France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites.
Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.
Gary Wilder is a professor in anthropology, with cross-appointments in history and French, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Part 1: The Imperial Nation-State 1. Introduction: Working through the Imperial Nation-State 2. Framing Greater France: A Real Abstraction Part 2: Colonial Humanism 3. Toward a New Colonial Rationality: Welfare, Science, Administration 4. A Doubled and Contradictory Form of Government 5. Temporality, Nationality, Citizenship Part 3: African Humanism 6. Negritude I: Practicing Citizenship in Imperial Paris 7. Negritude II: Cultural Nationalism 8. Negritude III: Critique of (Colonial) Reason Conclusion: Legacies of the Imperial Nation-State Notes Bibliography Index
