{"id":1298,"date":"2017-02-06T12:49:43","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T12:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2017-02-06T12:49:43","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T12:49:43","slug":"french-colonies-intellectuals-and-far-right-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/?p=1298","title":{"rendered":"French colonies, intellectuals and far-right ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gavid Bowd talks about his article\u00a0\u2018Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Charles Maurras and colonial Madagascar\u2019 24:1 (2016)<\/a><\/h3>\n

What does this article tell your readers about modern and contemporary\u00a0France?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The article attempts to show the influence of far right ideas on an intellectual in a\u00a0French\u00a0colony. Normally, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and other francophone writers are presented as being in resistance to colonial rule and, implicitly at least, on the left, \u2018progressive\u2019 side of the political spectrum. But\u00a0Rabearivelo\u2019s political affinities were with Charles Maurras and L\u2019Action fran\u00e7aise, although this did\u00a0not\u00a0prevent him from criticising\u00a0French\u00a0policy in Madagascar and expressing solidarity with oppressed people of colour in the British and\u00a0French\u00a0Empires as well as the United States. The aristocratic, anti-democratic and even racist tendencies of Rabearivelo are\u00a0not\u00a0unique: Maurras greatly influenced Ferhat Abbas in Algeria and Gerard de Catalogne in Haiti. So I attempt to give the reader a sense of the complexity of Rabearivelo \u2013 the first major writer of la Francophonie \u2013 and, by extension, of other colonised intellectuals. I hope also that it adds to the historical understanding of colonial and post-colonial Madagascar.<\/p>\n

What topics and issues do you address? How does your argument build upon or differ from previous arguments in the field?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Firstly, I attempt to give an idea of Maurras\u2019s ideology and, in particular, Action fran\u00e7aise\u2019s attitude towards the Empire during the Third Republic they so detested. Connected to this is the\u00a0big debate about assimilation and association of colonial subjects, Maurras and Rabearivelo being in favour of the latter. I was particularly stimulated by Martins Steins\u2019s 1981 doctoral thesis on the ideological antecedents of negritude, which shows how much Leopold Senghor was influenced by another far right thinker, Maurice Barres, and was warmly received in the pages of Action francaise. By showing the \u2018blood and soil\u2019 element at work in what Sartre called \u2018un racisme anti-raciste\u2019, Steins broke a taboo. His thesis was never published. Like a moth to a post-colonial flame, I decided to apply this approach to Madagascar\u2019s national poet.<\/p>\n

What kinds of methodologies did you use?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I draw upon the National Archives of Madagascar in Antananarivo, the Archives Nationales d\u2019Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the papers of Rabearivelo\u2019s surviving family. To this are added the\u00a0French\u00a0and Malagasy press of the time \u2013 thankfully conserved by Gallica<\/a> \u2013 and the two-volume Oeuvres completes recently published by Pr\u00e9sence Africaine and the CNRS<\/a>. So the \u2018methodology\u2019 is both document and literature-based. The research was kindly supported by the Carnegie Trust.<\/p>\n

How did you become<\/strong> interested in Rabearivelo?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was initiated to Rabearivelo\u2019s excellent work \u2013 and tortured world \u2013 when invited to take part in a multilingual translation workshop at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in December 2013. We concentrated on Rabearivelo \u2013 un passeur de langues par excellence \u2013 and hope to bring out soon\u00a0a translation of his poetry into English, Afrikaans, Malagasy, Creole and Bantu. I felt that some critical work remained to be done on neglected aspects of Rabearivelo, most notably his political views and ambivalent relationship with the colonial administration, as well as the endless debates over the\u00a0meaning of his suicide in 1937 at the tender age of 34. Was he un suicid\u00e9 de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 coloniale or\u00a0just\u00a0yet another of the\u00a0po\u00e8tes maudits he worshipped? Or both, and\/or more?\u00a0I am currently writing up my research in monograph form.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This article was originally published on:\u00a0https:\/\/modernandcontemporaryfrance.com\/2017\/02\/01\/french-colonies-far-right-ideas-and-intellectuals\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gavid Bowd talks about his article\u00a0\u2018Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Charles Maurras and colonial Madagascar\u2019 24:1 (2016) What does this article tell your readers about modern and contemporary\u00a0France? The article attempts to show the influence of far right ideas on an intellectual in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[311,310,120,313,312],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","tag-action-francaise","tag-charles-maurras","tag-french-empire","tag-jean-joseph-rabearivelo","tag-madagascar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1299,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francophone.port.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}