In revisiting the Popular Front sixty years on, this book explores the link between metropolitan France and the empire at a defining moment in their history.

By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.

This landmark collection by an international group of scholars and public intellectuals represents a major reassessment of French colonial culture and how it continues to inform thinking about history, memory, and identity. This reexamination of French colonial culture, provides the basis for a revised understanding of its cultural, political, and social legacy and its lasting impact on postcolonial immigration, the treatment of ethnic minorities, and national identity.

The authors highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers, artists, and other intellectuals to respond to the crises of the decade.

Faith in Empire is an innovative exploration of French colonial rule in West Africa, conducted through the prism of religion and religious policy. Elizabeth Foster examines the relationships among French Catholic missionaries, colonial administrators, and Muslim, animist, and Christian Africans in colonial Senegal between 1880 and 1940. In doing so she illuminates the nature of the relationship between the French Third Republic and its colonies, reveals competing French visions of how to approach Africans, and demonstrates how disparate groups of French and African actors, many of whom were unconnected with the colonial state, shaped French colonial rule. Among other topics, the book provides historical perspective on current French controversies over the place of Islam in the Fifth Republic by exploring how Third Republic officials wrestled with whether to apply the legal separation of church and state to West African Muslims.

Before the Vichy regime, there was ostensibly only one France and one form of colonialism for French West Africa (FWA). World War II and the division of France into two ideological camps, each asking for legitimacy from the colonized, opened for Africans numerous unprecedented options. French Colonialism Unmasked analyzes three dramatic years in the history of FWA, from 1940 to 1943, in which the Vichy regime tried to impose the ideology of the National Revolution in the region. Ruth Ginio shows how this was a watershed period in the history of the region by providing an in-depth examination of the Vichy colonial visions and practices in fwa. She describes the intriguing encounters between the colonial regime and African society along with the responses of different sectors in the African population to the Vichy policy. Although French Colonialism Unmasked focuses on one region within the French Empire, it has relevance to French colonial history in general by providing one of the missing pieces in research on Vichy colonialism. Ruth Ginio is a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of articles in International Journal of African Historical Studies, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, Cahiers d'etudes africaines, and several other journals.

The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.

A striking new interpretation of colonial policing and political violence in three empires between the two world wars.

Harry Gamble examines the controversies of political and educational reform in French West Africa from the early to mid-twentieth century.

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France. Introduction: The Postcolonial Nation, Fiona Barclay Part One: Narrative Gaps 1. Amnesia about Anglophone Africa: France’s Rhodesian mind-set, its manifestations and its legacies, 1947–58, Joanna Warson 2. From ‘écrivains coloniaux’ to écrivains de ‘langue française’: strata of un/acknowledged memories, Gabrielle Parker Part Two: The Algerian War, Fifty Years On 3. Conflicting memories: modernisation, colonialism and the Algerian war appelés in Cinq colonnes à la une, Iain Mossman 4. Derrida’s virtual space of spectrality: cinematic haunting and the law in Mon Colonel (Herbiet, 2006), Fiona Barclay 5. ‘Le devoir de mémoire’: the poetics and politics of cultural memory in Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie, Jennifer Mullen 6. (Un)packing the suitcases: postcolonial memory and iconography, William Kidd Part Three: The Transnational Family 7. Interrogating the transnational family: memory, identity and cultural bilingualism in Sous la clarté de la lune (Traoré, 2004), Zélie Asava 8. Continuity and discontinuity in the family: looking beyond the post-colonial in Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (Claudel, 2008), Fiona Handyside Part Four: Contemporary Commemorations 9. Anti-racism, republicanism and the Sarkozy years: SOS Racisme and the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République, Thomas Martin 10. Playing out the postcolonial: football and commemoration, Cathal Kilcline 11. Crime and penitence in slavery commemoration: from political controversy to the politics of performance, Nicola Frith