Colonizer or Colonized

Sara E. Melzer is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal's Pensees and coeditor of From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France.

• IntroductionPART I. FRANCE'S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE ANCIENT WORLDChapter 1. The Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns as a Colonial Battle: The Memory Wars over "Our Ancestors the Gauls"Chapter 2. The Return of the Submerged Story About France's Colonized Past in the Quarrel over ImitationPART II. FRANCE'S COLONIAL RELATION TO THE NEW WORLDChapter 3. Relating the New World Back to France: The Development of a New Genre, the Relations de VoyageChapter 4. France's Colonial History: From Sauvages into Civilized, French CatholicsPART III. WEAVING THE TWO COLONIAL STORIES TOGETHER: ESCAPING BARBARISMChapter 5. Interweaving the Nation's Colonial and Cultural DiscoursesChapter 6. Imitation as a Civilizing Process or as a Voluntary Subjection?Chapter 7. Imitation and the "Classical" PathChapter 8. Using the Sauvage as a Lever to Decolonize France from the AncientsConclusion. The Legacy of the Quarrel: The Colonial FractureNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

"Colonizer or Colonized is a groundbreaking inquiry that will undoubtedly reset the compass of future studies of early modern France. The book is an original, deeply and widely researched, boldly thought out, and well written work. It resets our way of thinking about the field." (Michele Longino, Duke University) "Sara E. Melzer makes an intriguing and well-argued case for considering the New World together with ancient Rome and French classicism and meticulously analyzes how this triangular history develops France's civilizing mission. Her investigation, informed by contemporary postcolonial studies, brings together disparate literary and historical factors in the French tradition in ways that encourage us to reconsider the legacy of military and political conquest for the period." (Harriet Stone, Washington University in St. Louis)