The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (review)

Ezra, Elizabeth. The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 173.

At a time when the French nation is deeply divided over issues of immigration and cultural diversity, Elizabeth Ezra invites the reader to examine the legacy of interwar French colonialism–specifically, its “colonial unconscious”–which, she argues, continues to shape the terms of the contemporary debate on race, multiculturalism, and national unity. The “colonial unconscious” refers to the set of ambivalent, primarily unconscious beliefs, representations, images and assumptions concerning race and the colonial Other that pervaded interwar French society. Ezra uses the expression not as a rigorously defined psychoanalytic concept but rather as a heuristic device that allows her to expose the internal inconsistencies, racist stereotypes, and rhetorical strategies underlying the colonial representations found in her corpus of selected interwar texts. As the author reminds us in her preface, l’entre-deux-guerres holds particular relevance for the study of the colonial imaginary since the popularity and visibility of the empire–what Raoul Girardet has termed “l’idée coloniale”–reached its height in metropolitan France during this period. References to the empire and exotic images of the colonial world were commonplace in the French culture of the time. Yet, according to Ezra, at the heart of the colonial unconscious lay the profoundly ambivalent “desire to preserve cultural distance” (152)–a desire that ran counter to the prevailing doctrines of French colonialism.