themselves as religious. Alec Hargreaves and Tyler Stovall turn their attention to France, the United States, and the mythical discourses built by minorities about these twin Republics. Whereas Stovall notes that the convergences of the condition of blacks in both republics means that France can no longer be imagined as a color-blind society where elite African Americans could find respite from racism, Hargreaves notes that the United States is increasingly acquiring the status of Promised Land for French young people of North African origin. Finally, Mireille Rosello underscores the effects of globalization and transnational migrations on the francophone world as well as the increasing disconnect between francophone literature and postcolonial spaces.

The second part is mostly literary in its outlook, except for the contribution by French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle. His chapter examines the strategic interests of French cultural agents and institutions involved in the development of contemporary African art. Cultural cross-fertilization appears somewhat differently in Yvonne Hsieh’s analysis of Stèles. She uses Glissantian theory in order to illuminate Glissant’s and Segalen’s works, and contends that Segalen, a navy officer, and therefore a member of the colonial machine, can also be read as a precursor to postcolonial writers because of his ability to intertwine languages and cultures in developing his own poetic language. Nothing could be more different from the attitude of Emile Nolly, another soldier-writer of the turn of the century analyzed by Karl Ashoka Britto in his piece on the figure of the tirailleurs annamites and the anxieties colonial soldiers created among the French. The contradictory desires to incorporate and exclude absolutely the colonial subject in/from the French nationalist project leave no room for Nolly’s colonial protagonist but death. Colonial violence is also present in...