Culture post-coloniale 1961-2006: Traces et memoires coloniales en France.(Book review)

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-DEC-07

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press

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 imperiale 1931-1961: Les colonies au coeur de la Republique (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 memoires post-coloniaux" and "Influences et continuites 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...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.