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Colonial Aphasia:

Race and Disabled Histories in France

Ann Laura Stoler

Today it is possible that France will have to choose between

attachment to its empire and the need once more to have a

soul. . . . If it chooses badly, if we ourselves impel it to choosebadly, which is only too likely, it will have neither one nor the

other, but simply the most terrible affliction, which it will suffer

with astonishment, without anyone being able to discern the

cause. And all of those capable of speaking or of wielding a pen

will be eternally responsible for a crime

—Simone Weil, 1943

Colonial histories possess unruly qualities. Sometimesthey may remain safely sequestered on the distant fringes of national narrativeswhere they have long been deemed to belong. Sometimes they transgress the pro-prietary rules of historiographical decorum, trample manicured gardens, uprootprecious plants, or ignore trespassing signs and zoning ordinances. Colonial histo-

Public Culture 23:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2010-018

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

An earlier rendition of some of the questions raised in this essay was originally given as thekeynote address for the conference “1951 – 2001: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Colonial Situa-tion,” at New York University, April 2001. I thank audiences at New York University, the Universityof Utrecht, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Tel Aviv University, the University of

Toronto, and the University of California, Los Angeles, for their probing questions. I thank DidierFassin, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Achille Mbembe, Richard Rechtmann, Janet Roitman, and MiriamTicktin for their challenging queries and comments. All translations from the French are by theauthor.

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ries may violently register the tensions of the moments in which they are recalledor slip surreptitiously into the faded patina of irrelevance. They can be renderedto the present as vestige — or pressingly at hand. They can be made unavailableunusable, safely removed from the domain of current conceivable human rela-tions, with their moorings cut from specific persons, time, and place. They arehistories that can be disabled and deadened to reflective life, shorn of the capac-ity to make connections. Not least, they raise unsettling questions about what itmeans to know and not know something simultaneously, about what is implicitbecause it goes without saying, or because it cannot be thought, or because it canbe thought and is known but cannot be said.

At issue is neither stubborn ignorance nor sudden knowledge. It is the confusedand clogged spaces in between in which this essay rests. It reflects on the concep-tual processes, academic conventions, and affective practices that both elicit andelude recognition of how colonial histories matter and how colonial pasts becomemuffled or manifest in contemporary France. My interest is in the peculiar con-ditions that have rendered France’s colonial history alternately irretrievable andaccessible, at once selectively available and out of reach. Intimately imbricatedis a more basic issue: the political, personal, and scholarly dispositions that havemade the racial coordinates of empire and the racial epistemics of governance sofaintly legible to French histories of the present.

Aphasic Afictions

Some ten years ago, in preparation for what was hailed as the first “transatlantic”conference on “the colonial situation,” in honor of the esteemed anthropologist

of Africa Georges Balandier, I was struck by two things: (1) by the celebratoryeffervescence of interest in, and proliferating work on, France’s colonial historyevident in both U.S. and French scholarship, and (2) by the curiously unreflectiveidioms in which earlier treatments of colonial issues were being framed.1 It wasa “forgotten history,” as a “memory-hole,” or as a “collective amnesia” — as ahistory that somehow was “lost” in the decades following the Algerian war andarmed battle in Vietnam and as a French public digested revelations about Vichy

1. This essay references only the U.S. scholarship on French empire, a field that too has explodedin the past decade, where it is directly related to my argument. While it would make sense to examinethe circulation between French colonial historians in the United States and France for a comprehensive review of this literature, that is not my subject here.

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and Nazi sympathies that stretched far beyond those previously indicted as itsmost infamous collaborators.2

For many of us who had long worked on France’s racially charged colonial his-tory and the breadth of its documentation, the exuberance seemed odd, almost fever-ish, and misplaced. It was not only belated, as students of French colonialism nowso readily note. In light of the staggering surge in publication and debate of the pastfew years, the excitement could be seen as just one in a series of renewed claims toexposure of the discrepant histories that divide republican principles from systemic,targeted, and sustained forms of privation in the making of modern France.

At issue, of course, has not been “discovery” of torture in the colonial historyof France, nor are these new revelations that there were indeed camps of coerciveresettlement, detention, and concentration throughout the empire’s carceral archi-pelago. In 1927 André Gide condemned the deadly labor regimes that accompa-nied the building of Indochina’s railway.3 Simone Weil produced a steady streamof anticolonial texts in the 1940s, up until the year of her death.4 In 1958 themilitant Communist Henri Alleg published La question, a graphic account of hisown torture at the hands of the French military.5 La gangrène, which appearedin June 1959 and was immediately banned, documented the intimate technolo-gies of brutal indignities that French soldiers inflicted on Algerian women andmen.6 Pierre Bourdieu was writing about Algerian workers and “the colonialsystem” throughout the early 1960s.7 Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi’s

2. For a fine English-language review of what Henry Rousso called the “Vichy syndrome,”see Rosemarie Scullion, “Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome,” Studies inTwentieth Century Literature 23 (1999): 11 – 26. Examples of the use of “amnesia” and “forgetting”are many. See, e.g., Helene Champagne, “Breaking the Ice: A Burgeoning Post-colonial Debateon France’s Historical Amnesia and Contemporary ‘Soul Searching,’ ” Modern and ContemporaryFrance 16, no. 1 (2008): 67 – 72.

3. André Gide, Voyage au Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 1927). There were many others I do notquote here. For a history of French “anticolonial” writing and the different forms it took, see Jean- Pierre Biondi and Gilles Morin, Les anticolonialistes, 1881 – 1962 (Paris: Laffont, 1992).

4. This article’s epigraph is taken from an unfinished essay, titled “The Need for Roots,” that Weilwas writing just before her death in 1943 and is quoted from Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethicof the Other , ed. and trans. J. P. Little (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 124.

5. Henri Alleg, La question (Paris: Minuit, 1961).6. La gangrène (Paris: Minuit, 1959). The book was seized and banned in France by the govern-

ment and subsequently translated by Robert Silvers and published in English as The Gangrene (New

York: Lyle Stuart, 1960).7. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, “Guerre et mutation sociale en Algérie,” Études méditerranée-nnes 7 (1960): 25 – 37; Bourdieu, “Les sous-prolétaires algériens,” Les temps modernes 199 (1962):1030 – 51.

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1962 account of the torture and rape of twenty-three-year-old Djamila Boupachareceived worldwide attention.8 Extensive evidence of detention camps in Alge-ria and within France proper has been available to historians in easily accessedsources for a long time.

Nor can it be claimed that racially targeted colonial violence in the makingand maintenance of the republic was absent from scholarship and popular lit-erature or confined to the exigencies of wartime alone. Aimé Césaire, FrantzFanon, Albert Memmi, and Jean-Paul Sartre all underscored the “sordidly rac-ist” and “systemic” compartmentalized violence that colonialism animated, the“lines of force” it created, and the “degradations” it instilled in the colonies andin Europe — among both colonizer and colonized.9 Abdelmajid Hannoum rightlyargues that historiography played a key role in making North Africa a Europeanterritory “in the minds of the French people,” following the formation of a settlersociety in the 1870s.10 But French historiography had lots of help. Historiographyhas been only one branch of a broader field of French academic culture, whosefavored rubrics, contents, and concerns have deftly excised Algeria as well asFrance’s other colonies, protectorates, and possessions from the national purviewnot once, but again and again.

Gérard Noiriel once used the phrase “collective amnesia” to reference the studied absence of immigration from French historiography and school curriculums.1

Similarly, “colonial amnesia” and “historical amnesia” are often used pointedlyto describe the public and historiographical low profile of colonial history inFrance.12 Kristin Ross saw the “keeping [of] two stories apart” (that of modernFrance and that of colonialism) as “another name for forgetting one of the stories

or for relegating it to a different time frame.”13

8. Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).9. Anne Mathieu, “Jean-Paul Sartre et la guerre d’Algérie: Un engagement déterminé contre le

colonialisme,” Le monde diplomatique, November 2004, 31 – 32.10. Abdelmajid Hannoum, “The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once Became French,” His

tory and Anthropology 19 (2008): 92.11. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity

trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially 1 – 9.12. See Anne Donadey, “Between Amnesia and Anamnesis: Re-membering the Fracture

of Colonial History,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23 (1999): 111 – 16. See also ToddShepard’s excellent study, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking

of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially “Forgetting French Algeria,”101–35; Benoit de L’Estoile, “L’oubli de l’héritage colonial,” Le débat 147 (November–Decembe2007): 91 – 99.

13. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 8 – 9.

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But forgetting and amnesia are misleading terms to describe this guarded sep-aration and the procedures that produced it. Aphasia, I propose, is perhaps a moreapt term, one that captures not only the nature of that blockage but also the featureof loss. Calling this phenomenon “colonial aphasia” is of course not an appeal toorganic cognitive deficit among “the French.” Rather, it is to emphasize both lossof access and active dissociation. In aphasia, an occlusion of knowledge is theissue. It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. Aphasia is a dismembering, a dif-ficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriatewords and concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia in its many forms describesa difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most impor-tant, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken.14

On Access and Retrievability

Between 2000 and 2009, the amount published on France’s colonial history was

nothing short of astounding. Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s La torture dans la république (2000); Marc Ferro’s Le livre noir du colonialisme (2003); Claude Liauzu’s Colo-nisation: Droit d’inventaire (2004); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s Coloniser,exterminer (2005) and La république impériale (2009); and Pascal Blanchard,Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire’s steady stream of edited volumes thatinclude Culture coloniale en France (2003), Culture impériale (2004), Culture post-coloniale (2005), La fracture coloniale (2005), and La rupture postcolo-niale (2010) represent only some of the titles emerging in this refigured academicand political space occupied by those who have long written on French colonialrule and by a younger generation avid to re-view France’s colonial history through

a different critical lens. The numbers of journals, academic and lay, that havetaken up “the postcolonial question” and its relationship to urban violence andimmigration, and to what the historian Benjamin Stora calls “ethnoracial regula-tion,” have all the earmarks of endowing the colonial past with a politically activeand progressive voice in the present.15

14. David Swinney, “Aphasia,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 31 – 32; Jonathan D. Rohrer, William D. Knight, Jane E. Warren, NickC. Fox, Martin N. Rossor, and Jason D. Warren, “Word-Finding Difficulty: A Clinical Analysis ofthe Progressive Aphasias,” Human Molecular Genetics, at http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/1/8.full (accessed October 7, 2009); “Aphasia,” Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Aphasia (accessed October 15, 2009); Harold Goodglass, Understanding Aphasia (San Diego,Calif.: Academic Press, 1993); The Free Dictionary, s.v., “aphasia,” medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/aphasia (accessed November 3, 2010).

15. For special issues of journals devoted to these questions see “Réflexions sur la postcolonie,” Rue Descartes 58 (2007); “La question postcoloniale,” Hérodote 120 (2006); “Postcolonialisme

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If a much-lauded history of postwar French intellectuals that appeared in 1992could easily assign only eight pages to colonial engagements, it would be hard todo so now.16 What has changed is how that history is thought to matter to people’spresent choices, future possibilities, and contemporary politics. What is beingrethought is where the social policies of systematic exclusions are located in thegrammar of republican values and thus how centrally the imperial entailments ofnational history are framed.

Many things distinguish early forays into colonial history from those thatanimate debate today. As current precipitants, many commentators point to thevirulent response to the proposed law of February 23, 2005, to require publicschools to teach “the positive values of the French colonial presence overseasparticularly with respect to North Africa.”17 One might imagine that such a boldstate injunction was a backlash, a response to widespread negative treatment ofFrance’s colonial past in school curricula. But French colonialism has never been

part of the national curriculum. It has been assiduously circumvented, systemati-cally excluded from the pedagogic map.Others have looked elsewhere to account for the recent postcolonial surge in

academic and political forums, particularly to what has been cast as an unprec-edented “explosion” of violence in November 2005, when more than ten thousandcars were burned and two hundred public buildings torched in towns and cities

et immigration,” Contretemps 16 (2006); “Pour comprendre la pensée postcoloniale,” EspritDecember 2006; “Empire et colonialité du pouvoir,” Multitudes 26 (2006); “Relectures d’histoirecolonials,” Cahiers d’histoire 99 (2006); and “Qui a peur du postcolonial? Dénis et controverses,”

Mouvements des idées et des luttes 51 (2007).16. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944 – 1956 (Berkeley: University of Cali

fornia Press, 1992), 174 – 75, 179 – 89, 282 – 88, 330–31.17. To gain some sense of the intensity of the responses to this law and the range of those who

mobilized against it, see “Un appel à l’abrogation de la loi du 23 février 2005, initié par la LDHet rendu public le 13 avril 2005” and the archived articles available at www.ldh- toulon.net/article.php3?id_article=592 (accessed January 10, 2006); Philippe Bernard and Catherine Rollot, “Lesinterrogations des manuels scolaires,” Le monde dossières et documents 357 (2006): 1; ClaudeLiauzu, “Une loi contre l’histoire,” Le monde diplomatique, April 2005; Sandrine Lemaire, “Uneloi qui vient de loin,” Le monde diplomatique, January 2006; and Julio Godoy, “Recasting Colonialism as a Good Thing,” July 5, 2005, Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2005/0705empgood.htm. As reported in the international press, see “France Orders Positive Spin on Colonialism,” Associated Press, October 21, 2005, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com

archives/61/148.html.Among the many who have since written about the proposed law and the controversies aroundit, see Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire: La controverse autour du “fait colonial” (Paris: Croquant, 2006); and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l’histoire coloniale (Marseille: Agone, 2009).

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18. Robert Aldr ich, “Colonial Past, Post-colonial Present: History Wars French-Style,” in History Australia 3, no. 1 (2006): 14.1 – 14.10. Riva Kastoryano also notes that “nothing is new with the lastriots in France, they just lasted longer.” Riva Kastoryano, “Territories of Identities in France,” Riotsin France, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Kastoryano (accessedOctober 22, 2006).

19. James Graff, “Why Paris Is Burning,” Time, November 2, 2005, at www.time.com/time/ world/article/0,8599,1125401,00.html.

20. Eric Maurin, Le ghetto français: Enquête su le séparatisme social (Paris: Seuil, 2004).21. Étienne Balibar, “Uprisings in the ‘Banlieues,’ ” Constellations 14 (2007): 60, 48. For an

ongoing discussion of responses to the 2005 events in the banlieues and critiques of these responses,

see www.ldh-toulon.net; and, among others, Achille Mbembe’s response, “La république et sa bête,”http://www.ldh-toulon.net/spip.php?article971 (accessed January 8, 2010).See also Theodore Dalrymple, “The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris,” City Journal 12 (2002),

www.city- journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html; and Rémy Herrera, “Three Moments of theFrench Revolt,” Monthly Review 58 (2006), www.monthlyreview.org/1005herrera.htm.

throughout the country. The crass description by Nicolas Sarkozy (then Interiorminister) of the protesters as “racaille” (rabble) recalled a rich lexicon of racial-ized terms, but his vocabulary was not the only colonial evocation.18 The imposed“state of emergency” drew on colonial-era legislation from 1955 that had beenused to squash protests against the Algerian war. The “riots” on the urban periph-eries (banlieues) were in the cités of sequestered and dilapidated tenements builtin the 1960s, where a majority of former colonial immigrants and their descen-dants still live. Unemployment rates among youth in these government-labeled“sensitive quarters” now reach 40 percent.19 This information was not revealing ornew. Nearly every commentary seeking to account for the riots begins with sucha description. Nor has the intensity of segregation or unemployment, contrary topopular perception, in fact changed much over the past twenty years.20 Sociolo-gists have been documenting this territorial segregation and its consequences fordecades. What has changed, perhaps, is not what is known about these coloniallineaments but how noncontainable the “degradations” that Césaire described asinflictions upon Europe have since become. The repeated deflection and activa-tion of that history is not unrelated to another well-honed and familiar narrative,one now charged with ever more urgent currency: that “security” rests on socialsegregation and spatial containment. Both are silent partners in a structure of feel-ing and force embraced not by a fringe right wing but by a broad population thathas held that the colonial past was not its history and that those involved in the lat-est protests and earlier ones were not and should not be part of France. As ÉtienneBalibar suggests, a “regime of dis-memberment” has produced its opposite: “theproximity of extremes.”21

The referents of the current high-fueled colonial debate have also changed.

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Fanon, Sartre, Césaire, and Memmi provided founding texts of an earlier momentand they all have been republished, but the current proliferation of research in andon the colonial past has turned to a vocabulary and set of questions generatedelsewhere. Anglophone “postcolonial studies” and its South Asian subaltern stud-ies variant have hit the (academic) shelves. Ignored for nearly two decades, bothare now the subject of hotly contested assessments about what they are, who counamong their practitioners, and, most important, whether their analytic categoriesare applicable to France.22 Islam, the headscarf debate, and “the colonial past”have each been taken as potent condensed signs that have mobilized and renewedcondemnations of universalist claims and exclusionary practices. Multiple meanings arise at these signs’ edges, in the intervals between words and at the politicaintersections of linguistic gestures.23 In those unspoken and unheard intervalsare colonial genealogies of political disenfranchisement, uneven efforts to linkcolonial dispossession to “postcolonial urban apartheid” and to a legal system thadistinguishes between those who should and should not have political rights.24

Still, both moments — the surges in rethinking the colonial in 2000 and againnow — attend little to the ambivalent treatment of colonial issues in precedingdecades. French scholarship careened between a deafening silence on the natureof colonial governance and critical recognition of its resilient structures, if notits contemporary effects. This is not a linear history, nor one formerly obscuredonly now emerging from darkness to light. It has repeatedly come in and outof focus and has more than once been represented as “forgotten” and thenrediscovered — a history that erupted at the center of French politics, then wasremanded out of the nation and its scholarly bounds. This is about more than mali

cious intent, historical illiteracy, or the bad faith of individual actors. It is aboutthe very nature of political thinking within and outside the fortressed Frenchacademe that valorizes only some formats for considering questions of humandignity — as though abstractions from France’s own racial history confers privi-leged philosophical worth. Not least, what has been left persistently unaddressedis why one of the global heartlands of critical social theory and the philosophies

22. The emergence of anglophone colonial studies has been recounted many times by Frenchscholars in recent years, and there is no need to do so here. For one version, see Marie-ClaudeSmouts, ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les “postcolonial studies” dans le débat français (Paris

Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007).23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1964), 41.

24. Paul A. Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault, “Postcolonial Urban Apartheid,” SSRC, Items and Issues 5 (2006): 8 – 15.

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of difference has so rarely turned its acute analytic tools to the deep structuralcoordinates of race in France.

Opening to this issue gives different valence to the revelatory tenor of colo-nial history today and its relationship to “the riots.” The public outcry at the“unexpectedness” of the riots belies the fact that they were not in “any significantrespect new.”25 Loïc Wacquant was not alone in asking why protests on this scaledid not happen earlier.26 One need not look far in the sociological literature todiscover that these have been zones of containment and abandonment for decades,punctuated with intensifying state surveillance and daily humiliations. The sameis true for state strategies that have repeatedly created compartmentalized spacein the colonial past and postcolonial present, a point that prompted Didier Fassinto query why French anthropologists neither foresaw what happened nor subse-quently had much to say about it.27

Some parties have had much more to say. The manifesto of the ever-expandingactivist movement that calls itself Indigènes de la république (Natives of theRepublic) has held that the banlieues are zones without rights, inhabited by an“indigenized” population subject to “colonial mechanisms” of control.28 By itsaccount, the French state remains a colonial one. Achille Mbembe goes elsewhere,to an observation that we have both long shared: governance in France rests on thelogos and pathos of a racial state honed in a history of empire.29 It is a state whosestrategies of separation and exclusion structure more than state institutions. Racialdistinctions permeate the unspoken rules and “choices” of residence, the chargeddebates on secularism, the sensory valuations that distribute moral disgust, theexplanations of sexual violence, and, not least, who can walk with ease on what

streets and in which quarters. But racialized regimes of truth have been refractedthrough a more fundamental and durable epistemic space. They shape what issuesare positioned at the fulcrum of intellectual inquiry and what counts as a recog-nizable frame of reference in scholarly and public debate.

In the landscape of racialized sentiments, the word race need not be spoken.It certainly need not in “republican” France, where race is not a legal category.

25. Alec G. Hargreaves, “An Emperor with No Clothes?” Riots in France, SSRC, riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Hargreaves (accessed October 22, 2006).

26. Loïc Wacquant, “L’état incendiaire face aux banlieues en feu,” Combats face au sida: Santédrogue société 42 (2005), www.combatenligne.fr/article/?id=589.

27. Didier Fassin, “Riots in France and Silent Anthropologists,” Anthropology Today 22 (2006):1 – 3.28. See the movement’s 2005 manifesto, “Nous sommes les Indigènes de la république!” www

.indigene-republique.org/spip.php?article1 (accessed May 14, 2006).29. See Mbembe, “La république et sa bête.”

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But a state need not refuse race as legal category for race to find no easy enunciation and to remain unspoken and unnamed. Racial states can be innovative andagile beasts, their categories flexible, their classifications protean and subject tochange. They thrive on ambiguities and falter on rigidities. Students of the racialhistory of empire have some lessons to teach — and to learn. Racial formationshave long marked differences by other names. Racial formations distribute spe-cific sentiments among social kinds, assign who are made into subjects of pityand whose cultural competencies and capital are deemed inadequate to makepolitical claims. As such, they demand that we ask who and what are made into“problems,” how certain narratives are made “easy to think,” and what “commonsense” such formulations have fostered and continue to serve.

When Pierre Bourdieu insisted on a call for savoir engagé at a speech in Ath-ens in 2001, just months before his death, and condemned the “artificial” divisionbetween scholarship and commitment, his assault was directed at the debate overglobalization, not the issue of race or the detritus of colonial relations that so markformer French colonies and contemporary France. Perhaps he had no need to sayit there. It had taken him some thirty years to speak once again about the anxiousbouleversement (confusion) that his work in Algeria had instilled in him and ofthe academic conditions that for years separated his “theoretical” production fromthe early war-torn colonial sites of his ethnographic work. Le monde diplomatique’s editorial insert on the piece referred nostalgically to such an engagemenduring the Algerian War, but it was Le monde diplomatique, not Bourdieu, thadrew that connection.

One can appreciate the impulse in various publications since his death that hai

a “postcolonial” Bourdieu and his invention of an “engaged ethnosociology,” andstill want to question the nature of that intellectual field in which he developed hisconcept of habitus as “sedimented history” but nevertheless chose to excavate the“distinctions” that marked bourgeois sensibilities without reference to the coloniahistory that produced the racial habitus of modern bourgeois France.30 It is thesame field in which Jacques Derrida, born in Algeria to a pieds noirs family osmall-town pharmacists, whose appreciation of “archive fever” has had such analytic force, and who chose, for most of his career, not to examine his own feverishresistance to examining the racialized colonial situation into which he was bornIn different ways, both Bourdieu and Derrida divorced their sharp critiques of

30. See, for example, Nirmal Purwar, “Sensing a Post-colonial Bourdieu: An Introduction,” Sociological Review 57, no. 3 (2009): 371–84, and Tassadit Yacine, “Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War:Notes on the Birth of an Engaged Ethnosociology,” Ethnography 5, no. 4 (2009): 487–509.

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31. See Sudeep Dasgupta’s interview with Jacques Rancière, June 2, 2008, at http://ranciere/blogspot.com/2008/06/sudeep- dasgupata-interviews- jacques.html (accessed October 24, 2009).

32. Jacques Rancière, “Racism, a Passion from Above,” at http://www.mediapart.fr/node/92825(accessed October 24, 2010).

33. Among the many books published in the late 1980s and 1990s on the rhetoric of the FrontNational and the appeal of Le Pen’s “national preference,” see Pierre Jouve and Ali Magoudi, Les ditset les non-dits de Jean- Marie Le Pen (Paris: La Découverte, 1988); Pascal Perrineau, Le symptôme

Le Pen (Par is: Fayard, 1997); Hubert Huertas, FN: Made in France (Paris: Autres Temps, 1997); andHarvey Simmons, The French National Front (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).

scholastic knowledge from the racial milieus of French empire that they knewintimately and on the ground.

Or one might consider Jacques Rancière, also Algerian born, whose luminouswork on philosophy’s poor has guided so much thinking about the subversion ofauthority and who in an interview in 2008, when asked about postcolonial studiesand subjects, answered that he did not have to address these issues because therewas no postcolonial studies in France.31 It is not that Rancière has not directedhis analytics of subversion to speak out on state racism in France. As he recentlyreminded his audience in a colloquium in fall 2010 on the expulsion of Romas asa group, fifteen years ago he wrote of racism not as a popular passion, as oftenmisconstrued, but as a “cold racism,” an intellectual one, largely a “creation ofthe state.”32 Still, there is something in all of these left luminaries that seems torefuse a more intimate colonial history, to resist the colonial entanglements that soclosely touched on the subjects of their intellectual lives. Clearly, today colonialtalk is everywhere. Race talk is as well. Sometimes their strands are interwoven.Sometimes they are not. Both have been mobilized to counter an increasinglypervasive narrative and set of policies committed to the notion that personal andnational security are threatened by “North African immigrants,” the cités andtheir racaille. It was Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National (FN) that in the1990s most forcefully spoke in a language of “insecurity” caused by “foreigners”(despite the fact that most of those targeted have been and are French citizensthemselves), with its xenophobic slogan of a “national preference.” But that is farfrom the case today. What was once considered signature far-right rhetoric is nowmainstream.33 It could be supposed that this rhetoric circulated within FN circles

and then to a broader population ten years later. But the circuits of appropriationwere neither one-way nor direct. Perhaps the most disquieting feature of Le Pen’sdiscourse in the 1980s and 1990s was not how extreme it was but how effectivelyit identified the pulse of popular sentiment, among many more than would everacknowledge FN sympathies or their unspoken fears that the FN so effectivelytapped.

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34. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racist Visions for the Twenty-First Century: On the Cultural Politics of thFrench Radical Right,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson(Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002), 108. An earlier version of that paper was given as the keynote addresfor the “Making History, Constructing Race” conference at the University of Victoria in May 1999.

Between 1997 and 1998, I spent several months researching the FN’s culturalpolitics — both the multimedia forms in which it was disseminated and its stanceon the everyday issues of schooling, delinquency, neighborhood safety, and cul-tural centers, particularly in the town of Vitrolles, where Bruno Mégret, then LePen’s right-hand man, had installed his wife, Catherine Mégret, as mayor. At amoment when scholars and journalists took comfort in accounts that demonizedthe FN as an aberrant mark on a democratic nation, I was struck by somethingelse:

What is disconcerting here is the slippage between FN rhetoric and thatin the more general public sphere, the chameleon-like form that FN posi-tions assume, the fact that it is increasingly difficult to identify a purelyFN position, in part because the Front has been so effective at appropri-ating the rhetoric of the Right, the Left, the extremes and everyone inbetween. . . . But the politics of appropriation has gone both ways: the FNmay be talking with ease about their defense of liberty, but those fiercelyopposed to its xenophobias are finding themselves working from catego-ries not dissimilar to some of those of the FN.34

Le Pen’s style and tactics may have been excessive and misdirected, but thatis not the point. What is so resonant today is a logic that ties insecurity to “youngArab men,” that assigns Famille, travail, patrie (Family, work, fatherland) — theFN’s favored slogan for its platform in the 1990s — to what is still hailed as thawhich those of North African origin do not comprehend. It is commonplace todistinguish their comportment, lifestyles, and sensibilities not only from France profonde but from what it means to be French. Long before the global and nationa

obsession with security became so pervasive, and before Sarkozy made his presidential campaign bid in the name of security, Le Pen concentrated the FN’s slo-gans, posters, Internet sites, and tracts on fostering a broad cultural repertoireof verbal and visual images focused on insecurity and on immigrants and theirthreat — and on defending the nation and neighborhoods from them.

Le Pen and the FN no longer garner much attention in the political field, in partbecause that field is a messier space in which Le Pen’s excesses are now commonplace. He is now a bit player, and, like everyone else, he too denounces racism (in

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the abstract). If the banalization of Le Pen’s discourse was already evident in thelate 1990s, as some could argue, it is more so now.35 Racisms thrive, as they longhave, in the presence of moral righteousness and abstract rejections of blatantlyracist claims. France’s colonial history is far more than the “backdrop” to how the“solutions” for security are now framed. Security regimes do more than directattention. They create new epistemic objects and craft attributes of subjects whowarrant that attention. This shaping of what Foucault saw as the conceptual andaffective edifice of racism’s rise, the conjuring of those internal enemies againstwhich “society must be defended” (the title of his 1975 – 76 Collège de Francelectures) and “against the dangers born in its own body,” are anchored in imperialcategories that provide living histories of the racialized present.36

Colonialism Dis-ease in French Anthropology

More than sixty years ago, Balandier advocated for a critical anthropology that

would put a historical sensibility at the center of its theoretical project. The chal-lenge he posed was to confront rather than circumvent the conflicted universe ofcolonizer and colonized and to track the social distortions of race and the “pseudoreasons” for it that had shaped African societies under French colonial domina-tion.37 He was not alone in making that call. In 1950 Alfred Métraux wrote of “afatal contradiction” at the “heart of our [European] civilization”; in 1945 Bronis-law Malinowski chided an anthropology too committed to “one-column entries,”and he instead urged study of “the aggressive and conquering” European com-munities in conjunction with native ones; in 1951 Michel Leiris wrote scathinglyof an ethnography that committed itself to irrelevance if it “closed its eyes to the

colonial problem.”38 If these scholars and others were outspoken in denouncingthe value of race as a scientific category (as so many did), the colonial institu-

35. See Pierre Tevanian and Sylvie Tissot, Mots à maux: Dictionnaire de la lepénisation desesprits (Paris: Dagorno, 1998). See also Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, ed., La république mise à nu parson immigration (Paris: La Fabrique, 2006).

36. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: The Lectures at the Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

37. George Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach” (1951), in ImmanuelWallerstein, ed., Social Change: The Colonial Situation (New York: Wiley, 1966), 38, 45.

38. Alfred Métraux, “Race and Civilization,” UNESCO Courier 3, nos. 6 – 7 (1950): 8; BronislawMalinowski, “Dynamics of Culture Change” (1946), reprinted in Wallerstein, Social Change, 14 – 15;Michel Leiris, “L’ethnographe devant le colonialism,” Les Temps Modernes 58 (1950), reprinted inhis Cinq études d’ethnologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 85.

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tions and practices that eviscerated the social lives and economic prospects ofFrench colonial subjects were rarely registered as core features of their analysisAlthough there were exceptions, these warnings in the imperative tense rarelytranslated into new conceptual formulations for what ethnographers studied andwhere they studied on the ground.39

In 1987, when Frederick Cooper and I sought to consider “tensions of empire”that cut across metropole and colony and through the connections that joinedliberalism, racism, and social reform, it was Balandier’s foundational 1951 essay“La situation coloniale: Approche théorique,” that in part inspired that turn.4

If anglophone colonial scholarship was then in hot pursuit of just those connections, spurred by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, from the global North andSouth, French social science seemed inured if not impervious to a rethinking thabrought metropole and colony, much less racism and republicanism, into a singleanalytic frame. What Cooper and I failed to note at the time was that Balandierhimself never really took up his own charge.41

The marked borders of disciplinary expertise could be invoked to account forthat lapse, but then disciplines are porous, shaped by the powerfully positionedwithin them, and their fulcrums change. In an interview in 1995 with Marc Augéand other Africanist colleagues, Balandier described his own intellectual itinerary, offering an oblique, disquieted, and personal response. He situated himself

39. Among the most prominent of these exceptions was Claude Meillassoux, who in 1958 – 59under Balandier’s supervision, undertook a six-month collective research project in central Côtd’Ivoire that dealt in par t with the “most profound” effects of a “par ticularly brutal” policy of dispossession and “regroupement” of the Gouro ethnic group that was carried out under French coloniarule in 1928 and destroyed 3,271 settlements in one district alone. As Meillassoux wrote at thtime, their study of change worked off the descriptive (if not the interpretive) ethnographic baselinoffered by Louis Tauxier in 1924, carried out “only eleven years after the conquest.” See ClaudeMeillassoux, Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire (Paris: Mouton, 1964), 9.

40. Georges Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach” (1951), reprinted inWallerstein, Social Change, 45; originally published as “La situation colonial: Approche théorique,”Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44 – 79. See Ann Laura Stoler and Freder ick Cooper“Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: ColoniaCultures in a Bourgeois World , ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University oCalifornia Press, 1997), 1 – 56.

41. Marxism, which in some strands of U.S. and British anthropology generated an intensiveturn in the 1970s and early 1980s to ethnographic histories of the “colonial legacies” that shaped theworld capitalist system, had a wholly different career in France, where it was called on more often

to query theories of exchange, class, and social evolution. See, e.g., Emmanuel Terray, Marxism andPrimitive Societies (New York: Monthly Review, 1972); Maurice Godelier, Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie (Par is: Maspéro, 1973); David Seddon, ed., Relations of Production: Marxis

Approaches to Economic Anthropology (London: Frank Cass, 1978); and Maurice Bloch, Marxismand Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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42. “Je ne vais pas faire une sorte de bilan masochiste mais je dirai que j’ai appris à mon compte,à mon débit et avec peine d’une certain manière que la présence B l’Histoire n’est pas une presencefacile, qu’elle coute de l’effort, qu’elle coute de la désillusion,

qu’elle coute des désenchantements,mais qu’elle contrainte

à continuer, à ‘faire.’ ” Une anthropologie des moments critiques: Entretienavec Georges Balandier (Par is: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1996), 8. I thank Janet Roitmanfor helping me think through the subtleties of Balandier’s phrasing.

43. Michel Foucault, “For an Ethics of Discomfort,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. SylvèreLotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 135 – 45.

44. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).45. One such personal account that became a public event and an opportunity to express shocked

ignorance and innocence by those who read it was General Paul Aussaresses’s newspaper interviewin 2001 and subsequent best-selling book describing his participation in systematic torture of Alge-rians during the Algerian war — and, more important, his defense of the torture tactics he and othersused. See “L’accablante confession du général Aussaresses sur la torture en Algérie,” Le Monde, May

3, 2001; and “Les aveux du général Aussaresses réveillent les cauchemars des anciens d’Algérie,” Le Monde, May 21, 2001. Others, such as General Maurice Schmitt, ancien chef d’état–major desarmées (former chief of staff of the armed forces), pronounced several years later that the accusationof torture used in Algeria was “pure affabulation” (pure fabrication). See “Le général Schmitt nietoute torture à Alger en aôut 1957,” Le Monde, March 22, 2005.

in a generation that was “liberated, but not entirely, that was decolonized but notfully, that thought about the university differently but did not construct it in a dif-ferent way.”42 As he poignantly put it, “I am not going to do a sort of masochistbalance sheet, but I will say that I have learned for my part, at my own expenseand with pain, that being present to History is not an easy presence, that it is acostly effort, that it comes with costly disillusionment and disenchantment, but itdemands to be continued and to be done.” The translation is awkward and onlypoorly captures what is strange and elusive in the original French text. WhenBalandier writes of being “present to” History with a capital H , modified withthe preposition “à,” he conveys a sense of personal accountability before Historyand the ongoing psychic expenditure and loss that such self-reflection requires.The text approaches what Michel Foucault called an “ethics of discomfort” — arefusal to let one’s certainties “sleep,” a mobile vision that is “close-up and rightaround oneself.”43 Balandier’s discomfort seems to register a personal and politi-cal reflexivity that comes from the struggle to give what Judith Butler calls an“account of oneself.”44

“Disenchantments” in the face of one’s earlier affiliations (communist or other-wise) are not alien to French intellectuals. But if the repentant mode of memoirs,autobiographies, and national “self-flagellation” over Vichy silences and collabo-rations have been staples of postwar French society, critical personal reflections(as opposed to what are now national auto-critiques) of participation in France’soverseas ventures have not.45

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Today the landscape seems to have radically changed. Biographies of intellectual icons of French culture like Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras are nowrelocated in the colonial worlds that shaped their writerly lives. Camus’s Chroniques algériennes, first published in 1958 on the desirability of an “Algeria ofederated peoples tied to France,” is deemed misdirected and out of favor but stilof interest for popular reconsumption.46 Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre supplementthe snide gaze upon Indochina’s French colonials “as great beasts of prey” in henovels with accounts of an even more virulent racialized rule that she saved forher notebooks.47 It was only in 2001 that Bourdieu sought to discuss the ceaseless ill ease and sense of the “tragic” he experienced as a young sociologist doingresearch and taking photographs in villages during the Algerian war.48 And onlyafter his death have his early essays on the politics of Algeria come to be seen asthe basis of his sociological theory of habitus, not mere case studies for his ana-lytic lexicon or conceptual imagination.49

The call on colonial idioms, references, and comparisons is now ironic, insistent, critical, and strong. In the mid-1980s and 1990s, métissage, a term longassociated with colonial contempt for those who were “mixed,” became a way totalk about the public embrace and promise of a multicultural France while turningaway from the structures of racial inequalities. Today the movement Indigènes dela république references the racist colonial policies of the Code de l’Indigenatreappropriates the term indigène to recognize and refuse racial discriminationsand mocks the fictions of a society that is “too” republican to legally recognizerace.

Colonialism and empire now appear as central threads in the nation’s unrav

46. Albert Camus, Chronique algériennes, 1939 – 1958 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002): 28.47. Marguerite Duras, Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes (Paris: POL, 2006); Duras, The Sea

Wall, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), 135 – 36.48. Bourdieu, Images d’Algérie.49. See, e.g., Tassadit Yacine, “Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at War: Notes on the Birth of an

Engaged Ethnosociology,” Ethnography 5 (2004): 487 – 509; Enrique Martin-Criado, Les deux Algéries de Pierre Bourdieu (Bellecombe-en-Bauges, France: Croquant, 2008); and Paul A. Silverstein and Jane E. Goodman, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic PracticesTheoretical Developments (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Silverstein and Goodmantoo, note,

The theoretical constructs that Bourdieu developed in [his] work, most notably, habitus, misrec

ognition, and symbolic domination . . . have entered the mainstream of social thought independently of the North Afr ican and French political and social contexts in which they were initiallydeveloped. . . . the colonial location of [his] work is nearly impossible to discern from the Outline[of a Theory of Practice], the primary ethnographic study in which the notion of habitus wabrought to maturity. ( Bourdieu in Algeria, 1 – 2)

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eling republican fabric. There is intense disagreement about how they figure,whether a focus on the “colonial continuum” strengthens urgent demands forsocial equity or is an irrelevant distraction from them, whether repentance andguilt have shaped politics or politics has replaced good scholarship.50 Somewould argue that the Republic and Empire are now difficult to view as mutu-ally exclusive categories. What had been a patent oxymoron, la république colo-niale, is still repugnant to some, but for others it represents the pulse of themoment, an opportunity to revise a decorous, whitewashed French history thathas never acknowledged that its own convulsive storming of the Bastille wasmet in the colonies by political demands that challenged the hypocrisy of its uni-versalist claims.51 Still, some scholars are uncomfortable with the politicizationof the colonial past by a “militant” right wing.52 While this is never explicitlyexpressed, others seem impatient with a harping on the colonial past because it isa distraction from the social matters at hand, and, in its present politicized form,better not to be pursued at all.

In less than a decade, postcolonial studies and its relevance to France hasemerged as a flashpoint of debate among academics and between activists andscholars.53 Over the past few years, lines have been drawn between those who arebona fide historians and those who dabble in selective and spotty colonial histo-riography for “political” purposes. In a recent scathing assault on the new Frenchcolonial scholarship, Jean-Françoise Bayart condemns what he calls “the suddenvogue” for postcolonial studies as often superficial, superfluous forays that render

50. Among the trenchant interventions on this subject, see those already cited. For a brief discus-sion of the “forgotten history” of Muslims in Algeria, see Patrick Weil, Liberté, egalité, discrimina-tions: L’identité au regard de l’histoire (Par is: Grasset, 2008), 151 – 58. Daniel Lefeuvre claims thatthe turn to the colonial past has been embraced as a “repentant” gesture alone in his Pour en finiravec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006). Marc Ferro, Le livre noir du colonialisme,

XVIe – XXIe siècle : De l’extermination à la repentance (Paris: Robert Laffront, 2003); and JaneBurbank and Frederick Cooper’s review of it in Cahiers d’études africaines 44 (173–74): 455 – 63.Benjamin Stora offers his sharpest critique of what cannot be claimed to be “new” or “forgotten,” inhis La guerre des mémoires: La France face à son passé colonial (Paris: L’Aube, 2007). On colonialcitizenship demands, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipa-tion in the French Caribbean, 1787 – 1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

51. See Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès, La république coloniale: Essaisur une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

52. That unease is reflected in an essay by Emmanuelle Saada, who argues for “a better under-standing of what colonial relations were and a need to make those results available to those whosepersonal and family histories have been marked by colonization.” Emmanuelle Saada, “Il faut dis-tinguer travail historique et positions militantes,” Le Monde, January 21, 2006.

53. See Bertrand, Memoires d’empire.

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the analyses both improbable and useless, creating a France “perhaps existingonly in [the] imagination” of some advocates.54

When Bayart laments the “often exaggerated overgeneralizations” amongthose who label all and everything a “postcolonial situation,” he is not wrong. 5

Academic fashions — memory studies, science studies, feminist studies — haveall produced indefensible metaphoric appropriations, as well as boldly creativecritical, and counterintuitive ones. Bayart’s call that French scholars need to do itheir way, and, in fact, have been doing similar work for a long time, informs hisaccount of why French scholars are so “reticent” to embrace postcolonial stud-ies. That reticence reflects a reasonable and measured response in what he callsa “different configuration of the scientific field.”56 But to focus on the “delayed”embrace or rejection of anglophone postcolonial studies may miss the point andmisdirect the question. Those who study the colonial do not have a monopoly onthe politics of epistemology or critiques of causation, as Bayart imagines theyclaim. The more interesting question is precisely what has constituted the “con-figuration of the scientific field” and what conventions of knowledge productionhave made France’s own history of a racialized polity so marginal to it. As RadaIvekovic argues, the “delay” fashions a history in its own right, inviting the reconfiguration of a field and perhaps even the “creation of new disciplines.”57

The territorial battles are under the sign of disciplinary norms, over who knowthe colonial archives and who has a right to write about that history and who doesnot. The vitriolic attacks on Grandmaison’s Coloniser, exterminer are a case inpoint.58 Few of his critics failed to note that he was not trained as a historianmuch less a colonial one. Nevertheless, his arguments about the French politics

of extermination and prolonged privation in Algeria in the 1840s are not difficultto corroborate in published sources from the period and in the colonial archivethemselves.

If “discovery” sometimes has ceded to a moral ledger of crimes and condem-nation, it has also produced unsettling genealogies that carve deep colonial trackthrough the structures of violence, through the geographies of confinement and

54. Jean-François Bayart, “Les études postcoloniales: Une invention politique de la tradition?”Societés politiques comparées 14 (2009): 11. See also Saada, “Il faut distinguer travail historique epositions militantes.”

55. See Jean-Francois Bayart, in this volume, 65.

56. Bayart, “Les études postcoloniales,”

7, 15.57. Rada Ivekovic, “Langue colonial, langue globale, langue locale,” Rue Descartes 58, no. 4(2007): 29.

58. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et l’état colonial (ParisFayard, 2005).

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detention, through the unequal distribution of state services — housing, schools,and civic resources. Affective space is not immune: humiliations and contempthave colonial etiologies, as does inequitable recourse to alleviation from them.Resentment has its virtues that speak to far more than rage and revenge.59 VincentCrapanzano makes precisely this point in his work on the “temporal stretch” ofthe emotional landscape of the Algerian auxiliaries who fought in the Frencharmy during the Algerian war (the harkis) and among whose descendants angerhas given way to social outrage and political demands.60

Sarkozy’s presidential campaign in spring 2006 made explicit colonial con-nections that were heavy in the air: campaigning in the Lot-et-Garonne region, hedenounced in the same sentence those “who chose to live off the labor of others,”told those who didn’t like France that nothing was obliging them to “remain onnational territory,” and castigated those who “prefer to search in the folds of his-tory for an imaginary debt that France owed them.”61 And then on a visit to Sene-gal in July 2007 there was his equally artful reference to Africa as the “wounded”continent and a reminder to his young listeners that “the real tragedy of Africais that it has not sufficiently entered history.”62 At issue is not just what Sarkozysaid but the common sense on which he relied that afforded him, as he put it, “lafranchise et la sincerité” (the right and the sincerity) — and his pride in sayingit.63 As I have argued elsewhere, the comment was not provocative but innocuousfor much of the “true” French audience to whom it was largely directed.64 Thatcommon sense rested on familiar associations and on the set of presuppositionsthat shaped his narrative. The notion that “self-hate” (cette haine de soi) amongSenegalese youth was something he had the “franchise” to assess drew on an

59. I take that term from Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Amery and the Refusalto Forgive (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

60. Vincent Crapanzano, “From Anger to Outrage: The Harki Case,” Anthropologie et sociétés 32, no. 3 (2008): 126.

61. See “La recidive: Sarkozy invite ‘ceux qui n’aiment pas la France’ à part ir,” June 24, 2006,www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2008).

62. “La recidive: Sarkozy invite ‘ceux qui n’aiment pas la France’ à partir,” June 24, 2006, www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2008). See the outpouring ofresponses to Sarkozy’s comments, most notably, Achille Mbembe, “Nicolas Sarkozy’s Africa,” www.africaresource.com/index.php?option= com_content&view=ar ticle&id=376:a-critique-of-nicolas-sarkozy&catid=36:essays-a-discussions&Itemid=346 (accessed December 29, 2007). Other responses

can be found at www.liberation.fr/rebonds/discoursdesarkozydakar. 63. For the full French text of Sarkozy’s speech, see www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank /print/79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2009).

64. Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthro- pology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191 – 219.

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unedited colonial lexicon of “uplift” so endemic to his thinking and to his coterieof speechwriters that they never even sought to couch it in other terms.65 In shorthe marked “the folds of history” as a danger zone, prompting an exhortation tohis listeners not to expect “repentance” on the part of today’s French society forthe crimes of its (often well-meaning) forefathers. The warning was clear: neitheAfrica nor France would do well to ferret in those folds.

In the Folds of Colonial History

One need not resort to Sarkozy’s clichés, however, to ask what work is beingdone in the folds of colonial history today. The rush to unmask, to divulge, andto claim the truth of the colonial past raises questions. One cannot help but thinkback to the 1980s, when the ebullient cry to recognize and celebrate le droit à ladifférence (the right to difference) and antiracism saturated the airwaves of theacademe, public culture, and the press. Harlem Désir, the head of SOS Racisme

was made into a pop hero. Movie stars and public figures celebrated their birthhomes in the colonies (Yves Montand and Isabelle Adjani, also known as Yas-mina, among them). François Cusset captured the tone when he described the1980s as a “lyrical elegy to mixedness” and “a tireless saraband to hybridity.” 6

Public culture and racialized structures of power worked off one another in complex ways. Denunciations of racism did not translate into better public servicesin the banlieues or better treatment by the police of French youth who “looked”North African. French citizens with North African first names continued to feethe need to frenchify their names on job applications. Perhaps the most glaringpolitical effect of the multicultural celebration, which ran into the 1990s, was

the “unexpectedly” large percentage of votes that Le Pen and the Front Nationalcontinued to win in regional and national elections.

“Forgetting” that harki families were placed in forest hamlets under militarysurveillance throughout the provincial countryside takes hard work when it wasthose men and women who were sweeping the streets, tending the gardens ofParisian summer homes in Provence, and providing the agricultural labor in thebreadbaskets of France. The matter is not a simple one. As Fanon wrote in 1952“The European knows and does not know.”67 It is Sartre, however, who remind

65. At www.elysee.fr/elysee/root/bank/print/79184.htm (accessed February 8, 2009).66. François Cusset, La décennie: Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 (Paris: La Découverte

2006), 104.67. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 108.

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us that people know and do not know, not sequentially but at the very same time.68 Like the noun ignorance, which shares its etymology with the verb to ignore, forgetting is not a passive condition. To forget , like to ignore, is an active verb, anact from which one turns away. It is an achieved state.

The conditions of possibility for the constrictions on colonial history are per-haps by now obvious. Herman Lebovics persuasively argued that the foundationalmyths of French cultural identity disallowed genealogies of empire as part of thetrue France, that the “political blueprint” relegated “empire to a national exten-sion” so that “native cultures” could be incorporated in the first half of the twen-tieth century only if they were wrapped “within the high culture of EuropeanFrance.”69 Noiriel was among the earliest to underscore a unitary myth of Francethat supported a notion of Frenchness that systematically excluded its immi-grant population. Twenty years later, on the occasion of the publication of hismost recent book on the deep history of racism and anti-Semitism in France, heobserves that in his earlier work he “deliberately set aside the colonial question”and wonders if his “refus” was “perhaps an unconscious one to broach a pastthat touched [him] too closely.”70 Noiriel’s insight about his own dis-regard, likeBalandier’s, complicates what goes into “choice” and what it means to know and“know better.” Here recognition of refusal blurs epistemic sense and affectivesensibilities. The unruliness of colonial history in France may be that it is tooproximate and touches too close.71

French scholars may have been “ready” and willing to confront Césaire’sclaim that colonialism is never done innocently — as many did — but what ismore disturbing is how little of France’s high-powered theoretical energy across

the disciplines (so incisive about political culture, totalitarianisms, capitalism,state structures, and class) was aimed at the racialized foundations of the Frenchstate, at France as an imperial formation, or at what Marnia Lazreg calls Frenchempire’s “structural imperative” for militarized terror.72 “Readiness,” or the lack

68. For a discussion of Sartre’s understanding of the politics of mauvaise foi (bad faith), see AnnLaura Stoler, “Imperial Dispositions of Disregard,” in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxietiesand Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 237–78.

69. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900 – 1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1992), 57.

70. Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset f rançais: Histoire de l’immigration, XIXe – XXe siècles (Paris:

Seuil, 1988), 16.71. Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe – XXe siècle): Dis-cours publics, humiliations privées (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 16.

72. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15. Lazreg offers an assiduously documented analysis of the

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thereof, offers a disposition not an explanation. Few passions are excited today inthe face of that other divisive memory-work for the same period that incessantlyhas accounted for — and recounted — who actively supported Marshal PhilippePétain and Vichy politics, who hid whom and where, who was really part of la Résistance.

“Readiness” is an issue of how relevance is construed. France could be exonerated because anti-Semitism could be folded into a history of war and exceptionwhile retaining a national narrative of republican virtue and a principle if not apractice of inclusion. Evidence of systemic and structured racialized policies written into the patrimonial parchments of the French Revolution could possibly bedismissed as well, if such evidence remains historically sequestered there, “contextualized” and contained in the trope that “history is a foreign country” — not agenealogy of what plagues France today.

The refusal to acknowledge eager complicity with Vichy and the avid embraceof physical and social violation in Algeria and elsewhere in France’s “posses-sions” have something in common. Both contexts have been largely understoodnot as central features of the republic but as its very negation. When the socialist Lionel Jospin declared in 1997 that Maurice Papon’s trial (for the deporta-tion of more than sixteen hundred Jews during World War II) was the trial of aman and not a period, and that France was not culpable because Vichy was “thenegation” of both the republic and France, he bestowed what Mbembe so pre-cisely calls a blameless “secular sainthood” on both.73 This is of course the samePapon who in 1961, as Paris’s prefect of police, ordered the massacre of peacefuAlgerian National Liberation Front (FLN) demonstrators, for which he was neve

indicted.74

In recent years, the press has brought colonial torture to the public domain

militarization of the French colonial state and torture not as an “epiphenomenon” but as an expliciand central feature of policy.

73. Achille Mbembe, personal communication with the author, November 6, 2009. I thankAchille Mbembe for making this point to me and for referring me to Jospin’s speech. On Papon’strial and his defense attorney’s efforts to have the American historian Robert O. Paxton’s testimonystruck from the record as “i rrelevant,” see “Robert Paxton donne une accablante leçon d’histoire,”

L’Humanité , November 1, 1997.74. See François Maspéro, “Les mensonges grossiers de M. Papon,” in Ratonnade à Paris, by

Paulette Peju (Paris: Maspéro, 1961), 195 – 200. Maspéro’s postface originally appeared in Le MondeFebruary 24, 1990. Sartre’s attempt to publish a piece on the “pogrom” in Les temps modernewas blocked by Papon, who had the volume seized. See Charles Masters, “Papon ‘Ordered SecretParis Massacre of 1961,’ ” Sunday Times (London), October 12, 1997, www.fantompowa.net/Flamealgerians_sunday_times.htm.

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before most French historians have made their way to it.75 In 2000 L’Express’sfeatured cover story, “Torture in Algeria: An Unpublished Testimony,” offered asensationalist report on colonial violence and violation that seemed to anticipatethe testimonial pleasure of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib.76 From soldiers’private collections were “snapshots” of corpses and heads severed by both theFrench army and the FLN. One image was of a naked Algerian girl standing inConstantine’s full sun, with her wrists held by two armed French soldiers, onewith a small smile, the other with a cigarette dangling from his mouth; face front,her breasts and pubic area are blocked out in black. Such “coverage” conveyednot only the sins of an unjust war but also ambiguous messages about what wasbeing confessed, what was being shown, and who was to blame. In 2001, severalyears before Jacques Chirac’s attempt to put into legislation the “positive role” ofFrench colonial pursuits, Le monde diplomatique profiled the previous forty yearsof the teaching of history in French public schools to argue that “colonial historyitself, and the resistances it created . . . were expurgated from school curriculums”to produce a generation with a warped knowledge of Algeria and an “expunged,bowdlerized history” of the Algerian war.77 It was not because teachers had notime or there were too many required courses but because, as Jean-Pierre Rioux,then inspector general of national education, explained his own reluctance to giveit too much emphasis, “the Algerian war was not very easily placed in a politi-cally correct vision, especially after Auschwitz.”78 It is against such a refusal thatStora had been making the case to give that war a name, relentlessly, for sometime.79 But colonial history was not and cannot be reduced to the Algerian war:systematic violations against persons and property spilled long before and far

beyond its edges.Perhaps the question for students of colonialism is not why this memory andnot another, why some invocations of the colonial and not others; rather, it isa question prompted by Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning against “idl[ing] in the

75. This is not because historians had no access to this information. World War II – period depart-mental and national archives became available in the 1990s. See Marc Bernardot, Camps d’étrangers (Paris: Croquant, 2008), 51n15.

76. Jacques Duquesne, “Torture en Algérie: Un témoignage inédit,” L’Express, November 30,2000, 56 – 61.

77. Maurice T. Maschino, “L’histoire expurgée de la guerre d’Algérie,” Le monde diplomatique,

February 2001, 8 – 9.78. Maschino, “L’histoire expurgée de la guerre d’Algérie,” 8.79. Among his many efforts to rewrite that history, see Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli:

La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); and Stora, Le transfert d’unemémoire: De “l’Algérie française” au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: La Découverte, 1999).

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garden of knowledge.”80 What animates effective rather than idle colonial history is not its timeliness — how well it fits current politics and the stories longrehearsed — but how deeply it disrupts the stories we seek to tell, what untimelyincisions it makes into received narratives, how much it refuses to yield to thepathos of moral outrage or to new heroes, subaltern or otherwise. Nicholas BDirks posed a question not unrelated in the 1980s when the academic rush tostudy colonial India coincided with a renewed popular nostalgia for the BritishRaj. He asked whether colonial studies was hot because it had become “safe” foscholarship.81 If the parallel stands, so would a concomitant question: is coloniahistory really a charged terrain, or is it somehow safer to reexamine now?

Confessions concerning French Algeria may be “safe” because they redeemthose willing to speak and the memory of what long remained dismissed andunheard, if not unspoken. Shocked moral outrage may suggest the innocence othose who were duped, ignorant, and not to blame. Feature stories on colonial waatrocities may be “safe” because they have the perverse effect of suggesting thatsuch individuated truths are redemptive. Exigencies of war leave unquestionedsustained violence and the threat of violation as structured features of “normal”colonial operations.

What is more, these are finished acts that can be relegated to the passé com posé (past tense). There was wrong done; we all live with regrets — beginningand end of story. Regrets themselves can be soothing and safe. Those regretsdepicted in the French film Indochine were not a counterhistory to the chic, coowhite-linen nostalgia Catherine Deneuve wears with such pathos in the film, norwas the regret portrayed in the steamier pedophilic pleasures of the movie adapta

tion of Duras’s The Lover .82

Both films have perversely fed Vietnam’s attractionas one of France’s most popular (sex) tourist and honeymoon destinations. But iis for students of colonialism to register and analyze how certain kinds of querieare rendered safe for public consumption and scholarly inquiry. Moral outragelike compassion, has a history of its own. As Didier Fassin argues, compassion i

80. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996).

81. Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press1992), 5. Arif Dirlik placed the onus elsewhere, attributing the surge to the increased presence of

self-identified postcolonial intellectuals in England and the United States seeking to “constitute theworld in [their own] self-image.” See Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism inthe Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 329.

82. Indochine, directed by Regis Wargnier (Paradis Films, France, 1992); L’amant , directed byJean-Jacques Annaud (Films A2, France, 1992).

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83. Didier Fassin, “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies inFrance,” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005): 362 – 87.

84. Swinney, “Aphasia,” 31 – 32.85. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” inStudies in Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 121.

86. Emmanuel Todd, Le destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocrat-ies occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Nancy Green, “ Le Melting-Pot : Made in America, Produced

a poor substitute for political entitlements and claims.83 This raises several ques-tions: can this inundation of intellectual and political labor on the colonial pastserve as an act of closure and of completion, as a new benchmark of virtue, muchas compassion for refugees and not political rights for “illegal immigrants” servestoday? Does this “filling out” of French history do other kinds of political work?Does this making whole proffer a “new” moral narrative, not a repentance as somany claim but a renewed pride that to be French is to rise above one’s past preju-dices and history, that reclaiming that history confers a new sense of moral andnational conscience — precisely when the borders of Europe are contested andracism in Europe is on the rise?

Race and Aphasic States

Some psychologists refer to aphasia as a “comprehension deficit,” others as a par-tial “knowledge loss,” “disruptions to comprehension and production of language

in both oral and written form.” Aphasics are often “agrammatic,” displaying dif-ficulty comprehending “structural relationships” — an anomaly that reveals morewidespread and fundamental cognitive and epistemic organization.84 Whetherone fully accepts the claim that French history has gone through an impaired stateassociated with aphasics, one thing is clear: aphasia highlights — far more thandoes “forgetting” — important features of the relationship among French histori-cal production, the “immigrant question,” and the absence/presence of colonialrelations. At issue is the irretrievability of a vocabulary, a limited access to it, asimultaneous presence of a thing and its absence, a presence and the misrecogni-tion of it. As Roman Jakobson reminds us, in aphasia, the “context is the indis-

pensable and decisive factor.”85 Not least, what I call colonial aphasia has produced misrecognitions such as

the well-worn claim that racism is an organic American problem, not a Frenchone, as the sociologist Emmanuel Todd repeatedly insisted in his 1994 book Ledestin des immigrés. Nancy Green parsed Todd’s categorical argument: “TheUnited States has a major problem with race, France does not.”86 By what grid of

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intelligibility could Todd have made such a claim? Racism for him was “a pecu-liarly American institution,” one that he claimed was an American import “thruson French history.”87

As a concept, colonial aphasia speaks directly to the 2005 film Caché ( Hidden), in which Georges Laurent, a successful TV host of a literary program, andhis family find their bourgeois lives unraveled by a series of videocassettes placedat the door of their home.88 Childhood memories of an Algerian boy, Majidwhose mother and father worked as servants for Laurent’s parents and who livedwith Laurent and his family, are punctuated by the murder of Majid’s family inthe 1961 Paris massacre of supposed members of the FLN and Majid’s departurefor an orphanage. “Hidden” in Caché is at once the camera, the memory, thephotographer — a history of dispossession and the history of French empireThere is nothing “forgotten” by either of the two grown men. This film tracka “disconnect” between words and things, an inability to recognize people andthings in the world and assign proper names to them. Nor did the film fare betterthan French historiography. None of the laudatory reviews of Caché ’s “brilliant”treatment of hidden pasts comments on or even alludes to the colonial watermarkof the film, the violent history it reenacts, or the “proximity of extremes” thadivides Laurent’s and Majid’s adult lives.89

There are other sites of colonial aphasia that cut deeply into the politics of dissociation. Why, for example, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when French historians were so taken with Pierre Nora’s turn to les lieux de mémoire (memory sitesin his multivolume celebration of national sites of remembrance, were immigrantsso absent from it?90 The only colonial lieux de mémoire in Nora’s first five thou

sand pages were viewed not from Saigon, Dakar, or the homesteads French set-tlers carved from confiscated Algerian orchards, fields, and farms, but through the

in France,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1205. Green writes that “there is one categorythat has been conspicuously absent from most French discourses about minorities: race.” Green, “ Le

Melting-Pot ,” 1205.87. Green, “ Le Melting-Pot ,” 1205.88. Caché , directed by Michael Haneke (Les Films du Losange, France, 2005).89. See the following reviews of Caché : Jake Meaney, January 27, 2006, www.stylusmagazine

com/articles/movie_review/cache.htm; Bill Long, “Living (and Dying) with Our Secrets,” May1, 2006, www.drbilllong.com/CurrentEventsVII/Cache.html; Wesley Morris, “ ‘Cache’ Keeps It

Secrets Brilliantly,” January 13, 2006, www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie@id=8349Faizan Rashid, “Dubai Film Festival 2005, Day 4: Cache,” movies.theemiratesnetwork.comdiff/2005/review.php?mv=REVIEW-1164 (accessed April 24, 2007); and Kevin Yeoman, April 172006, www.thecelebritycafe.com/reviews/cache.

90. Noiriel, French Melting Pot , 3.

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imperial prism of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris.91 Why was there suchample room to remember the partage de l’espace-temps (division of space-time)that separated Paris from its provinces but no reference to that pervasive politicaldistinction that still divides archival storage, history writing, and popular memorybetween what was “outre-mer” (overseas) and what was France?92 Noiriel con-fronted Nora on just that, as did Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. She remembersthat when she asked Nora about the absence of colonial lieux de mémoire in thosevolumes, his answer was that there were none.93

There is nothing that Nora “forgot.” Nor did he not know of the expungedplaces. On the contrary, Nora’s construction of what he deemed relevant to Frenchnational memory defied his own career path and biography. From a family of lagrande bourgeoisie parisienne (the Paris upper class) and schooled in historyat the Sorbonne, Nora’s first teaching assignment at age twenty-seven was at alycée in the Algerian city of Oran, where he remained between the summers of1958 and 1960. Upon return to Paris, he spent the next few months writing hisfirst book, Les Français d’Algérie.94 In its preface, the eminent colonial historianCharles-André Julien praised his disciple’s craftsmanship: Nora’s “acute” skillsof observation joined with a “strict historical education” that allowed him to standapart from those who embraced the excesses of “anticolonial totalitarianism.” ByJulien’s account, Nora was “committed to understanding the milieu in which helived, one that required a will to sympathy without excluding the liberty of judg-ment and, when necessary, severity.”95

And judgmental it was. Nora’s nationalistic disdain and class contempt forthose who made up “les Français d’Algérie” figured on nearly every page and

most clearly in his description of the shared characteristics of the “ambiguousFrench community” in Algeria. They had three traits in common: all were psy-chologically “déclassé” from their own nations, all left behind a “manqué” lifein Europe, and all were products of 120 years of “Europe’s sporadic injection of

91. Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 4 vols., vol. 2, La nation (Par is: Gallimard, 1984 – 86)275 – 319. After a public exchange between Noiriel and Nora on the absence of any reference toimmigrants in either of these first two volumes, Nora invited Noiriel to contribute an essay to thethird volume (a decade after the first two appeared). See Gérard Noiriel, “Français et étrangers,”in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (condensed version) (Paris: Gallimard, 1997),2:2433 – 65.

92.

Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3.93. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, personal communication with the author, New York, May2001.

94. Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Par is: René Julliard, 1961).95. Charles-André Julien, introduction to Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, 8 – 9.

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96. Nora, Les Français d’Algérie, 83.97. Sigmund Freud, Contribution à la conception des aphasies (1891; Paris: Presses Universi

taires de France, 1983), 51, 61. I thank the psychiatrist and anthropologist Richard Rechtmann fodiscussing aphasia with me. For an incisive use of Freud’s notion of “denial” with reference to racein France, see Didier Fassin, “Du déni a la dénégation: Psychologie politique de la représentation desdiscriminations,” in De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société françaiseed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 133 – 57.

98. A similar a rgument — that French colons were not really French — informs Charles-AndréJulien, preface to Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution Française et le problème

colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1961). In his preface to Toussaint Louverture, published in thesame year as Nora’s Les Français d’Algérie, Julien notes that the “préjugés racistes” of white habitants in Saint-Domingue were those of men who “did not transport their patrie on the soles of theirshoes,” men who spoke of Louis XVI not as “their sovereign ‘but’ with the same indifference theywould have to a foreign prince.” Julien, preface to Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 9.

undesirables.”96 Nora’s story is of Algeria’s colonists who were political deporteesand malcontents; a first wave condemned after the failed coup d’état in 1851, asecond wave made up of defeated communards in 1871, and a third formed bya “proletarian flow” from southern Europe between 1881 and 1901 that broughtAlgeria’s European population to 365,000 (83). Most were legally naturalized asFrench in 1889 (85).

Nora was

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