April 2006 Newsletter

President’s Message

The Society’s 32^nd annual meeting in Dakar, Senegal – our first on the African continent – was a stimulating and memorable event for all participants. We had 110 registered attendees from North America (United States and Canada), Europe (France, England, Germany, the Netherlands), Africa (Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, Congo Republic), Israel, La Réunion and six African graduate students currently working in North America and Europe. In addition hundreds of student and faculty visitors and some 20 Anciens Combattants of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais attended individual sessions. Our hosts, Ibrahima Thioub and Ibrahima Seck of the History Department at Cheikh Anta Diop Université and Ousmène Sène, Director of the West African Research Association, extended the most generous hospitality at premier venues in Dakar. First-rate multimedia facilities enhanced conference sessions at the university; hotel accommodations were elegant and refreshing; receptions, sponsored by the French Embassy, the American Embassy and the West African Research Center facilitated intellectual exchange and social relaxation. Participants in the après conference tour were able to visit historical sites at the Ile de Gorée and Saint-Louis. Journalist and student Jibo Nura conducted an interview about the society which appeared in the Nigerian monthly Desert Herald (June 2006) and can be found online at: http://www.amanaonline.com/Articles/art_1966.htm. Thanks to all for making this meeting such a success.

Future dates and sites have been set for the next two FCHS conferences. Mark your calendars: June 6-10, 2007 in La Rochelle, France and May 15-17, 2008 in Québec, Canada. The Call for Papers for the 2007 conference is posted on our website: www.frenchcolonial.org. Deadline for proposals is October 15, 2006. Thanks to the La Rochelle conference committee in advance: Philip Boucher, Robert DuPlessis, John Savage, David Del Testa, Mickaël Augeron, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke.

Please note the online Meeting Site Member Survey (which is located at http://www.frenchcolonial.org/ballot.php). Rank your favorite proposed sites for future conferences and indicate whether you might be willing to help host a conference near you. Access to the site will require a username and password which has been attached to your copy of the newsletter. The site will remain active until November 15.

French Colonial History editor Leslie Choquette is bringing out Volume 8 this year. Elizabeth Demers has agreed to become our new editor when Leslie retires as editor after the current volume. Thank you Leslie and welcome Elizabeth!

Owen White is the new chair of the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize Committee after Eric Jennings’ term expired. Pat Galloway has agreed to serve after Peter Moogk has stepped down. Thank you all for your hard work on this committee.

Our webmaster and newsletter editor, Ken Orosz, has been hard at work this summer. In response to membership queries, we are posting the programs from previous meetings on the website. We hope to have these in a searchable format by the La Rochelle conference. We are also planning a general update of the FCHS website. Please send suggestions for how the website might be improved to me: peabody@vancouver.wsu.edu. If you have a website at your university, please consider linking to the French Colonial Historical Society homepage: www.frenchcolonial.org.

To stay up to date with current book reviews, calls for papers, queries and discussion, don’t forget to subscribe to H-French-Colonial. Jeremy Rich and FCHS Vice President Mike Vann were instrumental in getting the ball rolling for this very useful listserv. Jyoti Mohan is doing excellent work as the current editor. Please remember that membership in FCHS will not automatically create your subscription – you must sign up on-line: http://www.h-net.org/~frenchco/.

Sue Peabody

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 March 1, 2007.

Applicants or their publishers should send three copies of books published in 2006 to the chairperson of the book prize committee:

Owen White

Department of History

University of Delaware

236 John Munroe Hall

46 West Delaware Ave

Newark, DE 19716-2547

USA

The award will be announced at the annual conference of the French Colonial Historical Society in La Rochelle, France in June 2007. Members of the Book Prize Committee are Owen White, Chair (University of Delaware), Pat Galloway (University of Texas - Austin) and Martin Thomas (University of Exeter)

Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, 2005

French Colonial Historical Society

Société d'histoire coloniale française

Wolfville, NS

June 4, 2005

Citation

Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, 2005

Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-century Mauritius

(Duke University Press, 2004)

Megan Vaughan’s study is a tour de force, reflecting fine research (notably in court records), and relating a series of gripping episodes from the under-studied 18^th-century Indian Ocean colony of Mauritius. This book works to retrieve the voices of slaves, free people of color, women and other subaltern people whose experience the author vividly brings to life.

The book’s sections on maternity, language, Enlightenment, Malagasy origins, and sex and sexual orientation, not to mention Vaughan’s engagement with a host of secondary fields (like the Atlantic slave trade, or the broader Indian Ocean diasporic context) make this a truly splendid and wide-ranging book with ramifications well beyond Mauritius. The committee was impressed by the way Vaughan integrates theoretical approaches, placing them in the service of historical evidence. In sum, this is a highly engaging, lively book. Creating the Creole Island is well crafted and represents French colonial history admirably in a sophisticated dialogue with other fields.

Books Nominated for the Annual

Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, 2005

James E. Bruseth and Toni S. Turner, From a Watery Grave: The Discovery and Excavation of La Salle’s Shipwreck, La Belle.

This is an effective and beautifully-illustrated presentation of information from historical, archaeological and conservation reports about Cavelier de La Salle’s lost supply ship and its contents. Artifacts recovered from the 1686 shipwreck are placed in their historical context and they reveal La Salle’s plans to engage in extensive trade with aboriginal peoples and to capture and exploit silver deposits in northern Mexico.

Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and the Seven Years’ War. University of Nebraska Press

Dull provides a detailed military, political and diplomatic history of the 1750s and 1760s, highlighting the role of individuals who determined the French navy’s fate in this period. The writer argues that France’s defeat in the war should not discredit its maritime policies or obscure the French navy’s successes.

John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland. W.W. Norton and Co.

Drawing an analogy with the late twentieth century war crime of “ethnic cleansing,” Faragher has produced a well-informed, carefully documented, and gracefully written account of the Nova Scotian Acadians and their forced removal in 1755. He reviews the historiography on his subject and places the Acadian expulsion within American colonial history.

Annegret Fauser. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. University of Rochester Press.

Vividly evokes the sounds of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, with interesting insights on how French listeners heard and interpreted the more “exotic” music performed at the fair.

Doris Garraway. The Libertine Colony. Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Duke University Press.

Innovatively interprets a variety of genres of French writing about the Caribbean to the end of the eighteenth century, with particular attention to how the themes of desire and sexuality shed light on the assertion of French power.

Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits Oxford University Press.

This beautifully crafted book explores popular religion, contact zones, material culture, diseases and cures, gender issues, all in the span of a dual biography that magically interweaves France and North America. In the epilogue the author explores the varied appropriations, instrumentalizations, and reinventions of Catherine Tekakwitha.

William A. Hoisington, Jr. The Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil. A Frenchman between France and North Africa. RoutledgeCurzon.

Through meticulous archival research this book recreates the life and violent death of a complex individual whose story illuminates our understanding of Moroccan independence.

Matt K. Matsuda. Empire of Love. Histories of France and the Pacific. Oxford University Press.

A colorful and engaging study that argues that the language of love was central to the construction and imagination of the French presence in the Pacific.

Kim Munholland. Rock of Contention. Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940-1945. Berghahn.

This gracefully written and strongly researched book casts fascinating light on the vexed relationship between the Free French and the Americans who encountered one another on New Caledonia in World War Two. This fine study is situated at the crossroads of French colonial and international history.

Anne Raffin. Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and its Legacies, 1940-1970. Lexington Books.

Spanning the colonial and post-colonial periods, this book presents thought-provoking insights into the significance of Vichy’s sponsorship of youth organizations in wartime Indochina.

Mireille Rosello. France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters. University Press of Florida.

From linguistic encounters in the work of writers like Assia Djébar to the meeting between the French and Algerian soccer teams in 2001, this book develops the intriguing concept of “performative encounters” to help understand a variety of interactions between France and the Maghreb.

Elizabeth Schmidt. Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958. Heinemann.

An important and very well researched social history of popular participation in the Guinean nationalist movement that makes extensive use of oral testimony and emphasizes the roles played by peasants, women, trade unionists, and veterans.

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall. The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution University of California Press.

This exciting work explores Abbé Grégoire as an agent of change during the French Revolution. Sepinwall uncovers continuities and coherences in Grégoire’s universalist thought, and sheds considerable light on the context in which these thoughts were produced. This book is as important to the field of intellectual history as it is to French and indeed world history.

Martin Thomas. The French Empire between the Wars. Imperialism, Politics, and Society. Manchester University Press.

A work of extraordinary geographic and thematic breadth that highlights the economic, social, and cultural impact of French imperialism between the two world wars and the growth of resistance to French rule. Thomas’ breathtaking range takes readers through such diverse issues as colonial trade patterns, military questions, exhibitions, gender relations and anti-colonial resistance.

Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the two world wars. University of Chicago Press.

This work enrolls theory to attempt to trace both French imperial and anti-imperial projects and discourses in the inter-war years. Wilder pays special attention to Négritude and its Parisian disciples between the wars.

W. J. Eccles Prize, 2007

The W.J. Eccles Prize is to be awarded annually to the graduate student or recent post-graduate student judged to have presented the best paper at the annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society and subsequently published in the society's journal French Colonial History. The prize is meant to encourage beginning academics in the field of French Colonial History and to honour the career of one of French Colonial History's greatest historians. Bill Eccles was an outstanding supporter of graduate students and this prize is meant to continue his work by encouraging those at the beginning of their careers in our field.

Gagnant du Prix W.J. Eccles 2006

Dans « L’Empire palimpseste : l’exemple des années trente dans le Limousin », Reine-Claude Grondin examine les modalités de circulation de l’idée coloniale dans une province française, et la question de son appropriation par une population située à la périphérie. L’auteur décrit la méfiance des Limousins vis-à-vis de l’idée coloniale, soupçonnée d’aggraver l’exode rural. D’où l’absence de la région de l’Exposition Coloniale de 1931 et sa mise à distance plutôt généralisée de la colonie. Selon Grondin, « L’ambition des propagandistes d’intégrer l’Empire au mécanisme de la vie française’ relève de l’utopie au cours des années trente. »

La méthodologie de l’article est innovatrice. Les conclusions se dégagent non seulement des recherches archivistiques mais aussi d’une lecture perspicace de la littérature régionale et d’un examen détaillé de la production des sociétés géographiques. Cette approche permet de saisir des interférences entre le dessein impérial et le dessein régional, qu’une vision trop exclusivement déterminée par l’histoire du Centre, ce qui a été jusqu’à présent le défaut de l’historiographie coloniale française, ne permettait pas de mettre en évidence.

Mention Honorable

Une mention honorable est aussi décernée à Thomas Peace pour son article, « Deconstructing the Sauvage/Savage in the Writing of Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith ».

Colleagues at Work

Ralph Austen is currently working on the biography of Amadou Hampate Ba.

Myriam Arcangeli is a PhD candidate in historical archaeology at Boston University. Her research focuses on the ceramics of colonial sites in the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana). She has a website entitled Historical Earthenwares of Southwestern Frace at www.people.bu.edu/arcange.

B.A. (Sandy) Balcom and A.J.B. (John) Johnston have just published a joint article that looks at French colonial missionary activity on Cape Breton Island in the first half of the 18th century. The reference is "Missions to the Mi'kmaq: Malagawatch and Chapel Island in the 18th Century," Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 115-140. John Johnston will be presenting a paper entitled “The Acadian Deportation in a Comparative Context: An Introduction” at the Diasporas and Discovery, Annual Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS), to be held in Vancouver, BC, in October 2006.

Lofti Ben Rejeb is researching US-North African relations during the colonial period.

Raymond Birn recently published Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe and the World 1648-1789 (Petersborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005).

Chris Bongie has completed an edition of the first two novels written about the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Picquenard’s Adonis (1798) and Zoflora (1800) for the French press L’Harmattan. This edition is scheduled for publication in late summer 2006. Based on archival, the Introduction provides new information about Picquenard’s time in Saint-Domingue during the early 1790s, where he served as secretary to the Civil Commissioners Polverel and Sonthonax.. Appendices to this edition include unpublished letters by Picquenard, as well as excerpts from the republican journal he edited in Saint-Domingue called l’Ami de l’Egalité.

Colin Coates published a collection of essays entitled Majesty in Canada: Essays on the Role of Royalty (Tornonto: Dundin Press, 2006) which included chapters by fellow members John Johnston and Sylvain Soleil dealing with New France.

Sarah Curtin published an article entitled “Emilie de Vialas and the Religious Reconquest of Algeria” in the Spring 2006 issue of French Historical Studies. This article is based on a paper first presented at the Toulouse FCHS Annual Meeting.

Piet Defraeye is looking for a co-researcher(s) for a large project on the cultural significance of Patrice Lumumba. Interested colleagues can contact him at defraeye@ualberta.ca.

John Gallucci works on the history and literature of French émigrés in upstate New York and French travel writing concerning North America and the Caribbean 1500-1800. He is also teaching a new course entitled New York/New France.

Ruth Ginio has recently published French Colonialism Unmasked: the Vichy Years in French West Africa with the University of Nebraska Press.

Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney recently published an edited volume entitled Captive Histories: English, French and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid (University of Massachusetts Press, ISBN 1-558-49543-6).

Rachel Jean-Baptiste works on west-central Africa, Gabon, women, gender, sexuality, colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade.

George Milne’s research interests include Native American and French Relations in Louisiana 1682-1732; colonial North America; and Ancien Regime France.

Joel Montague is a public health officer and collector of colonial ephemera (postcards, chromos, posers and maps) from Indochina. His main focus is Cambodia and the Khmer peoples in neighboring countries.

Todd Shepard published The Invention of Decolonization: the Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Cornell University Press, 2006).

Dale Standen is Professor Emeritus at Trent University. He retired June 30, 2006.

Eugene Tesdahl is working on the French colonial Atlantic: La Nouvelle France et le Sénégal. He focuses on issues of race, gender and inter-marriage.

Martin Thomas is organizing a conference entitled “The French Colonial Mind: Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Policy Making.” The conference will be hosted by the Exeter University’s Centre for the Study of War, State and Society and will take place from April 12-14, 2007. For more information contact Martin.C.Thomas@exeter.ac.uk

Mathilde von Bülow is completing her PhD at Cambridge University on the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962) and its impact on Franco-German relations.

Germaine Warkentin is completing her edition of the voyages of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. She is also working on Louis Nicolas and the Codex Canadiensis.

Notices

The Association Études Coloniales maintains a webpage of interest to members at http://etudescoloniales.canalblog.com/

Louis Siking