Writing French Colonial Histories

Spanning four centuries—from seventeenth-century New France to current debates over the direction of France's Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires—this special issue of French Historical Studies focuses on colonialism in French history and explores the questions, problems, and approaches now under consideration by French colonial historians. Until recently, historians of France have fixed their attention on the nation-state, while scholars in colonial studies whose training focused on the peoples and cultures colonized by France were thought to have little to say about the metropole, or even about European colonials residing in the empire. Guest editors Alice L. Conklin and Julia Clancy-Smith, together with the six contributors to this innovative collection, demonstrate unsuspected convergences between the parallel narratives of these hitherto autonomous scholarly terrains and, in so doing, respond in powerfully suggestive ways to the rising scholarly interest in alternative, global perspectives on the past.

Contributors. Saliha Belmessous, Julia Clancy-Smith, Alice L. Conklin, Eric Jennings, Erica J. Peters, Clifford Rosenberg, Daniel J. Sherman, Owen White