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This book examines French and Francophone intellectual history in the period leading to the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa (1945-1960). The analysis favours the epistemological links between ethnology, museology, sociology, and (art) history. In this discussion, a specific focus is placed on temporality and the role ascribed by these different disciplines to African pasts, presents, and futures. It is argued here that the post-war context, characterized, inter alia, by the creation of UNESCO, the birth of Présence Africaine and the prevalence of existentialism, bore witness to the development of new regimes of historicity and to the partial refutation of a progress-based modernity. This investigation is predicated on case studies from West and Central Africa (AOF, AEF and Belgian Congo) and, whilst adopting a postcolonial methodology, it explores African and French authors such as Georges Balandier, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chris Marker, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alain Resnais, Jean-Paul Sartre and Placide Tempels. Past Imperfect analyses the legacies of the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the difficulty encountered by these authors to articulate their anti-colonial agenda away from the modern methodologies of the ‘colonial library’. By focussing on issues of intellectual alienation, this book also demonstrates that the post-WW2 period foreshadowed twenty-first century debates on extroversion, racial inequalities, the decolonization of history, and cultural (mis)appropriation.

In most studies of British decolonisation, the world of labour is neglected, the key roles being allocated to metropolitan statesmen and native elites. Instead this volume focuses on the role played by working people, their experiences, initiatives and organisations, in the dissolution of the British Empire, both in the metropole and in the colonies. How central was the intervention of the metropolitan Left in the liquidation of the British Empire? Were labour mobilisations in the colonies only stepping stones for bourgeois nationalists? To what extent were British labour activists willing and able to form connections with colonial workers, and vice versa? Here are some of the complex questions on which this volume sheds new light. Though convergences were fragile and temporary, this book recapture the sense of uncertainty that accompanied the final decades of the British Empire, a period when radical minorities hoped that coordinated efforts across borders might lead not only to the destruction of the British Empire but to that of capitalism and imperialism in general. Exploiting rare primary sources and adopting a resolutely transnational approach, our collection makes an original contribution to both labour history and imperial studies.

Recognized as one of the most influential studies of memory in the late twentieth century for its elaboration of a ground-breaking paradigm for rethinking the relationship between the nation, territory, history and memory, Pierre Nora’s monumental project Les Lieux de mémoire has also been criticized for implying a narrow perception of national memory from which the legacy of colonialism was excluded. Driven by an increasingly critical postcolonial discourse on French historiography and fuelled by the will to acknowledge the relevance of the colonial in the making of modern and contemporary France, the present volume intends to address in a collective and sustained manner this critical gap by postcolonializing the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire. The various essays discern and explore an initial repertoire of realms and sites in France and the so-called Outremer that crystalize traces of colonial memory, while highlighting its inherent dialectical relationship with the firmly instituted national memory. By making visible the invisible thread that links the colonial to various manifestations of French heritage, the objective is to bring to the fore the need to anchor the colonial in a collective memory that has often silenced it, and foster new readings of the past as it is represented, remembered and inscribed in the nation’s collective imaginary.

Our Civilizing Mission is at once an exploration of colonial education, and a response to current anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of the ‘humanities’. On the one hand, focusing in detail on the example of Algeria, it treats colonial education as a facet of colonialism, exploring francophone writing that attests to the suffering inflicted by colonialism, to the shortcomings of colonial education, and to the often painful mismatch between the world of the colonial school and students’ home cultures. On the other hand, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education. Placing writers’ literary and personal accounts of their transformative and often alienating experiences of colonial education in historical context, it raises difficult questions – about languages, literatures, ways of thinking, nationalism and national cultures – that need to be reconsidered by anyone teaching subjects such as French, or English, especially through literature. [160]

In 1771 Joseph Banks, John Fothergill and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. The name of this collector was Henry Smeathman, an ingenious and enterprising Yorkshireman keen on improving his position in the world. His expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married several times into the coast’s ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a ‘stranger’ bound to landlords and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman’s life and his attitudes to slavery, both African and European, as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts—Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection forged in this period between science, collecting, and slavery. The book also reproduces and discusses Smeathman’s essay describing his journey on a fully slaved ship from West Africa to Barbados, a unique account because it is written by a passenger unconnected to the slave trade. After four years in the West Indies observing plantation slavery Smeathman returned to England to write his ‘Voyages and Travels’.

This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey’s Le système colonial dévoilé, a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. Jean-Louis Vastey was the best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after that country’s world-historical revolution (1791-1804). Born in 1781, Vastey was the son of a white plantation owner and a free woman of color; by the time of his murder in 1820, he had authored over ten books and pamphlets, and had become one of the most influential members of the government of King Henry Christophe. His first and most incendiary work, Colonial System Unveiled, provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Featuring an extensive Introduction and critical apparatus that provides historical and ideological contextualization for Vastey’s book, this edition also includes four supplementary essays on Colonial System written by scholars on the cutting edge of Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white - in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The authors focus on the ways in which their subjects have used the skills and resources they brought with them and the ones they found in each place of arrival to construct themselves and their families as subjects of their own lives, and also what new visions of self and community (or politics) have been enabled by the crossing of borders. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years, when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. The book offers readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in addition to which it calls attention to the lives and work of two lesser-known but important figures: Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, the book explores the empathy that daughters show towards blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. These works by French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone texts, and allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women's literature in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. The book contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone writing.

This book asks why, at a time when East India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism, and the missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical, and popular discourses that surrounded them, it seeks to uncover the various political, economic, and ideological agendas which allowed East Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from its trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, the book uncovers tensions in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called ‘civilising mission’, elucidating the intricate interactions between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies, and imperial imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to provide a trans-national perspective on slavery and abolition in the British Empire, uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with the economic, political, and moral imperatives of an empire whose focus was shifting to the East.