The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (review)

The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France, by Elizabeth Ezra. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. xvi + 173 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8647-5 paper.

Elizabeth Ezra's eloquent study of race and colonialism not only maps the pervasive influence of racist ideology on French cultural constructions of the nation during the interwar period, but also shows how this ideology continues to shape nationalist rhetoric in France today. She contrasts well-known figures such as Josephine Baker with lesser-known figures such as Paul Morand, Raymond Roussel, and René Crevel in penetrating analyses of the effects of the "colonial unconscious," the symbolic order that she claims shaped the aesthetics of modernist writers as well as those of the popular forms of entertainment found at the Expositions coloniales of 1931 and 1937 or at the cinema. The book concludes with an insightful chapter on the importance of race and the colonial unconscious in the rhetoric celebrating France's 1998 World Cup victory.

The Colonial Unconscious is a major contribution to the growing field of studies of the colonial past and its impact on French literature and culture. Ezra's study highlights and analyzes works that had been relegated to relative obscurity in spite of several scholars' cursory acknowledgment of their importance. As the author claims, many have noted the importance of Josephine Baker, but few have analyzed her films or her influence in depth. In recent years, that has changed. Indeed, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke UP, 1999) offers an excellent counterpoint to Ezra's study of the colonial unconscious, particularly with regard to Baker. In addition to increasing our knowledge of Baker's cultural influence, Ezra nuances our understanding of writers usually left to specialists in Surrealist writing—Raymond Roussel and René Crevel. She also takes on Paul Morand, an anti-semitic and racist writer who was recuperated by the Académie Française in spite of his collaboration with the Vichy government. Ironically, Morand has received much attention of late, because of the publication of his Journal inutile in two volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) and a collection of his Chroniques (Paris: Grasset, 2001). ¹ Ezra shows the importance of his Magie noire (1928) in the promotion of an unregenerately segregationist attitude at a time when the French also decried American segregation and racism. The "colonial unconscious" affected even those who opposed colonialism; as Ezra remarks, Roussel relies on steretypes and Crevel falls into the trap of the myth of the noble savage.

Ezra puts to rest the old platitude that French colonialism, in distinction to British colonialism, committed itself exclusively to the policy of assimilation. In fact, the French oscillated between assimilation and association. Ostensibly, association was a progressive policy, in that it was based on respect for the right to difference; however, its proponents insisted that non-Europeans were inferior to white Europeans, and pushed for segregation in the colonies. Much of Ezra's study is devoted to pointing out the inherent racism of this policy, which has been updated and adopted by the New Right in recent years.

The notion of a colonial unconscious indicates a debt to the theories of a collective memory developed by Maurice Holbwachs and the Annales school of historiography, as well as to the Freud of Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents. Ezra offers spare commentary on these writers, preferring to position herself in opposition to Homi Bhabha. She writes that mimicry does not disrupt colonial authority, as Bhabha would have it, for

the doubleness of French colonial discourse reinforces it, providing a sort of reverse doublure, or lining, that protects it from the outside—a wolf in sheep's clothing. The French empire did not self-destruct; it was overthrown. And it was not overthrown by colonial ambivalence. It seems an (unconsciously) imperialist gesture to locate the possibility of subversion within...