Subversión y moraleja

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A shot from Battle of Algiers The French Empire has been conventionally seen as the most assimilationist of European Empires, and Algeria its most integral settler colony with almost one million French inhabitants in 1945. After its decline as a world power following the Second World War and the rise of anticolonial revolutions responding to the racism and state violence of events such as the Setif massacre in Algeria in 1945, France deployed a programme of forced modernization focused on social and economic planning, strategic resettlement and the 'emancipation' of women that combined military violence with 'development' and which unsuccessfully tried to achieve the transformation of the Algerian subject into a docile one that would fit with French plans for Algeria as an integral part of French territory, a continuation of France on the other side of the Mediterranean. Although some historians trace the start of the war back to French invasion in 1830, due ...

Dien Bien Phu (1954) The American involvement in Vietnam, starting during the Second World War in their fight against the Japanese and intensifying after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, was an important Cold War conflict, but the central analytical presence of the Cold War was not the only source of policy in Vietnam: other analytical narratives such as European colonialism , including themes of Western cultural superiority and racialised perceptions of the Vietnamese, are crucial to understanding key elements of the war such as American modernization theory, best exemplified through programmes such as the Strategic Hamlet Programme (1962-3) and Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) (1967-73). Strategic Hamlet Despite Roosevelt's call for the self-determination of peoples across the globe in the Atlantic Charter (1942) and the US collaboration with the Vietminh  during the Second World War, at his death in 1945 his successor Truman ...

While applauding the end of legal colonialism, American modernization theorists such as Rostow shared to large extent the theory and practice of European colonial planners, and Rostow himself saw colonialism as part of the transitional path to modernization. Sharing a similar view of modernity and development and an emphasis on self-image and cultural superiority clouded with Orientalist assumptions, both also shared an authoritarianism and recourse to violence for the 'greatest good,' although modernization theory had some peculiarities such as its distaste for formal direct rule or its increased focus on the social sciences and cultural over biological racism, the last two being borrowed by colonial planners after the Second World War to try to 'fit in' with the changing tide of history. Colonial planning after 1900s and modernization theory of the 1950s shared a similar belief in modernity, a human-centred (vs. God-given) process of increasing order and cla...

Although the Sonderweg* ('special path') tradition of German history has tended to overplay the uniqueness of German military-institutional culture when explaining colonial massacres such as that of the Herero and Nama in today's Namibia, Germany was part of a broader international system of colonial warfare that included international norms, principles of foreign domination, political narratives and concepts without which administrative massacres such as that of the Herero and Nama would not have been possible. German claims to South-West Africa were formally confirmed by European powers in the Conference of Berlin (1884-5), the infamous 'scramble for Africa.' The Herero and Nama massacres would not start until a few years later, but the unlawful occupation of a foreign territory by Germany can only be understood in this broader framework of European imperialism in the first place. What has been sometimes called the age of 'New Imperialism' fo...

The continuous presence of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (HoD) in the literature on colonialism can be attributed to what literary critic Harold Bloom has called its 'unique propensity for ambiguity,' so that rather than having an immutable meaning that has endured for several generations, it has allowed different readers in different places and at different times to attribute diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings to it.  Some of the sources of its continuous reference in the literature on colonialism are: its importance for postcolonial theorists , representing both imperialism's monopoly over and failure of representation of the colonized; its shifting meanings over time , with some seeing Conrad as a pioneering social critic and others as complicit with prevailing European ideologies; its representation of 'helpless imperialism,' an issue often overlooked in narratives of an all-powerful and pervasive colonialism; its status as somewhat representative ...

His interest being that of the moralist rather than the historian, Todorov's The Conquest of America says in many ways more about the present day than it does about the issues dealt with in the book. Talking about the discovery self makes of the other , of the colonial view of difference as lack or absence , of the Foucauldian power-knowledge matrix that often accompanies colonial rule, and of the assimilationism vs. inferiority debate , Todorov's analysis of the first colonial encounter could not be more relevant for twentieth-century colonial history and beyond. For Todorov, what took place in America after 1492 was not merely the invasion and progressive subjugation of one group of peoples by another, but an encounter between two ways of interpreting the world, between two systems of signs. In his history of cross-cultural communication, Todorov narrates how the Spaniards defeated the Indians 'by means of signs,' being in a higher plane of human communication...