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11 Provincializing France
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Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Franco-Senegalese intellectual and political activist who was to become Senegal’s first president, wrote in 1945, “the colonial problem is fundamentally nothing but a provincial problem, a human problem.” Leading luminaries of the French colonial establishment, like René Pleven, were saying something similar: “the French colonies, like the other provinces of France, wish to help rebuild the house of France.”1 The critical intellectual and the colonial officials both had their reasons for trying to blur the line between the European and the African provinces of France. The latter were trying to justify their political system to a world becoming more skeptical of the claims of some people to rule over others, and they were combating colleagues who saw colonies as mere zones of extraction and exploitation, possessions of France, but not integral to the polity. The former was trying to position colonized people firmly within the political space of a Greater France—as citizens of empire—so as to make claims on that system for a fuller, more meaningful, and more respectful inclusion in the polity. Part of Senghor’s article was an effort to tell French people about 341 11 Provincializing France Frederick Cooper African history and culture and to convince them that Africa, like France, had much to contribute to world civilization as well as to a heterogeneous France. Another part was a plea to Africans: “assimilate but do not be assimilated.” Africans should not make themselves into black French people, and they should not hold themselves aloof from French culture and proclaim their cultural authenticity.2 They should be critical, adaptive, and selective as they seek to better understand what French and African cultures have to offer them in the future. In 1945, both Senghor and the ascendant progressive wing of the colonial establishment were anxious to shed the term empire without replacing it with a culturally homogenized polity, and they acknowledged what Senghor called the “historic fact” of colonization while seeking to turn the tide of history toward another form of multinational polity.3 Both were trying to provincialize France. Both understood well that empire, nation, and province were all constructs—ways of representing a system of power whose lines were not so clear—and they made use of them to try to adapt political structures to conform better to the constructs they favored. A couple of generations later, the idea of “provincializing Europe” has come back into academic circles, but not in so dynamic a form. The argument, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation among others, turns the thought that Europe could be like an ordinarily place among other ordinary places into an ironic demonstration that Europe cannot be provincialized. The stumbling block is that Europe has passed off its particularity as universal, obscuring not least how much its pretension to be the source of global civilization is in fact the story of colonialism. European colonialism was not just about economic exploitation or geopolitical domination but about configuring an “other” that would underscore Europe’s position as the font of social progress, democracy, and rationality. This approach suggests that even when colonialism came into question, Europe could still determine the forms in which opposition could gain a foothold and the terms in which analysis of colonization , including by historians, could be articulated. Colonized societies always seemed to “lack” something that Europe possessed, to be “behind” in whatever trajectory Europe seemed to be following, not least the trajectory that seemed to make the nation-state the only possible outcome of political mobilization.4 Frederick Cooper 342 [54.163.218.81] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:04 GMT) Such arguments reflect the political dilemmas that colonial activists had to confront but could not always overcome, and they reveal the frustrations of non-European intellectuals today who willingly engage the theoretical propositions of European social thought without finding their European colleagues willing to reciprocate. The danger, however, is that the critique perpetuates what is being criticized . Europe remains the reference point to which everyone else has to point. Enlightenment, rationality, modernity, and the nation-state remain on their pedestal, now emblematic of European arrogance instead of universal civilization, but still quintessentially European. But one might ask instead whether Europe itself “lacked” what India or Africa is said to lack. In this chapter I hope to contribute to the goal of provincializing Europe, but in a different way. I question whether concepts such as modernity or the narrative...