Representations of Britain and British Colonialism in French Adventure Fiction, 1870–1914

2006 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Cornick
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
French Society ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Jules Verne ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Adventure Novels

Recent scholarship has rediscovered the plural manifestations of a colonial culture in France, emerging after 1870 and reaching its apogee in the early 1930s. The period between 1870 and 1914, when France was undergoing rapid modernisation and was fully engaged in the process of consolidating its distinct national identity, constitutes the richest period for the impregnation of French society by this culture. This article reveals how images of British colonialism contrasted with representations of French colonial practice across a number of examples of popular adventure novels written between 1867 and 1903 by contemporaries and imitators of Jules Verne: Alfred Assollant, Paul d'Ivoi and Colonel Driant.

Modern Magic and the War on Miracles in French Colonial Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Culture ◽  
French Colonial

On 16 September 1856, gentleman illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin embarked from Marseille on the steamship Alexandre bound for the embattled French colony of Algeria. Thirty-six hours later, a detachment of French soldiers met him in the port of Algiers. Recently retired as an entertainer to pursue research in optics and the emerging field of applied electricity, Robert-Houdin was about to return to the stage in a series of magic performances that a French general purportedly called the most important campaign in the pacification of indigenous Algeria (Chavigny 1970: 134).

Co-constituting Fijian identity: the role of constitutions in Fijian national identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mudaliar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Island States ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter focuses on the role that constitutions play in national identity, particularly in states that are recently independent and constrained by a colonial legacy. It uses Fiji as a case study, exploring how British colonialism influenced conceptions of Fijian national identity in the constitutional texts of 1970, 1990 and 1997. The chapter explores the indigenous ethno-nationalist ideals that underpinned these constitutions, which led to the privileging of indigenous Fijian identity within the wider national identity. However, in 2013, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama introduced a new constitution which shifted away from previous ethno-nationalist underpinnings towards a more inclusive national identity through the promotion of a civic nationalist agenda. In doing so, Bainimarama’s goal of reducing ethnic conflict has seen a constitutional re-imagining of Fijian identity, which includes the introduction of new national symbols, and a new electoral system, alongside equal citizenry clauses within the Constitution. This study offers a unique insight into power and identity within post-colonial island states.

Muslim Integration and French Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
North African ◽  
French Society ◽  
Migration History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Research

The subject of Muslim integration has been the focus of much policy development, media engagement, and everyday conversation in France. Because of the strong rhetoric about national identity—a national identity based on Republican ideals of universalism, equality, and French secularism (laïcité)—the question often becomes, “Can Muslims, as Muslims, integrate into French society and ‘be’ French?” In other contexts (e.g., the United States), religion may act as an aid in immigrants’ integration. In Europe, and France specifically, religion is viewed as an absolute hindrance to integration. Because of this, and thanks to a specific migration history of Muslims to France, the colonial grounding for the development of French nationality and secularism, and the French assimilationist model of integration, Muslims are often viewed as, at best, not able to integrate and, at worst, not willing to integrate into French society. The socioeconomic inequality between Muslim and non-Muslim French (as represented by life in the banlieues [suburbs]), the continued labeling of second- and third-generation North African Muslim youth as “immigrants,” the occurrence of terrorist attacks and radicalization on European soil, and the use of religious symbols (whether the head scarf or religious food practices) as symbols of intentional difference all add to the perception that Muslims are, and should be, the subject of integration efforts in France. While the discourse is often that Muslims have failed to integrate into French society through an acceptance and enactment of French values and policies, new research is suggesting that the “failed” integration of Muslims reveals a deeper failure of French Republican universalism, equality, and secularism.

West African Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. McCall
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
West African ◽  
Video Production ◽  
Video Technology ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
African Cinema ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
French Colonial

Motion picture technology developed at the dawn of the 20th century, just as the formal colonization of Africa was launched at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. While it took a few decades for cinema houses to spread in West Africa, by mid-century the colonial administrations began to use film as a means for conveying colonial culture to African subjects. For the British and French colonials, film was a means to shape public opinion. Both British and French colonial administrations criminalized indigenous filmmaking for fear of the subversive potential of anti-colonial messages—film communicated in one direction only. When West African nations became independent in the late 20th century, these restrictions vanished and Africans began to make films. This process played out differently in Francophone Africa than in Anglophone countries. France cultivated African filmmakers, sponsored training, and funded film projects. Talented and determined filmmakers in Anglophone Africa also struggled to produce celluloid films, but unlike their counterparts in former French colonies, they received little support from abroad. A significant number of excellent celluloid films were produced under this system, but largely in Francophone Africa. Though many of these filmmakers have gained global recognition, most remained virtually unknown in Africa outside the elite spaces of the FESPACO film festival and limited screenings at French embassies. Though West African filmmakers have produced an impressive body of high-quality work, few Africans beyond the intellectual elite know of Africa’s most famous films. This paradox of a continent with renowned filmmakers but no local film culture began to change in the 1990s when aspiring artists in Nigeria and Ghana began to make inexpensive movies using video technology. Early works were edited on VCRs, but as digital video technology advanced, this process of informal video production quickly spread to other regions. The West African video movie industry has grown to become one of the most prominent, diverse, and dynamic expressions of a pan-African popular culture in Africa and throughout the global diaspora.

Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-ḥērem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity: Reconsidering the Sabaean Text RES 3945 in Light of Biblical and Moabite Evidence

2007 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren A.S. Monroe
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
The South ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Early State ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
Tripartite Relationship

AbstractIn the biblical conquest accounts,hērem signifies ritual destruction and consecration to the deity of entire enemy populations and towns. The root hrm also appears in two extrabiblical conquest accounts: the Mesha Inscription and the Sabaean text, RES 3945. This article revisits the interpretation of the Sabaean text in light of recent scholarship in South Arabian Studies, and argues that RES 3945 should be placed on equal footing with the Mesha Inscription for its relevance for understanding the biblical hērem. Taken together, these sources situate the war-hērem in the context of early state formation, and suggest that the tripartite relationship between people, land and god, expressed in terms of b&ebrever&icaront, or &#147covenant,&#148 in ancient Israel, may in fact have found expression more widely, in a tribal, inland Palestinian setting with cultural connections extending into the South Arabian Peninsula.

Conjugality

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-403
Author(s):  
Danai S. Mupotsa
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Rite Of Passage ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ritual Process ◽  
Legal Infrastructure

The wedding is often observed as performing a narrative closure, for instance, as a ritual that acts as a rite of passage to proper sex, or proper gendered and sexuated statuses framed in the terms of heteronormativity and homonormativity. The aims of this article are to sit beside recent scholarship that examines marriage, as well as the law/legal infrastructure and language that offer conjugal rights, that is, social, economic, and legal rights, and confers statuses of personhood to those who have access to them. Bride, regardless of the specific gendered status and personhood occupied within legal, social, and economic terms here, does not (only) refer to the constituted individual who lives or experiences a gendered and sexed position and location but, rather, refers to the ritual process itself that comes to produce a range of positions, scenes, desires, practices intensities, and, finally, confusions around which the expression of liberal subjecthood, or ethnic and national identity, might emerge.

The Family Model of Society and Russian National Identity in Sergei N. Glinka's Russian Messenger (1808-1812)

Slavic Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Common People ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Common

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were “fathers” to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.

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