Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia

Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.

There are few comparative studies in the literature on this subject, while there is a plethora of work on women writers within a single colony Lorcin avoids reductive explanations, examines the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, and modernity Lorcin provides a complex, not unsympathetic look at these writers, without ignoring the underlying racism or trauma of colonialism and Neurology and Modernity, ed. Salisbury and Shail (Palgrave, 2009)

Autorentext
Patricia Lorcin is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, USA. She is the author of Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (1995), editor of Algeria and France 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia (2006), and co-editor of several collections of essays including France and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image (2009).

Klappentext

This illuminating study of European women's narratives in colonial Algeria and Kenya argues that nostalgia was not a post-colonial phenomenon but was embedded in the colonial period. Patricia M. E. Lorcin explores the distinction between imperial nostalgia, associated with the loss of power that results from the loss of empire, and colonial nostalgia, associated with loss of socio-cultural standingin other words, loss of a certain way of life. This distinction helps to make women's discursive role an important factor in the creation of colonial nostalgia, due to their significant contribution to the establishment of a European colonial environment.

Inhalt
PART I: 1900-1930. COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR IMAGINED SELVES Women and their Colonial Worlds Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen PART II: 1920-1940. POLITICAL REALITIES AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS Reality Expressed; Reality Imagined: Colonial Women in Twenties Algeria and Kenya Writing and Living the Exotic [The Twenties] Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism [The Thirties] PART III: IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE REFORMULATION OF NOSTALGIA Nationalist Anger; Colonial Illusions: Women's responses to Decolonization Happy Families, Red Strangers and 'A Vanishing Africa': Nostalgia Comes Full Circle