✍ Scribed by Itay Lotem
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity.
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
Comparing Memories
Two Historiographies
Structure
Part I: France
Chapter 1: Tracing Postcolonial Silence in France
Disengagement in the Wake of Decolonisation
Immigration and the Colonial Settlement
Silence and the Generational Shift of the 1980s
Changing Opinions about Immigration
Conclusion
Chapter 2: A Silence that Never Was? Appropriating the Algerian War of Independence
The Metropole and the War in Algeria
After Algerian Independence: Moving on?
Une guerre sans nom: The Military and the Memory of Algeria
The Public Memory of Algeria: The Silence Busters
Commemorating the War
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Devoir de mémoire on the Road to 2005: The Republic and the Emergence of Memory Activism
Devoir de mémoire
The Memory of 17 October 1961: Vichy as a Link to Memory Discourse
The Memory of Slavery and the Taubira Law
The Aftermath of the Taubira Law
The Gestation of the 23 February Law: The Pied-noir Community and Devoir de Mémoire
Earlier Pied-noir Activism: The First Memory Activists?
National Pied-noir Memory Activism and the 2005 Law
A Memorial Explosion
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Memory as Republican Critique: Race and Anti-Racism After 2005
The Dieudonné Affair and the Immediate Pre-2005 Context
The Indigènes de la République and the Colonial Republic
The CRAN: Blackness and the Memory of Slavery
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Memory as a Marker of Political Affiliation
The 23 February 2005 Law as a Politicising Moment
‘No Repentance’: The Symbolic Politics of the ‘Neo-reactionary’ Right?
Memory and the Left
Conclusion
Part II: Britain
Chapter 6: Silence I: Why Look Back in Anger? De-Prioritising Empire
Empire Is Over: But Which Empire?
The Empire Strikes Again? From the Falklands to the Blairite Empire 2.0
Representations of Empire in the Public Space: The Short Life of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum
Empire 2.0? The Brexit Wars
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Silence II: Convivial Multiculturalism’s Tyranny of the Present
Rethinking the Island Race Without Empire
Anti-racist Resistance: Multiculturalism and the Forgetting of Empire
Challenges to a Multicultural Nation
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Breaking the Chains? Slavery in Britain’s Public Space
Beginnings of Commemoration: Bristol and Liverpool, Local Memories
The Road to 2007
The Bicentenary: A Turning Point?
After 2007: A Shared Memory?
2015: The Compensation Debate and the State’s Responsibility
Conclusion
Chapter 9: New Contestations of Race and Empire
The Rise of Black History
Contested Public Spaces: Whose Memory?
The New Public Intellectuals? Faces of Post-Imperial Reckoning
Conclusion
Chapter 10: The Tale of the Imperial Balance Sheet
The Rise of Niall Ferguson
Remembering the Mau Mau?
The Mau Mau Trial—Reparative Justice or a Site of Memory?
The Balance Sheets on the Daily Mail
Epilogue: When Statues Fall
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Interviews
Newspapers, Periodicals and Online Media
Publications
Index
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