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244  French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial it is in france, one of the key sites of Enlightenment thinking, that the contemporary debates are most explicitly seen as continuous with early debates around Les Lumières and the Revolution. Both the popular media and high-profile public intellectuals portray the conflict as one between universal secular Enlightenment and religious and communitarian particularism. As we saw earlier, the dominant line in French intellectual life during much of the 1990s was antagonistic to discourses of critical race, identity politics, and multiculturalism . Until recently, postcolonial theory too formed a structuring absence in the dominant French discourse. This absence contrasted not only with the AngloAmerican academic world but also with other parts of Europe (the Netherlands. Germany, Scandinavia) and with many parts of Asia and Africa, all sites where postcolonial studies have been a significant presence for decades. In France, the word “postcolonial” functioned largely as a chronological marker, a synonym for postindependence rather than as an index of a discourse or field of inquiry.1 For complex reasons, many French intellectuals ignored at best, and maligned at worst, a constellation of interrelated projects such as postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies. There was a manifest hostility to what were perceived as Anglo-American currents in general, whether in the form of multiculturalism (associated with the “Anglo-Saxons”) or cultural studies (associated initially with the United Kingdom and later with the United States) or postcolonial theory (associated with the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and the Anglophone zone generally). Thus, the debates have taken on national-allegorical overtones, in terms of both how French intellectuals imagined their own role and how they imagined the role of intellectuals from other nations. There was in France a postcolonial terrain, however, occupied not by postcolonial studies but rather by work within the traditional disciplines. Whereas postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world was initially the product of scholars in English and comparative literature and the humanities generally, what one might call “proto-postcolonialist” studies in France was dominated by anthropologists and historians. Already in 1971, anthropologist Georges Balandier, for example, anticipated Homi Bhabha’s notions of “sly civility” as a coping mechanism within colonialism by speaking of “collective reactions that could be called clandestine or indirect” or of “calculated manifestations of passivity” as subtle ways of undermining colonial domination.2 245 French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial This chapter charts a new situation where the old antagonisms persist but when new voices and discourses also emerge. In the late 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century, we witness a major engagement with what has variously been called “postcolonial theory,” “postcolonial critique,” and “postcolonial studies.” Numerous conferences and special issues of journals such as Esprit, Labyrinthe , Rue Descartes, and Mouvements treat“the colonial fracture,”“the sequels of colonialism,” and “the wars of colonial memory.” Many of the recent publications thematize the historical delay itself through a quasi-ritualistic acknowledgment of the French hesitation in joining the postcolonial trend. To take just one of many examples, Dino Costantini’s The Civilizing Mission: The Role of Colonial History in the Construction of French Political Identity begins by acknowledging a gap between France and the Anglophone countries. In the latter,“the fact that colonial history forms a constitutive part of a common Western identity has been recognized for decades,” while France has only recently begun to“interrogate the theoretical and practical consequences of the centuries of colonial engagements and the way they have fashioned France’s political identity up to the present.”3 Ironies of an Aversion A number of poignant ironies hover around the initial reluctance of French intellectuals to embrace postcolonial studies. The first and most obvious is that postcolonial studies itself has been very much shaped by Francophone anticolonial discourse. Many key problematics within postcolonial critique trace back to Francophone intellectuals such as Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Memmi, and Anouar Abdel-Malek. The chapter titled“The Pitfalls of Nationalism” in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, for example, anticipated the postnationalist aspect of postcolonial theory, while Abdel-Malek’s critique of Oriental studies in the 1960s foreshadowed Said’s classic Orientalism. The second irony is that “French Theory ,” as Robert Young pointed out in White Mythologies, was shaped by the colonial situation and by the fact that many of the leading theoreticians (Derrida, Althusser, Lyotard, Cixous) were linked to North Africa. The third irony is that French poststructuralism has had widely acknowledged...

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