Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa

Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa GREGORY MANN THE OVERSEAS SECTION OF THE FRENCH NATIONAL ARCHIVES at Aix-en-Provence is packed with American doctoral students, and other scholars specializing in French history, who are busily elbowing aside genealogists and students of the "old colonies" to get at files on Algeria, Vietnam, and Congo. As a historian of francophone West Africa, I welcome all this activity, as well as the chance to engage in a deeper dialogue with my Europeanist colleagues. At the same time, I query the degree to which French colonial history remains the history of France outside the Hexagon (or "continental France"), and how the boundaries of inquiry, or at least of the academy, might limit historians to nibbling on the edges of potentially rich local histories.' Aix's Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer (CAOM) is not the only place in the south of France where one finds traces of the colonial past. Focusing on the unique history of the town of Frejus (Var) and on war memorials built there and in the French Soudan (today's Mali) between the 1920s and the 1990s, this essay asserts the importance of locality in colonial history and attempts to illustrate I am grateful for the comments of Alice Conklin, Laura Lee Downs, and the anonymous referees of the AHR. This article was written and researched with the support of the Fulbright Program, Northwestern University, the Camargo Foundation, the Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall (Paris), and a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia University. I thank Karine Valerie Walther for providing research assistance with contemporary French periodicals. An earlier version of this paper was presented as "Locating the Imperial and the Empirical in Post-Colonial Francophone Histories" at the 116th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, January 3-6,2002. 1 For an essay on the revival of colonial studies with particular reference to France and Africa, see Frederick Cooper, "Decolonizing Situations: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951-2001," French Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 47-76. A recent historiographic survey with an emphasis on Indochina is Robert Aldrich, "Imperial Mise en valeur and Mise en scene: Recent Works on French Colonialism," Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 917-36. See also "Writing French Colonial Histories," Alice Conklin and Julia Clancey-Smith, eds., special issue, French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (2004); Gary Wilder, "Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity," in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, (Durham, N.C., 2003); Daniel J. Sherman, "The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism," French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (2000): 707-29. Wilder and Conklin and Clancy-Smith suggest that historians of France have handled the curves in the "imperial turn" rather differently than have historians of other European nations, Great Britain in particular. See the essays in Burton, After the Imperial Turn. The terms "colonialism" and "imperialism" are frequently used interchangeably. In this paper, I prefer colonialism, following a distinction laid out by Henri Brunschwig some years ago. For Brunschwig, colonialism, like imperialism, rested "on the assumption [of] political domination and economic supervision over the territories which had been conquered. But it excluded a third assumption, which was vital to imperialism: the possession of a clear conscience." Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 187/-19/4: Myths and Realities, William Glanville Brown, trans. (London, 1966), 180-81, emphasis added. 409 410 Gregory Mann past and present connections between metropolitan and colonial sites.? It also poses a pair of related questions about methodology, history, and location': What units of analysis will illuminate broad questions yet allow the richness of individual stories to unfold in particular sites? What might districts, towns, or camps have to tell us that colonies and empires might not? In a recent article on imperial India, Mrinalini Sinha asks whether or not new directions in the study of British imperialism and domesticity "reduce [the empire] to a site from which to interrogate the metropole." She suggests that the challenge facing historians is "to recognize simultaneously the specificities of [the metropole and the colony's] separate imperiallocations."4 Here I want not so much to take up her challenge-which diverges slightly from Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper's call to "treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field"5-but to rephrase it and to push it a little further. I would like to register a plea that the specificities of particular places be brought to the fore, not only to ground research empirically but also to disaggregate and cast new light upon colonial and postcolonial circumstances. Colonial histories need a sense of place-an appreciation of the contrasts between, say, Guadeloupe and Paris or Niger-and the ability to evoke the difference." But they need more than that: they deserve the kind of local analysis that has the potential to illuminate the emergence of singular social forms or particular politics, the accidents of history by which, for example, a seaside town in southern France becomes the temporary home of thousands of West Africans, 2 In my usage, locality, the identity of a place, is the product of histories that create particular social forms, types of community, and vectors of memory while generating possibilities for the future. Localities enable meaning. They are in this sense akin to Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire; Nora, "General Introduction: Between Memory and History," in Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Arthur Goldhammer, trans., 3 vols. (New York, 1996-1998), see esp. 1: 15. Note that my use of "locality" differs from that of Arjun Appadurai, who uses the term to refer to a phenomenological quality. My definition more closely resembles the meaning he lends to "neighborhood," in that the latter characterizes a social form; Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996), 178-99. See also Mamadou Diouf, "The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 679-702. 3 By "location," I mean something quite different than do most scholars of postcolonial studies. I use the term to refer to place and not to subject position; see Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, "Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, 'Postcoloniality,' and the Politics of Location," Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 292-310. Avowedly postcolonial scholarship veers from the quite specifically localized-for example, "Under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994)-to place as mere metaphor; see the caution expressed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A C (...truncated)