Colonialism, Culture, and National Vision in North Africa and the Middle East
Panel 110, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel focuses on the use of “culture” in colonial efforts to construct and control national historical narratives in colonial North Africa and Mandate Lebanon. It brings multiple perspectives on how colonial authorities sought to exploit the potential of new media, new patterns of leisure, and new technologies of representation in controlling and reinforcing images of France’s colonial projects in North Africa and the Middle East.
Each of the papers presents a different angle in addressing the question of how the production and use of culture be used as a lens to analyze negotiations of colonial power during and beyond the colonial period. Two of the papers focus on attempts to control narratives of national identity. The first analyzes how the Palace of Morocco exhibit in the 1931 International Colonial Exposition held outside of Paris constituted a distilled symbolic representation of France’s “protectorate” narrative of partnering with the Moroccan Sultan in modernizing the country, while respecting and preserving tradition (a colonial imaginary that was most ironically realized in the tour of the exhibit by the Moroccan Sultan on August 7th, in the company of Hubert Lyautey, the first Resident General, and “architect,” of modern Morocco..) The second examines how the development of the tourist industry in Lebanon from 1920 to 1950 was linked to constructions of national historical narratives before and after independence. The third paper of the panel examines the use of cinema as a specific means of colonial control in North Africa during World War II up until 1960. This paper specifically examines the epistemological ground on which colonial authorities based their rationale for propaganda and censorship in colonial North Africa, highlighting the relationships between French metropolitan knowledge and colonial practice.
Held from May to November in the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris, the 1931 International Colonial Exposition's official slogan was "The Tour of the World in One Day," and was intended to showcase France's imperial grandeur for the benefit of a metropolitan French audience, which numbered over 7 million over the six months the exposition was open. While the ICE has been analyzed as the crowning celebration of a colonial imaginary of la plus Grande France, "Greater France," this paper focuses specifically on the Palace of Morocco at the exposition. Drawing on archival documentation of the exhibit (including correspondence, drawings, and photographs), I examine how the Palace constituted a distilled representation of the French binary colonial construction pitting le vieux Maroc against France's own oeuvre in modernizing and developing Morocco, the mise en valeur of the Protectorate nation building project. It also looks at the Moroccan Sultan's visit to the ICE and the Palace of Morocco on August 7th, 1931, reconstructing the irony of the Sultan's "tour of Protectorate Morocco in one hour," accompanied by Hubert Lyautey (the first Resident General of Morocco and grand marshal of the ICE), which marked the symbolic apogee of the Protectorate fiction of a Franco-Moroccan partnership.
This paper will explore the relationship between constructions of national historical narratives and the nascent tourist industry in Lebanon between 1920 and 1950. It will investigate the ways in which the political territory of “Lebanon” during the French mandate was defined, exhibited, marketed, and manifested. It aims to show how hoteliers, guidebook writers, journalists, as well as ‘average’ citizens identified different “tourist publics” as Lebanese, Arab, or ‘western’, and will explore the assumptions that underwrote how those groups were defined as consumers and to what purpose. This paper will reveal similarities and differences in the ways that the Lebanese and the French understood the role that tourism – from its beginnings as ‘summering’ (istiyaf or l’estivage) to the evolution of winter sports – could play in building a national economy with limited available natural resources, in delineating political boundaries within Lebanon as well as at its edges, and in cementing an image of national patrimony marked by particular materiality. Who was excluded from this image? What currency does Lebanon’s 1960s nomenclature as “the Paris of the Middle East” have, in this historical light? This paper ultimately attempts to use tourism as a lens to analyze densely nested structures of power and their impact on social and cultural organization.
In a 1920 report, Marshal Lyautey wrote, "we have no doubt about the positive results that we should expect from the use of cinematography as an instrument of education". The wishes of Lyautey did not however fully materialize until the Second World War and for obvious reasons. French colonial authorities were very concerned about the reaction of their colonial subjects vis-à-vis Nazi propaganda. Since the end of the 1920's, films started to combine both image and sound and became therefore a major instrument of propaganda and counter-propaganda especially during the war.
This paper is an attempt to look at the ways in which French authorities used the cinema to "educate" its colonial subjects and to look at the mechanisms of censorship that were applied. The very nature of cinema as a medium of communication meant that this propaganda was not limited to an urban elite alone, but to a wide range of public including the countryside. The use of the cinema as an instrument of propaganda was closely linked with the logic of "la psychologie des masses" as an intellectual basis very much in vogue in France in the Middle of the 20th century. Another concern of this paper is therefore to analyze the relation between film propaganda and the epistemological ground upon which colonial authorities based their rational for propaganda and censorship in colonial North Africa. From this angle I intend to probe the question of the relationship between French metropolitan knowledge and a particular kind of colonial control and practices.
