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  • Culture post-coloniale 1961–2006: Traces et mémoires coloniales en France
  • Dominic Thomas
Culture post-coloniale 1961–2006: Traces et mémoires coloniales en France. Ed. Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel Paris: Editions Autrement, 2006. ISBN 978-2-7467-0895-7. 287 pp.

This is the third volume of the series published in France by the Editions Autrement under the direction of members of the Association pour la Connaissance de l'Histoire de l'Afrique Contemporaine (ACHAC). The earlier volumes, Culture coloniale 1871–1931: La France conquise par son Empire (ed. Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, 2003), and Culture impériale 1931–1961: Les colonies au cœur de la République (ed. Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, 2004) stimulated much public debate and fueled the growing disciplinary, institutional, political, and public polemic surrounding colonial history, national memory, contemporary immigration, and the field of postcolonial studies in France. Organized around two sections entitled "Enjeux et mémoires post-coloniaux" and "Influences et continuités post-coloniales," the project attempts to render the above-mentioned phenomena "historically intelligible" (7), to provoke "disciplinary decompartmentalization" (14) in France, and to assess "colonial genealogy" (7) and what is at stake in adopting such an approach to the legacies of colonialism in the Hexagon today.

The most heated responses to this question are to be found in the field of history, in which the subspecialty of "colonial history" is powerfully entrenched and reputed for its conservative angle. In the essay "Mémoire coloniale: résistances à l'émergence d'un débat," Bancel and Blanchard outline the tenuous connections between the study of history based on the scientific and evidentiary mode, and memory as the "individual or collective reconstruction of the past that is not anchored in scientific methodologies" (23). The revisionist element is explored in an excellent contribution by Suzanne Citron, and the implications are extended by Sandrine Lemaire in her essay on the role the French educational system plays in disseminating and crystallizing such approaches. This inevitably leads to an engagement with the broader ideological project of memory that is to be found in Pierre Nora's multivolume Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past), one that has indeed come under attack more recently in a powerful critique formulated by Perry Anderson in his book Un regard critique sur la culture française (Seuil, 2005). Ultimately, as Bancel and Blanchard point out, what comes under scrutiny are the parameters of the French Republic itself, since "the process of probing colonization and colonial history surely necessitates a questioning of the [End Page 234] foundations of the dominant hexagonal political ideology, namely Republican ideology? [. . .] Since to confront colonization necessarily implies the deconstruction of those discourses that legitimated it" (36).

These disciplinary battles reflect the manner in which the cultural and political domain are inextricably linked in France and are also indicative of the conflicted attitudes pertaining to colonial history. One such example can be found in the juxtaposition of the Law of 23 February 2005 (subsequently partially adjusted) that endeavored to underline the "positive role played by France overseas" in response to lobbying by the powerful Pied-Noir and Harkis communities (whose votes are much-coveted by the French Right particularly since they have in recent years increasingly expressed political allegiance the Front National) and President Jacques Chirac's statement in his official public address on the occasion of the inauguration of the Quai Branly Museum on 20 June 2006 (apparently with no sense of irony), that "France wishes to pay homage to peoples whom, throughout the ages, history has all too often done violence. Peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors. Peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history" ("Allocution" 1).

Such institutional obstacles and challenges should nevertheless not obfuscate the growing presence in France (or of works published or available in French) of scholars or groups whose work effectively advances what has come to be known as postcolonial studies (Achille Mbembe's De la postcolonie [2000] has had a transformative influence in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the English-speaking world but has for the most part been ignored in France...

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