Using the concept of genre de vie: French geographers and colonial Algeria, c.1880-1949

By the mid-twentieth century, French geographers had produced substantial works of research aiming to classify genres de vie. They had broken with the idea that nomadic and sedentary genres de vie were the successive stages of a universal history of human societies, and argued instead that they were the result of human adaptations to specific natural environments. Within this new conceptual framework, nomadism was thus understood as a form of highly evolved genre de vie responding to the particular characteristics of the steppe. But if pastoral nomadism was the best possible adaptation to the dry steppe zone, on what natural basis could the extension of European sedentary agriculture be justified? Scientific answers to this question were of strategic importance in Algeria which was the most important colony of settlement in the French empire and in fact often considered as a part of France. Through the analysis of a corpus of works published by institutionally recognized geographers concerning Algeria and Algeria’s indigenous genres de vie (including doctoral theses, articles in the Annales de Géographie and literary reviews), the paper attempts to show how the concept of the ‘adaptation of mankind’ to the natural environment, when applied to Algeria, generated a series of intractable divides and deep contradictions. This in turn requires us to reconsider the idea that in French geography, the neo-Lamarckian concept of natural determinism systematically supported a distinction between so-called ‘European’ and ‘Native’ populations. By examining precisely the scientific usages of the concept of genre de vie in the colonial and imperial situation, the paper will attempt to reveal how the academic debates of the time were shaped by competing views of the civilizing mission of French colonialism in Algeria.     

Mussolini's colonial race laws and state-settler relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935-41)

Abstract Why in Mussolini's empire were relations between colonizers and colonized regulated by the government in Rome? The reason is not to be sought in the supposed tendency of Italians to fraternize with Africans but rather in the totalitarian nature of the regime and the rapidity with which the empire was populated. In a few years tens of thousands of Italians emigrated to Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI); the informal elaboration of common standards of behaviour on the part of colonists towards the local population would have required time while Mussolini intended to forge the empire following a strict hierarchy of racial relations.

By and large, Italians were in agreement with their government over the subordination of the colonized, but they disagreed with the forms that such subordination should assume. Many Italians violated the race laws; but mixing with Africans did not necessarily mean being on friendly terms with them. A significant minority of Italians went to AOI with the intention of making rapid and easy profits: they had no intention of settling permanently and were intolerant of any rules, including those aimed at racial segregation. Thus a clash developed between these Italians, who were not interested in long-term colonial projects, and the government which was determined to impose its own model of colonial order.     

Imperial reproductions: The circulation of colonial images across popular genres and media in the 1920s and 1930s

The Fascist phase of the Italian colonial experience was characterized by the diffusion of colonial discourses and imagery across Italian culture. Significantly, it was frequent for the same people to produce texts belonging to diverse genres, often cutting across different media and irrespective of distinctions between elite and popular audiences. Concentrating on representations of the East African territories which were eventually to constitute the Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) , the article analyses the way in which a selected number of images of the colonies spread across different genres and media, arguing in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to colonial processes of representation. Textual and visual mappings of Africa inscribed its territories with European symbols, value systems and signifiers. Geographers and travel writers, in particular, had a fundamental role in creating not only the physical but also the mental space for colonization. They enacted the transformation of East Africa from the dangerous and unmapped setting of the heroic acts of individual explorers to the stage for a collective colonial effort. In their footsteps there followed the discourse of tourism and the tourist industry, which was meant to integrate the image of the colonies with that of the peninsula.     

Protestantism,nation and diaspora in Imperial Germany

This article examines the close connection between Protestantism and nationalism in Imperial Germany within a transnational context. In the years before 1914, the Prussian State Church in particular strengthened the legal and organisational framework for an increasing number of diaspora congregations to become attached. These acted as an important vehicle to embed the nationalist rhetoric produced within the Reich into emigrants' notions of belonging. Whilst previous scholarship has noted this connection in general, the article sheds more detailed light on the mechanics and structure, but also on the limits, of this process. Feedback processes from periphery to centre, in turn, had an impact on German national identity construction as that of a nation that was not confined to state borders. Applying a constructionist theoretical framework, the contested question of whether the heterogeneity of Germans abroad allows for the application of the diaspora concept is answered affirmatively.     

Warfare,political identities,and displacement in Spain and Colombia

This paper explores the causes of displacement during civil wars. Recent scholarship has shown that conventional civil wars – those in which forces are relatively balanced – and irregular civil wars – those in which one side is substantially stronger than the other – exhibit different patterns of violence. We hypothesize that, while the mode of violence differs, the form of displacement should be consistent across the wars: displacement is a tactic of war that armed groups use to conquer new territories. By expelling civilians associated with rivals, armed groups improve their odds of gaining control of contested territory. This implies that members of a group are targeted for displacement because of their identity and presumed loyalties. We test the theory using two fine-grained datasets on individuals displaced during a conventional civil war, in Spain (1936–1939), and an irregular civil war, in Colombia (1964–). In both cases, the war cleavage was ideological and reflected in national elections: the locations where political parties received support indicated which populations were sympathetic to rivals. In both civil wars, we observe higher levels of displacement in locations where more sympathizers of rival armed groups reside. The article is the first comparison to our knowledge of the sub-national dynamics of displacement within two different civil wars and it shows that the microfoundations of displacement are similar across types. Finally, the article explains macro-level differences with a coherent micro-level framework.     

Islam and Politics: Egypt,Algeria, and Tunisia

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my dear daughter, Amal, who died on May 8, 1994, of cancer and pneumonia at the age of 29, leaving behind two little children.     

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo,Charles Maurras and colonial Madagascar

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1903–1937) is widely considered to be the first major writer of la francophonie and as Madagascar’s national poet. His untimely death has been interpreted as an act of rebellion against French colonial rule. However, little attention has been given to his outspoken attachment to the ideas of Charles Maurras and the far right Action Française. This article explores Rabearivelo’s politics, his ambivalent relationship with colonial rule and the complexity of the identity politics expressed in his work.     

Reprisal Violence and the Harkis in French Algeria, 1962

Rejecting notions of inherent violence, this article focuses upon the large numbers of Algerians from the French-organised anti-FLN Militias who were subjected to reprisals after the French exit from Algeria in 1962. Estimates of those killed range from 10,000 to 150,000, and the violence is justifiably described as brutal. The specificity of this violence has only emerged as a field of enquiry since the 1980s. Initially this stemmed from the impact of eyewitness accounts, combined with the emergence of organised pressure groups in France. Collectively these new voices spoke out against simplistic interpretations that reduced these Militias to pro-French villains in a heroic decolonisation narrative - a perspective reinforced by the recent historical research of Pierre Daum, François-Xavier Hautreux, Mohand Hamoumou, and Michel Roux. This article draws upon this historiography, but it also moves beyond it to situate Algeria within a global history of violence and to challenge interpretations that explain this violence solely in terms of a Franco-Algerian dynamic. Instead, the 1962 massacres must be understood in terms of broader global processes of violence that connect these generic contexts to the specificity of the Algerian case.     

Talking class,talking race: language,class, and race in the call center industry in South Africa

Against a backdrop of declining manufacturing employment, this article uses a study of the call center industry to argue that English language proficiency is central to new service jobs in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on research in Durban, we in this study show that access to call center work—especially the highest paid niches—is heavily mediated by English language skills generally attainable only at the most elite high schools. In doing so, we argue that access to English-medium education can challenge racial disadvantage, but simultaneously that English can help to consolidate white privilege through the continued association of a ‘prestigious’ accent with whiteness. The study accordingly reveals the importance of language in the changing intersectionality of race and class and, in doing so, underlines the value of social and cultural perspectives in labor geography.     

Chen,Li.Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty,Justice and Transcultural Politics

Inspired by comments released in the British press following the 2009 execution in China of a British citizen,Chinese Law in Impenal Eyes seeks to understand the roots of the dominant Western interpretation of Chinese law,one that in part still echoes the comments expressed over the case of the ship the Lady Hughesin 1784.Focusing on several pivotal moments in the Sino-Western encounter (mainly between Britain and China) between 1740 and 1840,the author depicts the ways in which the image of Chinese law was created and shaped,and how it acquired such lasting power.     

Instagram abroad: performance,consumption and colonial narrative in tourism

As a form of travel writing and a highly favoured marketing tool, Instagram provides a blueprint of the ideologies underpinning contemporary tourism. This article argues that consistent visual motifs on Instagram echo a colonial iconography that sees tourist destinations as available for possession and consumption, effacing local place and identity. The reproduction of three motifs – the tropical exotic, the promontory gaze and fantasised assimilation – mediatises ideations that, rather than depicting these destinations as contemporaneous spaces in which a tourist is a guest, depict them as ‘other’ realms for the tourist’s taking. Local residents, when pictured, are configured as genericised icons of exoticism that serve to imbue the tourist’s experience with authenticity. These visual tropes, paired with textual captions and hashtags, present tourists as the rightful occupants and users of local spaces in a way that echoes the colonial seizure of foreign lands, an action that is imaginatively performed as tourists enact these three motifs in Instagram posts. Taken together, the visual regime witnessed and performed on Instagram contributes to the imagined and real perpetuation of unequal power relations in global tourism, which continue to privilege wealthy tourists over local residents.