HIS42810

This module will examine aspects of the interaction between France and French culture, on the one hand, and the societies and cultures of her colonial empire. Covering the years between the seizure of Algiers in 1830 and the end of the Algerian war in 1962, it concentrates on the two key areas of North Africa and Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). The texts for weekly discussion (all in English translation) are a mixture of French intellectual and literary responses to empire and texts written by 'indigenous' intellectuals, mapping their often ambiguous responses to French civilisation.

1. Introducing French colonial history
2. The Liberal Genocide: Alexis de Tocqueville on Algeria
3. Mapping the colonial world: The invention of Laos
4. The Uses of the Precolonial Past: Angkor Wat and the Granary of Africa
5. The Rickshaw: A Global History
6. Education and the Transformation of Traditional Culture: Mouloud Ferraoun and Nguyen Khac Vien
7. On Becoming Modern: Vu Trong Phung and 1930s Hanoi
8. Colonial Encounters 1: Albert Camus and Pied Noir Identities in Algeria
9. Colonial Encounters 2: Albert Memmi and the colonisers and the colonised in Tunisia
10. Colonial Encounters 3: Marguerite Duras on race and gender in Indochina
11. Writing Violence: Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre
12. The Battle of Algiers Remembered: Zohra Drif-Bitat and Gillo Pontecorvo