Seminars

Beyond France

Year Founded 2014

Seminar # 763

StatusActive

This University Seminar focuses on the transnational material, intellectual and symbolic exchanges that have characterized the regions that once composed successive French empires since the seventeenth century. The seminar will not be an exercise in colonial or imperial history, organized around the opposition between « center » and « periphery », but rather an exploration of connections and lines of fragmentation within that space. The goal of the seminar will be to explore not only France’s global expansion and retraction in the modern period, but, no less significantly, the after-lives of the French empire in various post-colonies, networks, and institutions. Our goal is to map a distinct—but not isolated—world within the “globe,” one conditioned but not defined by France, its empires, its language, and its ecumene. Inherently interdisciplinary, the seminar will bring together scholars in the humanities and the social sciences from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa in order to understand these complex exchanges that reach « Beyond France ».

Chair/s

Ralph Ghoche

rghoche@barnard.edu

Madeline Woker

madeline.woker@princeton.edu

Rapporteur/s

Jihad Azahrai

ja3858@columbia.edu

External Website

Past Meetings

Meeting Schedule

Scheduled

16
Nov

November 16, 20265:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Columbia Maison Française

Anatomy of a Colonial Fantasy

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Fatima-Ezzahrae Touilila, New York University

Respondent/s

Madeline Woker, Princeton University

Abstract

The decades of the 1910s and 1920s showed a record of articles and administrative reports on the Islamic institution of the caliphate among European colonialists. According to the French Prime Minister, Raymond Poincaré, the question of the Caliphate was “among those that motivated the most controversy among [European] writers and publicists,” and “made the ink of orientalists flow profusely.” At the peak of their expansion into Muslim territories, the French saw the caliphate as a crucial preoccupation for the future of their empire. As a result, the caliphate became a prolific site of discourse, a productive locus at the intersection of diplomacy, orientalism, and colonial governance. If the subject deserved extended imperial concern, it was because colonialists considered the caliphate as the opaque repository of all Muslim dreams, a utopia carried in each and every Muslim. This chapter inverts the gaze to show that this description applied more acutely to French imperialists’ conception of the caliphate than to Muslims’ understanding of the institution. Rather than considering the caliphate as a site of Islamic subjectification, the chapter considers it as the nodal point of colonial subjectivity. I trace how the idea of the caliphate became a conceptual repository from which French imagination drew, and how visions of the caliphate oscillated between colonial nightmares and colonial dreams.

Scheduled

28
Jan

January 28, 20275:30 pm - 7:00 pm

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Judith Surkis, Rutgers University

Abstract

Scheduled

25
Feb

February 25, 20275:30 pm - 7:00 pm

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Madina Thiam, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

Scheduled

01
Apr

April 1, 20275:30 pm - 7:00 pm

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Madeleine Dobie, Columbia University

Abstract

Showing all 4 results

Past Meetings

Scheduled

16
Oct

October 16, 202612:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Buell Hall, Room 300S

Columbia University

The Return: US-educated Chinese Architects in Shanghai, 1914-1949

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Esther Da Costa Meyer, Princeton University

Respondent/s

Cary Liu, Princeton University Art Museum

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader project concerning the impact of colonialism on architectural history. It explores the professional, cultural, and psychological tensions faced by the first generations of US-trained Chinese architects who returned to work in Shanghai, the most important treaty port opened to Western powers following the First Opium War (1839-42). Despite their credentials, they were usually relegated to subaltern positions in foreign architectural offices and met with pervasive forms of racial discrimination. The consolidation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Guomindang in 1928 ushered in a period of momentous change. Chinese architectural firms proliferated, securing commissions from both the nationalist government and the private sector. Yet the young architects’ liminal position between the transnational networks forged as students abroad and their allegiance to a new, independent China had profound implications for their architecture and their personal lives.

Scheduled

18
Sep

September 18, 20264:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Faculty House

Book Talk with Doyle Calhoun

View Abstract

Speaker/s

Doyle Calhoun, University of Cambridge

Respondent/s

Walid Bouchakour, Trinity College, Connecticut

Abstract

Throughout the French empire, from the Atlantic and the Caribbean to West and North Africa, men, women, and children responded to enslavement, colonization, and oppression through acts of suicide. In The Suicide Archive (Duke University Press, 2024), forthcoming in French as Mourir pour n'être à personne (La Découverte), Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and neocolonialism, from the time of slavery to the Algerian War for Independence to the “Arab Spring.” Noting that suicide was either obscured in or occluded from French colonial archives, Calhoun turns to literature and film to show how aesthetic forms and narrative accounts can keep alive the silenced histories of suicide as a political language. Drawing on scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings alongside contemporary African and Afro-Caribbean novels, film, and Senegalese oral history, Calhoun outlines how such aesthetic works rewrite histories of resistance and loss. Consequently, Calhoun offers a new way of writing about suicide, slavery, and coloniality in relation to literary history. Please note: this talk will involve discussion of suicide as well as colonial and state violence.

Showing all 2 results

For last year’s schedule, click the Past Meetings button. For older seminar meetings, please reference your seminar page in the Annual Report.