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universities. Articulate, francophone colonial students supplied the cadres and journalistic voices of what Mahfoud Kaddache terms the avant-garde révolutionnaire of anti-colonial nationalism. 63 There are close parallels between the Vietnamese and Chinese students drawn to Communist internationalism in 1920s Paris and the negritude movement of the 1930s which brought together
In the twenty years between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, the French empire reached its greatest physical extent. At the end of the First World War, the priority of the French political community was to consolidate and expand the French empire for, inter alia, industrial mobilisation and global competition for strategic resources. The book revisits debates over 'associationism' and 'assimilationism' in French colonial administration in Morocco and Indochina, and discusses the Jonnart Law in Algeria and the role of tribal elites in the West African colonies. On the economy front, the empire was tied to France's monetary system, and most colonies were reliant on the French market. The book highlights three generic socio-economic issues that affected all strata of colonial society: taxation and labour supply, and urban development with regard to North Africa. Women in the inter-war empire were systematically marginalised, and gender was as important as colour and creed in determining the educational opportunities open to children in the empire. With imperialist geographical societies and missionary groups promoting France's colonial connection, cinema films and the popular press brought popular imperialism into the mass media age. The book discusses the four rebellions that shook the French empire during the inter-war years: the Rif War of Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, and the Kongo Wara. It also traces the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism and anti-colonial movements.
cultural nationalisms, it has become all the more urgent today to demonstrate the inadequacy of either feminist or anticolonial politics in isolation. The study of colonial masculinity demystifies the grounds for such excruciating choices. At one level, it extends the current scholarship on anti-colonial nationalisms: for it not only expands the field of gender in nationalist politics, but, even more crucially
Introduction In the previous chapter we examined colonial discourses in relation to writings from the colonial period. In this and several of the following chapters we will explore many of the different strategies with which the authority of colonialism and colonial discourses has been combated. This chapter and the next are concerned with representations related to anti-colonial nationalism and their impact upon political, social, cultural and literary contexts. Attitudes to nationalism in postcolonialism are wide-ranging and conflicting. As our immediate
broader contexts of anti-colonial nationalism as antecedents and legitimate elements of the field. And to conceive of the field as the provenance of materialist, historicist critics as much as it is of textualist and culturalist critics. If we look at the publication trajectory of postcolonial studies since 1978, and confine the glance only to metropolitan Anglophone academic publications within cultural studies, we find that materialist contributions have been a significant and persistent element throughout this period. The year 1989, for example, saw the publication
– ceremonies, rituals and symbolic gestures, no matter how powerful – could not solve the material and cultural problems of the colonised. The Malagasy might applaud the French gesture, and pledge fealty to the Republic, but disappointed expectations would fuel anti-colonial nationalism. Ranavalona’s remains dwelt in the Rova cemetery during the remaining decades of French colonial rule, through a
BOEHMER Makeup 3/22/05 2:55 PM Page 140 John's G5:Users:john:Public:John's Mac: John's Job 8 The nation as metaphor: Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera metaphors are the public history of nations (with apologies to Balzac). (Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’)1 Unreal nation The first, post-1945 phase of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa, as in other colonised regions, was distinguished by literal belief structures: a strong, teleological faith in the actual existence of the nation as ‘people’, and the sense that history
a backward nation could ‘modernise’ itself while retaining its cultural identity. It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based. (p. 30) Chatterjee argues that anti-colonial nationalisms inevitably have to use one of the chief tools of the colonists, and this makes them culpable in continuing to traffic in colonial ideas (a matter of concern for critics such as Paul Gilroy, as we noted a moment ago). Not
imperial romance were Britain’s experiments with indirect rule from Fiji and Zululand in the 1880s to Nigeria and Tanganyika in the early twentieth century. These fostered some interesting partnerships between administrators and traditional leaders, before succumbing to the more powerful forces of anti-colonial nationalism led by educated elites. Promotion of ‘traditional leaders’ as imperial partners
African society. The belief that imperial governance was an ambivalent exercise was, therefore, not an inherent component of the colonial encounter, but the contingent outcome of certain colonial relationships. But what of the threat of anti-colonial nationalism, which had become such a potent force by the end of the interwar period? Two crucial elements allowed officials to think of anti-colonial activity