France had one of the largest global empires, its territories stretching from southeast Asia, across Africa, and to the Caribbean. Language and culture played key roles in the projection and structures of French colonial power. The French rhetoric of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ and the profound political, economic, social and cultural changes brought about by colonisation meant that anticolonialism in turn demanded a radical rethinking of local culture. Many anticolonial thinkers from the Francophone world therefore not only challenge the political and economic inegalitarianism of French colonialism, but also propose various forms of cultural reinvention. Authors writing in French have articulated ideas which at times have been quite specific to the French empire, and at other moments have profoundly influenced anticolonial thought globally, just as Francophone thinkers have been shaped by ideas outside of the Francophone world. This course is thus about the diversity and circulations of anti-colonial thought as much as it makes suggestions for what might constitute a canon.

In this course, we analyse the relationship between culture and politics in the works of some of the world’s greatest anticolonial thinkers. These thinkers explored questions such as: what are the most effective political and cultural weapons to fight colonial domination? What is our ‘authentic’ culture or is the pursuit of this a futile endeavour? What is the place of women in the articulation of colonial and nationalist cultures? The course is arranged thematically around key questions and problems in anticolonial thought, with each session taking a major thinker as a starting point for reflecting on these questions. The first session sets francophone anticolonialism in the context of wider debates on the meaning of terms such as postcolonialism and decoloniality, and will situate key Francophone authors in relation to thinkers such as Edward Said, Robert Young, Walter Mignolo, and Olúfémi Táíwò. The second session examines the complicity as well as the tension between politics and poetry in the work of the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, alongside some other figures of the mid-20^th century negritude movement. The third session interrogates violence and national culture in Frantz Fanon, while also probing the controversy in Fanon’s reception. Session four then questions the relationship between the nation and the rest of the world by analysing culture, place, and globality in the work of the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant and the Guadeloupean Maryse Condé. Session five examines questions of voice, archive, and representation, taking as its starting point the Algerian writer Assia Djebar’s short story ‘Women of Algiers in their Apartment’. In the final session, we shift our attention from text to film, exploring how filmmakers such as Sarah Maldoror and Gillo Pontecorvo encourage us to think about transnational anti-colonial solidarity and intersecting axes of oppression.