The Colonial Unconscious - by Elizabeth Ezra (Hardcover)

About the Book

France between the two World Wars was pervaded by representations of its own colonial power, expressed forcefully in the human displays at the expositions coloniales, films starring Josephine Baker, and the short stories of Paul Morand, and more...

Book Synopsis

France between the two World Wars was pervaded by representations of its own colonial power, expressed forcefully in the human displays at the expositions coloniales, films starring Josephine Baker, and the short stories of Paul Morand, and more subtly in the avant-garde writings of René Crevel and Raymond Roussel. In her lively book, Elizabeth Ezra interprets a fascinating array of cultural products to uncover what she terms the "colonial unconscious" of the Jazz Age--the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of exoticism and the double bind of a colonial discourse that foreclosed the possibility of the very assimilation it invited.Ezra situates the apotheosis of French colonialism in relation to both the internal tensions of the colonial project and the competing imperialisms of Great Britain and the United States. Examining both the uses and the limits of psychoanalytic theories of empire, she proposes a reading of French colonialism which, while historically specific, also contributes to our understanding of contemporary culture. The enduring legacy of empire is felt to this day, as Ezra demonstrates in a provocative epilogue on the remarkable similarities between the rhetoric of colonial France and accounts of the French victory in the 1998 World Cup.

Review Quotes

The Colonial Unconscious is a significant contribution to the growing field of French Cultural Studies. Ezra's close readings... bring much that is new and original to our understanding of interwar France. Furthermore, this book will be of considerable interest to scholars of contemporary France, for it offers insight into the working of colonial ideology.

Elizabeth Ezra's eloquent study of race and colonialism not only maps the pervasive influence of racist ideology on French cultural constructions of the nation during the interwar period, but also shows how this ideology continues to shape nationalist rhetoic in France today.... The Colonial Unconscious is a major contribution to the growing field of studies of the colonial past and its impact on French literature and culture. Scholars of French colonialism owe much to Ezra for this superb acheological study of the development of the colonial unconscious in the twentieth century.

Ezra's essays are full of dexterous word play and suggestive and at times compelling ideas about how a colonial unconscious functioned in interwar France--an unconscious that surely has left residues that are resurfacing today.

Ezra's slender yet dense volume is the latest contribution to the growing scholarly literature on the history of colonial representations and their impact on collective mentalities during the interwar period, a relatively new field that enriches the already substantal corpus of works analyzing political, social, and economic dimensions of French colonialism.

This fascinating study examines the extent to which the 'idee coloniale' pervaded French cultural life of the Jazz Age and the ambivalent ways in which colonialism was presented.... Her study represents a challenging interpretation of the French colonial legacy and the rhetoric with which it was surrounded.

About the Author

Elizabeth Ezra teaches in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Stirling. She is the author of Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur, editor of European Cinema, and coeditor of France in Focus: Film and National Identity and Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.