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This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.
Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) was published by the Paris-based publishing house Editions du Seuil in 1952 when Fanon was twenty-seven. This book first develops the theme of the francophone contextualisation of Peau noire by concentrating on the specifically Martinican references in the text which have either been effaced or distorted in subsequent representations of Fanon. By retrieving the specific cultural and historical significance attached to particular linguistic items in the text, the book reveals the unconscious traces of a history which Fanon consciously wants to expunge. It is precisely the question of expunging the past. The book argues that Fanon's desire for a violent rupture with the past and a new beginning rules out the possibility of a Creole conception of Caribbean history and culture associated today with the writers. The book also situates Peau noire in the context of racism in metropolitan France and explores different aspects of Fanon's engagement with Sartre in Peau noire. It focuses specifically on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism, and discusses Fanon's engagement with another of Sartre's texts, 'Orphée noir'. The book further discusses Fanon's engagement with Sartre and the tension between universalism and particularism. Finally, it concentrates on studies of the psychic, existential and political dimensions of racial ideology in Peau noire.
editor, writer and producer who did not assume the mantle of director until relatively late in his career. Thus, a study of how Audiard both conforms to and departs from these two once readily accepted notions is a particularly apt analysis to undertake within this series. Audiard and his films perpetually test the bounds between metropolitan French centre and cinematic, geographic and sociocultural fringe
46 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks 3 Colonial racisms in the ‘métropole’: reading Peau noire, masques blancs in context JIM HOUSE This chapter aims to provide a historical reading of the many examples of racism in ‘metropolitan’ France that Fanon cites and comments upon. It also analyses the significance of Peau noire for our understanding of the various cultures of colonial racism, evaluating the text in relation to the different currents within the opposition to racism circulating in France from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Fanon’s preoccupation with
representations of Fanon. By teasing out these references, Macey relocates Fanon within a very specific space and time and blocks the over-hasty tendency to universalise his ideas. So, for example, the ‘comparison’ culture of Martinique, whereby social distinctions are constructed around different shadings of colour, will be in stark contrast to the cruder dichotomy between black and white which Fanon will encounter in metropolitan France. Not only will this difference in reading colour reveal to Fanon the unstable nature of racial classifications and their status as situated
, the army struggled to expand geographically under the Fourth Republic. Its narrative of military necessity and economic modernization had failed to win over sceptical civilians. Militarized environments and decolonization As it battled against civilian opposition in metropolitan France, the army engaged in bloody and morale-sapping wars against decolonization as the Fourth Republic struggled to hold onto France’s colonies. In the wake of rising public hostility to the war and the army’s humiliating defeat at Dien Pien Phu, Pierre Mendès-France negotiated the
the defence of French imperialism at any post-war peace conference. 12 In general, where Vichy looked southward towards a collapsing imperial position, Free France inevitably gazed northward to metropolitan France. Where Vichy dwelt upon imperial policy, Free France dreamt of the Liberation. This difference in emphasis was hardly surprising. Vichy was a quisling state which found
representations, has become a significant trend in the academic research of recent years. The present chapter hopes to contribute to an ongoing interest in the area, as an introduction to a longer project that examines the place occupied by history when it is present as traces and fragments in the literature of immigration produced in France since the early beur novels of the 1980s. My project approaches this question through the case study of a single significant date of the Algerian War in metropolitan France, known as October 17, 1961. This specific event has been the object
: though they are socially marginalised in one way or another, the protagonists of Regarde les hommes tomber (1994), Un héros très discret (1996) and Sur mes lèvres (2001) are all Gallic, native French speakers who were born and live in metropolitan France, mainly Paris. These films establish many of the characteristic motifs and themes that define Audiard’s oeuvre: an
winners, and there is little desire to recall the pitiful history of the remainder of the French armed forces during the war years, except to recount how those soldiers, sailors and airmen, principally in the colonies, eventually rediscovered a dignity and retrospective glory by rallying to de Gaulle. Unquestionably, it was these colonials that transformed the Forces Françaises Libres (FFL) into a truly formidable force, enabling it to play an important role in the ultimate defeat of Nazism. By contrast, the rump of the French forces in metropolitan France had an