Empire and Culture The French Experience, 1830-1940

by Evans, Martin; Sackur, Amanda

• ISBN13: 9780333791813
• ISBN10: 0333791819
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume explores how the idea of empire in France was expressed in film, photography, painting and monuments. It analyzes how the image of the universal, civilizing mission saturated French society during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it examines how the subject peoples of the empire were represented in art and fiction. In this way, the authors underline that there was not just one single image of empire but many, ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left. The volume contains and in-depth consideration not just of the triumphalist images of empire but the oppositional ones, most notably the surrealists, which directly challenged the emergent colonial consensus.

Author Biography

Martin Evans is at the Centre for European Studies and Research at the University of Portsmouth.

Amanda Sackur is Research Associate, Francophone Area Studies, at University of Portsmouth.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Notes on the Contributors	x
1 Culture and Empire, 1830-1962: An Overview	1	(26)
Martin Evans
Part I Film
2 Poor Propaganda: French Colonial Films of the 1930's	27	(14)
Martin O'Shaugnessy
3 Un de la Légion: Myth Conception and Misconceptions	41	(16)
Marie-Hélène Heurtaud-Wright
Part II Photography
4 Surrealism, Colonialism and Photography	57	(14)
David Bate
5 Documents against Civilization	71	(20)
David Evans
Part III Food, Music and Dance
6 Indigestible Indo-China: Attempts to Introduce Vietnamese Food into France in the Interwar Period	91	(12)
Erica Peters
7 The 'Ballet blanc et noir': A Study of Racial and Cultural Identity during the 1931 Colonial Exhibition	103	(10)
Dana Hale
8 'Frenchmen in Disguise': French Musical Exoticism and Empire in the Nineteenth Century	113	(18)
Tom Cooper
Part IV Promoting the French Empire
9 Making Indo-China French: Promoting the Empire through Education	131	(17)
Nicola Cooper
10 The Empire and the Nation: The Place of Colonial Images in the Republican Visions of the French Nation	148	(13)
Timothy Baycroft
11 Portrait of the Young Woman as a Coloniale	161	(20)
Marie-Paule Ha
12 'All the World's a Stage', Especially in the Colonies: L'Exposition de Hanoi, 1902-3	181	(11)
Michael G. Vann
Bibliography	192	(12)
Index	204