Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Altergott, Renée

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>During the “Scramble for Africa,” proponents of imperialism imagined the new phonograph as a potential tool of colonization that could use disembodied, recorded voices to enchant indigenous listeners and manipulate them into submission, what I call “phonographic imperialism.” This article studies the iconography of a major turning point in French colonial history—the capture and sentencing of Samori Touré in French Sudan in 1898—and the implications of these sources for the notion of phonographic imperialism within the French empire. By comparing fictitious portrayals of the phonograph in Africa, from French advertisements to a Mande legend from Samori’s native region, we may begin to lay bare the assumptions about listening and fidelity that underpin the concept of the “phonograph-fetish,” a trope that would remain popular for nearly the entire span of the Second French Colonial Empire.</p>

Kilpatrick, Emily

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>The legacy of the <i>Année terrible</i> permeated the creative practice of the Belle Époque, and the shaping of a collective cultural memory exercised artists across all disciplines. When composers and their peers reflected on the events of 1870–71, the creation and performance of art song (<i>mélodie</i>) often assumed a key narrative and symbolic function. This study investigates the ways by which composers and their colleagues drew on song, and song performance, to engage with post-1871 dialogues of memory, memorialisation, and artistic renewal. It surveys <i>mélodies</i> that were composed in direct response to political and artistic imperatives, and others whose creation was subsequently reimagined in the shaping of historical narratives. Through composers’ creative practice, and their subsequent accounting of it, the study examines how the <i>mélodie</i> was deployed both to express and contextualise traumatic experience, and to access discourses of cultural memory and musical identity.</p>

Desormeaux, Daniel

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

Bell, Dorian

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>The historical relationship between anti-Semitism and Orientalism is usually understood according to their overlapping representations of Jews and Muslims. In this essay, I begin by asking whether nineteenth-century French anti-Semitism and Orientalism might also be considered from the standpoint of a functional continuity. Reading an 1888 trio of anti-Semitic, imperialist novels by Louis Noir, I propose that empire offered modern anti-Semitism the solution to a problem vexing Orientalists and anti-Semites alike: how to denounce capitalism from a position immanent to the system. The result—what I call imperial anti-Semitism—in turn invites us to examine anti-Semitism’s contested place among racial capitalism’s global logics. Seeking to understand anti-Semitism’s twenty-first century resurgence, I make a case for anti-Semitism’s ongoing pertinence to the capitalist world order.</p>

Chalaye, Sylvie

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>In the second half of the nineteenth century, dramatic literature racializes the comic argument of the “nègre.” Race becomes a comic device of vaudeville, as dramatic as it is musical, notably with Labiche, through the figure of the man who will soon be called “Bamboula” and who summons burlesque situations, eccentric settings, carnival disguises, humorous couplets, explosive dances and clownish fun. This figure is found in the music hall with Chocolat at the beginning of the twentieth century and will participate in all the new media formats of modernity, enough to trivialize racism and durably shape mentalities. (In French)</p>

Cooper, Barbara T.

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>This article examines the way Charles Garand’s <i>Georges le mulâtre</i> (1878), a play based on Alexandre Dumas’s novel <i>Georges</i> (1843), forces theatergoers and readers to look at race and racial prejudice. Each act shows the division and divisiveness that racial prejudice imposes on the drama’s characters and suggests that it is only by overcoming the long-held biases built into the colonial setting that people can learn to live together happily and fruitfully. France is represented as the utopian opposite of the île Maurice (Mauritius) where judgments about individuals are not made based on skin color and ancestry but rather on a person’s actions and character.</p>

Dubreuil, Laurent

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>With a focus on a “French” corpus ranging from the 1850s to the 1900s, this essay explores different literary theorizations of race <i>through</i> poetry. From Vigny to Lautréamont and Vivien, the ancient syntagm “race of the poets” is often revived to build the mythology of what Verlaine would call the <i>poète maudit</i>. There, such a poetic “race” may remain structurally unrelated to the contemporary conceptualization developed by Gobineau for instance (or, conversely, by Firmin), even with Baudelaire, whose work is otherwise linked to the colonial experience. While the existence of a link between the assertion of racial belonging and poetic production cannot be determined a priori, it sometimes leads to intricate, multifold, and meta-literary statements about ethnicity, nationhood, and creation. Besides Rimbaud’s “Mauvais sang,” we describe such reflexive constructs in Verhaeren’s work and in the volumes published by the Haitian writer Paul Lochard, whose poetry is interpreted anew. (In French)</p>

Guedj, Jérémy

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>Apollinaire’s work is heavily influenced by cosmopolitanism, which does not preclude finding elements in it that are related to ongoing thoughts about race that saturated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article proposes to explore this tendency, without overestimating it, in two directions. First, it will deal with Apollinaire’s thinking about race through explicit statements on the topic. For example, he was sufficiently aware of nineteenth-century theories of race that he wrote that “Gobineau could not be fashionable in a civilized country.” Additionally, we will try to determine, more indirectly, how his conceptual tools and his thoughts about race are reflected in his writings, when he evokes, for example, “the Jewish” or “Negro” race to which he appears well disposed, but which he nevertheless describes with language suggesting racialized thought. (In French)</p>

Reynaud-Paligot, Carole

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>The notion of human race took on considerable importance in the nineteenth century, supported by an active and recognized scientific community. The classificatory approach, which sought to order the world, took place in a context of violent economic and political dominations—slavery, followed by colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and led to a vast enterprise of hierarchization. Among the vectors of production and circulation of this racialization of colonial identities, school textbooks and publications of a pedagogical nature held a prominent place. Several generations of French schoolchildren thus learned the inequality of races in their textbooks. The introduction in the colonies of a different form of teaching than metropolitan education also led to the inclusion of racial inequality in school textbooks for colonized populations. (In French)</p>

Yee, Jennifer

2022 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

doi:

<p>Abstract:</p><p>One of the key examples analysed in Edward Said’s <i>Orientalism</i> is Flaubert’s account of his meeting with the <i>almeh</i> Kuchiuk Hanem, a skilled dancer and courtesan, in Egypt in 1850. Frequently revisited by criticism following Said, Kuchiuk has had an extraordinary afterlife in which she is seen as standing for the Orient as a whole, an instance of synecdoche. We, as postcolonial theorists, tend to interpret Kuchiuk-as-text (Flaubert’s notes describing his encounter with her), through the same trope of synecdoche, as standing for nineteenth-century Orientalism as a whole. Yet a close reading of Flaubert’s text reveals his concern to note down specific details and to avoid the generalising logic that would make the individual a representative of her “race.” We, as critics, could learn from such a lesson. All literary genres shape readers’ expectations, and the rules of the particular sub-genre that is the postcolonial theory essay risk predetermining our interpretation of texts.</p>