Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds ed. by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (review)

et pour l’égalité) was established in 2004 to combat discrimination, it remains hostile to ethno-racial categorization, and complaints of discrimination against Blacks must be based on “national origin” rather than “race,” which does not exist as a category of discrimination for the HALDE. Marie Ndiaye, the author’s sister and the 2009 winner of the Prix Goncourt, provides an added bonus in her preface, “Les Sœurs,” a subtle parable on two mixed-race sisters and their reactions to discrimination in France. Pap Ndiaye will be dismissed by some opponents of action affirmative or of the gathering of statistics on Blacks merely because he is an américaniste. Nevertheless, La Condition noire demonstrates that France needs new and vigorous policies to deal with discrimination against Blacks and argues forcefully for Black Studies as a legitimate field of study in France. Davidson College (NC) Homer B. Sutton MUDIMBE-BOYI, ELISABETH, ed. Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7391-2135-1. Pp. 236. $70. As the old saying goes, the sun never set on the French empire, which, at its zenith, measured twenty times the size of metropolitan France (roughly the equivalent of the United States) and spanned the globe. A long and painful process of decolonization, involving costly wars of liberation in Indochina and Algeria, left France with just a handful of Départements et Territoires d’outre-mer (DOM-TOM). Relations between Paris and the former colonies have been mixed, to say the least, ranging from cordial to frosty and even downright hostile, and all the former colonies have struggled to find their way as independent states in their own right. Although it is true that France has continued to intervene militarily in several places, most notably in Africa, it is also true that France has tried hard to mend fences with its former colonies through such consortia as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and thereby maintain a presence in what is sometimes called, nostalgically—according to its detractors—the Francophone world. The problem with such a Francocentric view is precisely that it perpetuates a de facto colonial power dynamic, as though it were still possible for France to continue to dictate Frenchness in plain denial of the indisputable fact that immigration to France has already redefined what it now means to be “French.” Today it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that the French empire became, early on and almost by default (since the French were latecomers to the colonial empire-building game and had to rest content with scarcely inhabited desert areas with few natural resources), a question of national prestige rather than economic gain (with a few exceptions, such as Algeria and CochinChina ). Witness the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. This (post)colonial power dynamic is further reflected in the lexicological dichotomy between “French” and “Francophone.” This collection of essays from a 2006 conference held at Stanford University subverts this orthodox idea of Francophonie to examine it from the point of view of the cultural Other and explore ways in which the two terms “French” and “Francophone” can coexist and even enrich each other. Empire Lost consists of a dozen contributions by authorities in the field, including luminaries such as Assia Djebar and Michel Serres. The first part of the book looks at France today Reviews 183 as a “postempire mise en abyme within the hexagonal center” (xvii), changing its demographic landscape, awakening new sensibilities and cultural presences that are transforming France into a country of diversity and newness. Articles focus on laïcité in the French public school system; the growing visibility of Islam in France; the impetus provided by globalization for immigration to Europe; the growing irrelevance of formerly accepted terms, such as “Francophonie;” the appearance of néobarbarismes such as “Francographie” and “Françafriche,” which must be seen as an effort to somehow name the rise of new “multitudes” struggling to become “communities” (48); the African-Americanization of France, that is to say, the growing relevance of the African-American experience in France. Essays in the second part of the volume explore “new kinds of cross-cultural expressions in the arts, in...