Decolonization and Politics of Memory. Textbooks in the Context of Societal Conflicts in France (1962-2009)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Eckhardt Fuchs
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 171630067

This project analyses the conflictual French memory politics of decolonisation with regard to the question how "real" historical conflicts have become a conflict of interpretation - the guerre des mémoires. The research is based on history and civics textbooks since the 1960s because these textbooks can be seen as national autobiographies which form a socially relevant and officially sanctioned archive of historical knowledge. In these media historical ruptures, changes, and conflicts are defined, designed, covered or dramatised. The aim of this project is to analyse diachronically the representations of colonialism, decolonisation, and postcolonial migration in textbooks. By means of a specific genre, this project offers an innovative contribution to the international debate on memory politics, which has become a prominent research field.In the second phase of the project a monograph entitled "Textbook Knowledge (in) the condition postcoloniale? The Event of Decolonisation, Conflicts in Postcolonial Memory Politics and Crises of Representation in France since the 1950s" will be published. To this end the project will elaborate on the research results of the first phase of the project and on initial essays and presentations. The monograph analyses in particular which dominant reference discourses have shaped and changed the textbooks since the decolonisation of the 1950s. At the same time it reconstructs the corresponding genealogy of postcolonial memory politics. These reference discourses, which considerably influenced the textbooks in the researched period, concern the crisis of western civilisation, modernisation, republican integration, and postcolonial memory politics. The investigation will focus here on the different historiographical, intellectual, social-scientific, political and pedagogical statements, influences and factors which have underpinned and changed textbooks, as a medium, from a discourse analytical perspective. This includes an appraisal of and a genealogical reflection on specific, and in particular recent historiographical and memorialist trends of colonialism, decolonisation and their consequences in France within textbook research.Overall in this manner, the historical change, function and status of textbooks as an archive of a history of the presence in the condition postcoloniale are reconstructed. At the same time, the research deals with the question to what extent there is a fundamental political-epistemological crisis of representation at stake here.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants