Colonial Unconscious

Elizabeth Ezra teaches in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Stirling. She is the author of Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur, editor of European Cinema, and coeditor of France in Focus: Film and National Identity and Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.

This fascinating study examines the extent to which the 'idee coloniale' pervaded French cultural life of the Jazz Age and the ambivalent ways in which colonialism was presented.... Her study represents a challenging interpretation of the French colonial legacy and the rhetoric with which it was surrounded.- Sarah Howard (Times Literary Supplement) Elizabeth Ezra's eloquent study of race and colonialism not only maps the pervasive influence of racist ideology on French cultural constructions of the nation during the interwar period, but also shows how this ideology continues to shape nationalist rhetoic in France today.... The Colonial Unconscious is a major contribution to the growing field of studies of the colonial past and its impact on French literature and culture. Scholars of French colonialism owe much to Ezra for this superb acheological study of the development of the colonial unconscious in the twentieth century.- Lisa McNee (Research in African Literatures) Ezra's essays are full of dexterous word play and suggestive and at times compelling ideas about how a colonial unconscious functioned in interwar France—an unconscious that surely has left residues that are resurfacing today.- Alice L. Conklin, University of Rochester (American Historical Review) Ezra's slender yet dense volume is the latest contribution to the growing scholarly literature on the history of colonial representations and their impact on collective mentalities during the interwar period, a relatively new field that enriches the already substantal corpus of works analyzing political, social, and economic dimensions of French colonialism.- Brett Bowles, Iowa State University (H-France Book Reviews) The Colonial Unconscious is a significant contribution to the growing field of French Cultural Studies. Ezra's close readings... bring much that is new and original to our understanding of interwar France. Furthermore, this book will be of considerable interest to scholars of contemporary France, for it offers insight into the working of colonial ideology.- Janette Bayles, Utah State University (SubStance #97)