April 2006 Newsletter
In addition
to the usual call for papers, news from our colleagues, notices, minutes of the annual meeting in Wolfville, and the Heggoy Prize
announcement, this issue of the newsletter also includes an updated program for
this year’s annual meeting in
Finally, please check your mailing labels to ensure that your dues are up to date. When filling in the membership form please make sure that you include your name, address and e-mail. Members wishing to receive the newsletter electronically or who wish to be added to the online directory should send their contact information to korosz@maine.edu.
President’s Message
During the past few months the final program for our upcoming
Preparations
are also well underway for our 2007 meeting in
This
is my final note as president. I want to thank the members of the Society for
making my term both extremely enjoyable and a true learning experience. For
helping me navigate during the past three years, I’d especially like to thank
my immediate predecessor
I
look forward to seeing many of you in
Robert DuPlessis
Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, 2006-2007
Each year
the French Colonial Historical Society presents a book in honor of one of its
founding members, Alf Andrew Heggoy.
Book prize recognition includes an award of US $350 for the best book
published during the previous year dealing with the French colonial experience
from the 16th to the 20th century. Books
from any academic discipline will be considered but they must approach the
consideration of the French colonial experience from an historical
perspective. The deadline for this year
is
Applicants
or their publishers should send three copies of books published in 2004 to the
chairperson of the book prize committee: Eric Jennings, Department of History,
The
award will be announced at the annual conference of the French Colonial
Historical Society in
Colleagues at Work
Mark Choate is working on a comparative history of European
migration and imperial demographic settlements, especiall in the period
1880-1940.
Julia
Clancy-Smith recently published an article entitled “Women, Gender and
Migration Along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre-Colonial
Tunisia, 1815-1870" in Gender and History vol. 17 no. 1 (April 2005):
62-92.
Luca
Codignola recently published entries on the “American Revolution;” “Treaty of
Paris;” “Marquis Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière;” “Pierre-Joseph
Céloron de Blainville;” Michel-Guillaume-Jean Crèvecoeur;” and “François
Marbois, marquis de Barbé-Marbois” in Bill
Barbara
Cooper is finishing a study of Protestants in majority Muslim Niger and
launching a new project on the history of debates and discourses related to
reproduction in
James
Covi is a graduate student in world history with specific interests in
comparative colonial education.
Robert
DuPlessis published “Cloth and the Emergence of the Atlantic Economy,” in Peter
A. Coclam (ed) The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries (University of South Carolina Press, 2005) pp. 72-94.
David
Gardinier recently completed the third edition of his Historical Dictionary of
Gabon to be published in 2006.
Yasmeen
Hanoosh is a graduate student in the
James Hunter presented a paper at the Society for Historical
Archeology in
Anne-Laure
Jaumouillié is a teaching assistant at the
Kendra
Kennedy is a graduate student in historical archaeology at the
Timothy
Kent received the State History Award from the Historical Society of Michigan
for his two volume work entitled Rendezvous at the Straits: Fur Trade and
Military Activities at Fort de
Herman
Lebovics’ new collection of essays has been published as Imperialism and the
Corruption of Democracies (Duke University Press, 2006).
Russell
Magnaghi is conducting research on the French in
Phyllis
Martin’s 1995 book on Brazzaville (CUP), winner of the Alf Heggoy Memorial Book
Prize, has been published in French as Loisirs et société à Brazzaville pendant
l’ère coloniale (Paris: Karthala, 2005).
Two articles relating to her present research on Catholic women in
Congo-Brazzaville have also been translated into French: “Vie et mort, pouvoir
et vulnérabilité” contradictions quotidiennes à la mission de Loango
(1883-1904),” Mémoire Spiritaine (Paris), no. 21 2005; and “Eloge de
l’ordinaire: église, empire et genre à travers la vie de Mère Marie-Michelle
Dédié (Sénégal, Congo, 1882-1931)” Le Fait Missionaire (Lausanne) forthcoming
2006.
Céline
Melisson is working on administration in the French colonies, particularly the
role of naval officers, from 1663 to 1770.
Carolyn
Podruchn’s book, Making the Voyageur World: Traveling and Trading in the North
American Fur Trade, will be published in 2006 by the University of Nebraska
Press as part of their series “France Overseas: Studies in Empire and
Decolonization.” The series is also
co-published in
Timothy
Pearson’s research interests include Religion and culture in
Celine
Ronsseray is a 4th year doctoral student in history at the
Université de la Rochelle. She is
working on the administrative staff in
Notices
The Historical Foundation of Canada has recently launched
the Black History
University History announces a new web portal of
interest to historians. Created in
conjunction with the University of Canterbury School
of History, New Zealand, the portal aims to make the best online resources in
history available to students and academic alike. The portal can be found on the web at http://www.universityhistory.org/
The
Historical Society will be hosting its 5th annual conference from
June 1-4 at the William and Ida Friday center in
The
editors of the Journal de la Société des américanistes are pleased to announce
that the journal, which is devoted to Amerindian societies and cultures, can now be found
online at http://jsa.revues.org/ .
On
The
European Science Foundation has a small fund to support research as part of its
program on Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in
www.esf.org/esf_article.php?language=0&activity=1&domain=4&article=363&page=1054
Call for Papers
The Gulf Coast Colonialist Colloquium invites scholars to
attend its 4th annual meeting to be held at
Appel
à Contributions: 1ère journée d’études des doctorants en sciences humaines et
sociales, La Rochelle, Jeudi 8 juin 2006 sur les “Acteurs et agents locaux de la colonisatin
française: méthodes, sources, nouveaux enjeux de la recherche en France
(XVIIème-XIXème siècles).”
Cette journée pluridisciplinaire est organisée principalement à
l’attention des docorants et jeunes chercheurs. Addresses contacts: Anne-Laure Jaumouillé (ajaumoui@univ-lr.fr) ou Céline Ronsseray
(celine.ronsseray@univ-lr.fr),
Faculté de Lettres Langues Arts et Sciences Humaines, 1 Parvis Fernand Braudel,
1700 La Rochelle, France.
The “Integration and Conflict in the
Upper Guinea Coast” Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in Halle, Germany is seeking papers for a conference entitled “The
Powerful Presence of the Past: Historical Dimensions of Integration and
Conflict in the Upper Guinea Coast, West Africa” to be held at the Institute
October 18-20, 2006. Travel expenses
will be refunded and accommodation provided for those invited to present a
paper. Please send abstracts of 500
words or less by May 19, 2006 to Dr. Jacqueline Knörr, Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle, Germany or via e-mail at knoerr@eth.mpg.de. Additional information on the conference can
be found on the web at http://www.eth.mpg.de/events/current/pdf/1140085803-02.pdf
The History Department of the
University of Texas at Arlington and the Transatlantic History Student
Organization are seeking papers for the 7th Annual Graduate Student
Symposium on Transatlantic History.
Graduate students in history and other disciplines are invited to submit
proposals (300 words) and a short cv by May 31, 2006 via e-mail to Paul
Rutschmann (prutsch@uta.edu) and Dr.
Thomas Adam (adam@uta.edu). Selected participants will receive a small
stipend to help offset travel expenses.
The Society of Early Americanists (
The
editors of African Identities and
The
Association for Canadian Studies invites paper submissions for its annual
conference to be held
Minutes of the Annual Meeting
French Colonial Historical
Society, Annual General Meeting
Nota bene: The meeting was held
after lunch in the dining room of the
Present:
President’s Message:
DuPlessis: The Executive met on Wednesday afternoon at
the Beveridge Arts Centre and the good news is that we are solvent. Thanks to
Alf Heggoy Book Prize for 2004
DuPlessis: Very happy to announce that the
winner of this year’s Alf Heggoy Book Prize is Londa Schiebinger, Plants and
Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. (
DuPlessis
then read the email: “It is certainly a
cliché for a prize committee to comment upon the difficulty of selecting a
winner among the many fine nominees in a given year. Yet, I must insist that,
in my four years of service on the Heggoy Book Prize committee, this year’s
selection has been especially challenging, due to the very high number of truly
exceptional submissions. We had fourteen nominees in total (a record during my
tenure on the committee), several from some of the most prestigious and
specialized presses in
Many
of this year’s nominees challenge our preconceptions about what, in fact,
constitutes French colonial history. Whereas, at one time, the field might be
self-evidently taken as the study of Frenchmen (their lives and institutions)
in their overseas colonies, this year’s submissions – more than any in the
recent past – ask us to reexamine the French imperial experience from the
outside in, by privileging the perspectives of the people indigenous – or
forcibly transported – to the regions where French colonists settled, conquered
and ruled. Perhaps most revealingly, several of this year’s
nominated books call into question an earlier commonsense division between the
French metropole as Hexagon and its overseas colonies by examining the
political and cultural resistence between peripheral regions (the Camargue, the
Larzac) and Parisian centrality.
Yet
this year’s winner, Londa Schiebinger’s Plants
and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard), clearly
stands out for its originality and elegance. A groundbreaking work in Atlantic
history, environmental history and the history of science, Plants and Empire follows a single plant about which very little
was previously known or written, Merian's peacock flower, decoding its many
colonial connections. Schiebinger traces knowledge of the plant from its
discovery and use by indigenous and enslaved women in the West Indies as an
abortifacient, into the written records of French and other European colonists
(Poincy, Descourtilz, Merian, Sloane), to Europe, where the exotic plant was
happily cultivated but where knowledge of its capacity to end pregnancy
disappeared. In this way, Shiebinger asks us to consider the ways that science
and empire privilege certain knowledge, while allowing others to become lost in
a self-induced "ignorance."
The
selection of this book as winner of the Heggoy Prize for "the best book
... dealing with the French colonial experience from the 16th to the 20th
century" will no doubt be controversial, because
of its subject matter, argument and scope. By addressing the imperialism of
resource identification and extraction (in Schiebinger’s neologism:
bioprospecting) and the controversial subject of abortion, Schiebinger’s
detailed analysis of the early modern natural sciences implicitly critiques
many of presentist positions as universal or eternal. Because her argument
traces not only the direct transmission of knowledge but also absences,
forgetting, and silences, some will criticize this work as speculative but, as
Schiebinger clearly shows, there are limits to positivist history; through
diligent research and careful interrogation of sources, we can catch glimpses
of the worlds beyond the records produced by colonial participants. Finally,
although Plants and Empire goes
beyond the French colonial empire to embrace an "extended
In
short, Londa Schiebinger’s Plants and
Empire is an eminently readable, meticulously argued, extremely original
work of history that deserves to be read widely – by scholars of the French
colonies, yes, but also by students, historians of science, of gender relations,
of slavery, of the environment, of empire, of the Atlantic world. In
recognition of the excellence of this book and in the interest of recommending
it to members of the French Colonial Historical Society and a much wider
audience, the prize committee celebrates Plants
and Empire with the 2005 Heggoy Book Prize.
W.J. Eccles Essay Prize for 2004
Michelle
Cheyne’s well-written and carefully structured paper tracks a pedestrian opera
manuscript as it moves through the censorship mill in
Cheyne
takes the surviving version of the libretto, together with the comments of
censors and references in the press, and from these sources teases out an
analysis of French unease over questions of empire and colony, monarchy and
republic and troubled French assumptions about hierarchy, in particular, racial
hierarchy. By replacing a black, colonial protagonist with an Arab one and by
shifting the scene of action from the Antilles to Madagascar, the libretto's
revision avoided any encouragement for the audience to think about the
metropolitan/colonial, white/black dichotomies that existed in Restoration
France and instead found a villain for the piece outside the confines of the
French cultural/imperial sphere in the person of an Arab, savage but also
outlandish, irrelevant, and unchallenging. The documentary materials here analyzed
are for Cheyne the pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle with many gaps, which this
historian has fitted together with great intellectual dexterity in this tour de
force of historical investigation and explanation.
French Colonial History
DuPlessis introduced
Choquette: I encourage everyone to
submit papers for French Colonial History.
We are no longer following a strict “Proceedings” format and papers
presented at Toulouse, DC, or Acadia are all welcome for Volume 7. Please note too that the FCHS Executive has
also determined that papers not presented at the Annual Meetings of the FCHS
are also to be published in the French Colonial History but they must meet the
same deadlines and format. This is a
logistical requirement of our partner Michigan State University Press. Volume 6 will be published shortly. French Colonial History is now part of
Project Muse.
H-French Colonial
DuPlessis introduced
Rich: A number of people are involved,
particularly Ibra Sene. Volunteers are
needed to edit the list and to act as book review editors.
Dakar 2006
Kwaku
Gyasi and Phillip Boucher made presentations on the 2006 Meeting to be held in
Gyasi: The meeting will be held from
15-22 May at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar. There is a package being arranged and trips
are planned to the Ile Gorée and to the old capital of
Boucher: Pleased to announce Kwaku’s tenure and
promotion. The theme of the
Rich:
Noted the need for medicine and vaccinations.
DuPlessis: Advised members to go to the CDC website.
La Rochelle 2007
DuPlessis: Has spoken – mid-May – with
the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. The
Meeting will take place on the new campus of the Université de La Rochelle.
Québec 2008
Laberge: Meeting will be held in the
third week of May. Conference will be
held in Old Quebec, but there will be a lot of people celebrating the 400th
anniversary. There should be no problem
with finding funding for the same reason.
Adjournment.
DuPlessis: Invited people to enjoy the
rest of their stay in Wolfville and on the beautiful campus of
Books for the University Cheikh Anta
Diop,