Patricia M. E. Lorcin

Todd Shepard

"Collection of essays that explore the French presence in the 19th and 20th-century making of the Mediterranean"--Provided by publisher.

Transnational and Imperial Histories

French Mediterraneans

A special issue of French Historical Studies

France and Islam

The relationship between Algeria and France that formed during the 132 years of colonial rule did not end in 1962 when Algeria gained its independence. This long period of occupation left an indelible mark on the social fabric of both societies, one that continues to influence their cultures, identities, and politics. Wide-ranging in scope yet complementary in focus, the essays deftly convey the extent to which the French colonial experience in Algeria resonates on both sides of the Mediterranean. Young and established scholars shed light on the linguistic, cultural, and social mechanisms of violence, remembrance, forgetting, fantasy, nostalgia, prejudice, mythmaking, and fractured identity. Addressing the nature of Franco-Algerian relations through such topics as migration, displacement, settler colonialism, racism, and sexuality, these essays provide an important contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and North African history. With renewed public debate surrounding the two countries’ shared past and their interwoven communities today, this volume will be indispensable for anyone with an interest in the relations between Algeria and France and the literature on memory and nostalgia.

Identity, Memory, Nostalgia

Algeria and France, 1800-2000

Kabyle, arabes, français : identités coloniales explore le cheminement par lequel les différences ethniques et les particularités culturelles ont été développées et utilisées en tant qu'instruments de contrôle social. Patricia Lorcin examine les circonstances et les influences qui ont donné naissance et diffusé les clichés de " bon " kabyle et " mauvais " arabe (habituellement évoqués en tant que mythe kabyle) en Algérie. Elle démontre comment ces clichés ont été utilisés pour nuire aux moeurs et croyances des autochtones pour imposer les valeurs culturelles, sociales et politiques de la France. Patricia Lorcin souligne l'évolution des catégories ethniques avec le temps et met en exergue leur nature instable et leur remise en cause continuelle, en fonction des circonstances et des convenances politiques ou sociales. Elle démontre comment l'idéologie raciale, qui se développait en Europe, a eu une influence majeure sue les stéréotypes ethniques en Algérie à l'époque coloniale.

identités coloniales

Kabyles, arabes, français

Hafid Gafa ti

David G. Troyansky

The dissolution of the French Empire and the ensuing rush of immigration have led to the formation of diasporas and immigrant cultures that have transformed French society and the immigrants themselves. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World examines the impact of this postcolonial immigration on identity in France and in the Francophone world, which has encompassed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Immigrants bear cultural traditions within themselves, transform ?host? communities, and are, in turn, transformed. These migrations necessarily complicate ideals of national literature, culture, and history, forcing a reexamination and a rearticulation of these ideals. ø Exploring a variety of texts informed by these transnational conceptions of identity and space, the contributors to this volume reveal the vitality of Francophone studies within a broad range of disciplines, periods, and settings. They remind us that the idea and reality of Francophonie is not a late twentieth-century phenomenon but something that grows out of long-term interactions between colonizer and colonized and between peoples of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions. Truly interdisciplinary, this collection engages conceptions of identity with respect to their physical, geographic, ethnic, and imagined realities.

Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World

This illuminating study of European women's narratives in colonial Algeria and Kenya argues that nostalgia was not a post-colonial phenomenon but was embedded in the colonial period. Patricia M. E. Lorcin explores the distinction between imperial nostalgia, associated with the loss of power that results from the loss of empire, and colonial nostalgia, associated with loss of socio-cultural standing—in other words, loss of a certain way of life. This distinction helps to make women's discursive role an important factor in the creation of colonial nostalgia, due to their significant contribution to the establishment of a European colonial environment.

European Women's Narratives of Algeria and Kenya 1900-Present

Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia

While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region. In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard offer a collection of scholarship that reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean. These essays provide a critical study of space and movement through new approaches to think about the maps, migrations, and margins of the sea in the French imperial and transnational context. By reconceptualizing the Mediterranean, this volume illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies.

Patricia M. E. Lorcin

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