Tensions of Empire : Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World

Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to __Tensions of Empire__ investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times. Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Between Metropole and Colony Part One. Framings 1. Liberal Strategies of Exclusion 2. Imperialism and Motherhood 3. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse Part Two. Making Boundaries 4. Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience 5. Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers 6. "The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable" 7. Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire Part Three. Colonial Projects 8. "Le bebe en brousse" 9. Tradition in the Service of Modernity 10. Educating Conformity in French Colonial Algeria Part IV. Contesting the Categories of Rule 11. he Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity 12. The Dialectics of Decolonization 13. Cars Out of Place Notes on Contributors Index Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to this text investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays in this book demonstrate various ways in which 'civilizing missions' in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order