Seminars

This is the tenth chapter of my book manuscript, titled A Taxing Empire: Power and Taxation in the French Colonial World, 1850-1950. In this book, I use the insights of intellectual, political, social, and economic history to show that taxation was central to the making, operation, and unmaking of French colonialism and that a focus on taxation is uniquely revealing of the ways in which global relations of political and economic inequality were established and maintained in the modern age. In eleven chapters, I explore the history and politics of colonial taxation in the French empire over one hundred years and cover both the colonial territories which generated the highest levels of revenue and those where debates about tax policy were particularly consequential at various points in time. This qualitative and archive-based history of colonial taxation in the French colonial empire argues that taxation was not only a way of raising money for colonial states but also an instrument of rule, a defining feature of life under colonial rule, and a central object of anti-colonial resistance. This chapter is situated in part IV of the book –Taxation and the Crisis of Empire– which examines efforts to ward off the revolutionary and subversive potential of tax resistance in the French colonial world during the 1930s. While the preceding chapter looked at grassroots tax resistance in colonial Algeria and Vietnam during the Great Depression, this chapter is much more focused on French colonial policy.

The chapter we will read is the third in my book, The Future is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria. The book examines the multivocal feminist discourses that emerged in interwar Algeria in response to developments across the Middle East, including state feminist projects in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq as well as feminist movements in Egypt and Syria. These discussions also responded to local developments, including the large-scale entry of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes. This particular chapter examines how a diverse range of Muslim commentators agreed that women’s education was the first step in a broader project of women’s advancement. As they advocated for women’s education, they looked east to other countries in the region and inward to Islam’s own history of feminist reform to challenge French colonial ideology about Muslim misogyny and offer a vision of Algerian Muslim belonging to the modern world.

The exhibition L’Art nègre which took place in Dakar in 1966 is recognized as a pivotal event in the history of global postwar art and culture, but the architecture of the Musée dynamique which was built for this occasion remains to be fully parsed. How did this simple building achieve its complex aesthetics, conveying classicism, cosmopolitanism, and African modernity all at once? How does the history of its collaborative design and chameleonic afterlife fit in conventional narratives of 20 th Century architecture, whereby new nation-states adopted modernism to express their independence? A composite portrait of the building can be gleaned from literature that has tended to emphasize that the building’s design was based on a number of pre-existing models, including that of the eponymously named Musée dynamique in Neufchâtel, Switzerland. Yet to read the Musée dynamique only as a variation on an international model or type fails to capture how its construction intervened in the evolving aesthetics of African modern architecture, in the political career of Léopold Sedar Senghor’s notion of négritude, and in the charged urban dynamics of the francophone post-colony. Based on new historical archives and revisiting existing sources, this paper offers an alternate story to suggest that even as a bespoke jewel, the building of the Musée Dynamique belongs in a continuum with the architecture of colonial “equipment” in Dakar. In the wake of the Loi-cadre of 1956, the building and its associated urban planning became less as an emblem of decolonization than a frame for its unfolding: a cultural service through which the Senegalese state sought, for over two decades, to appropriate and adjust the soft-power structures the French were leaving behind.

"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage.

In the 1860s, Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir, a Sufi shaykh and the vanquished leader of the Algerian resistance to the French invaders, proposed a rather peculiar solution to counter the expanding colonial project in the region and to spare his co-religionaries further military confrontations with the West. From his Damascene exile, he argued that Christianity and Islam shared a mystical and esoteric core and that both religions could peacefully unite if their followers transcended their visible religious differences and collectively built a new metaphysical pact across the two shores of the Mediterranean. Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir’s ecumenical vision, I argue, was transmitted through an uninterrupted silsila- a chain of Sufi masters and disciples- metamorphosing by the middle of the 20th century into an art and architectural theory. The mutation of this Muslim universalist utopia into a cohesive aesthetic discourse was the fruit of multiple intellectual collaborations between Arab Sufi mystics and a group of European converts to Islam. Rene Guénon (1886-1951), one of the most important metaphysicians of the 20th century, is a central node in this silsila. The aesthetic question has not been central to Guénon’s work. Yet, his rare insights on the matter helped, as I argue, shape a Sufi reading of art that his followers adopted and expanded. This is the third chapter of my book project, where I closely read Guénon’s views on the nature and function of art while situating him within the mystical and intellectual tradition first initiated by Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir.

Written toward freedom, groping toward concepts that do not yet exist for the outernational and untimely spaces from which it emerges, written by, about, and for people who often cannot write or read in a conventional sense, foyer literature seems to be in trouble from the start. And yet, there exists a small but richly rewarding corpus of foyer memoirs, one of which, Notre case est à Saint-Denis ’93 (2015), by Franco-Malian writer, photographer, projectionist, and immigrant rights and workers’ rights activist, Bouba Touré, will serve as a kind of matrix text for us. There are also reasons to consider foyer literature as overflowing the categories of both narrative and written form. It might include the collection of oral histories collected and published by the Senegalese labor leader Sally N’Dongo as part of Voyage forcé : itinéraire d'un militant (1975). Or it might include the film by Mauritanian director Sidney Sokhona, Nationalité : Immigré (1975). Paradoxically, in allowing for a proliferation of forms to be considered, the specificity of the thing seems only to be sharpened. This chapter will explore this paradox more fully, along with other preliminary issues in the definition a foyer literature, asking, ultimately, what it means to write for those who “ne savent ni lire ni écrire,” and why such writing has been so unmistakably placed at the center of depictions of West African workers’ struggles. *Foyer: a hostel or residence hall created by the French state to house workers coming from (former) French colonial territories to work in the Hexagon during “les trente glorieuses” (1945-1975). While the first foyers were not associated with a particular ethnic, racial, or national group, ever since the start of the Algerian war for independence in the 1950s, North African workers were deemed untrustworthy and disinvited, the foyers have remained a social, cultural, and political space closely identified with West African immigrant workers.

“Le cancer est notre démon radioactif, notre petit cadeau nucléaire envoyé via mer, via air.” —Ari’lrau Richard, Matamimi ou la vie nous attend (2006, 115) “À 27 ans, alors que j’allaitais Théo qui avait 1 an, j’ai constaté une boule dans mon sein. Mammographie. Biopsie. Chimiothérapie. Radiothérapie […]. C’était un cancer au stade 3, déjà avancé.” —Jessica Oublié et al., Tropiques Toxiques (2021, 114) My reflection originates from the juxtaposition of two images. The first image appears in the literary magazine, Zist, and is relayed in the graphic narrative Tropiques Toxiques (2021) by Jessica Oublié et al. on the theme of chlordecone contamination in Guadeloupe and Martinique. A Black woman dressed in the French flag sits in front of a pink background, under a banana tree, holding Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre. Her right breast is connected through intravenous drip to the banana tree, itself connected to a catheter full of poison, which is slowly contaminating her. This image clearly links exposure to the chemical used to eradicate banana weevils between the years 1972 and 1993 in the French Caribbean and the risk of breast cancer. The second image, used in the context of the rallying cry “MaohiLivesMatter” condemning the legacy of French nuclear testing, shows a woman with the top-half of her body draped in the French flag and the flag of French Polynesia wrapped around her thighs. Her hands are chained at the wrists, her evanescent ravaged body is consumed by radiation as the radioactive cloud takes shape over her breasts. The proliferation of breast cancer is identified as a direct consequence in present-day French Polynesia of radioactive fallouts during the nuclear testing conducted by the French government between the years 1966 and 1996 in Mururoa and Fangataufa. This gendered perspective on the effect of ecosystems lastingly damaged by pesticide use in the context of the French Caribbean and nuclear testing in the context of French Polynesia, this chapter argues, centers the motif of the cancerous breast to embody neglect and abuse, as well as simultaneously incarnate forms of vulnerability that signal the urgency of care. If the first step of this study is to investigate ways to challenge colonialist tropes of sexualized women’s bodies through the imagery of the cancerous breast, I next propose that by making visible lives made vulnerable, by inhabiting this vulnerability, it becomes possible to both expose neglect and shape caring into a transoceanic praxis of resistance to governmental and institutional inaction.

The following is the second chapter of my book project The Politics of Dwelling: Urbanization, Migration and Home Between Senegal and France, 1914-1974. The book traces the rise of what I call the politics of dwelling in France and Senegal, a political framework that turned certain Senegalese populations’ domestic spaces into colonial and postcolonial governmental responsibilities. This chapter is part of the first half of the book that examines how the conceptual groundwork for this framework was laid during and after World War I. However, this section also explains the limits of this framework in the interwar years and why Senegalese claimants struggled to make their domestic well-being appear like legitimate domains meriting government support. This chapter follows a first chapter on domestic assistance for Senegalese soldiers in both Senegal and France during World War I, ending with disputes over the kinds of domestic assistance veterans were entitled to. In this chapter I look at how periodic plague outbreaks in coastal Senegal after 1914, and government decisions to destroy houses in response, produced political compromises and bureaucratic systems that Senegalese dwellers used to demand government assistance. I examine debates over segregation in Dakar as well as indemnity petitions in Saint-Louis and the Cayor to argue that these claimants try to make their particular domestic needs and spaces, the very ones that had been pathologized by state officials, state responsibilities. This fit their own domestic demands into ongoing debates about the boundaries and responsibilities of colonial government. While these claims were not always successful, I argue Senegalese dwellers used them to enact and articulate expectations about what the colonial state’s relationship with their domestic lives could or should be.