The Visual Culture of French Colonialism

In New France, public buildings were imbued with powerful symbolism both inside and out. The use of terms such as castle (château), palace (palais), and private townhouse (hôtel or hôtel particulier) to designate structures built for colonial notables underscored their rank within the socio-political framework of the French Ancien Régime. Inside stately colonial residences built at royal expense, material manifestations of power and fashion converged to create microcosms of monarchical absolutism and aristocratic sociability an ocean away from the metropole. Like their counterparts in France, colonial governors, intendants, bishops, and others made full use of physical objects and spaces to legitimize authority, articulate elite identity, and arbitrate good taste. Imported furniture, tapestries, mirrors, and other items allowed these individuals to live according to courtly etiquette and style launched at Versailles in addition to trends for comfort refined in Paris.

Through the lens of archival records, architecture, and decorative arts, this study draws connections between the ownership of such commodities in New France and the development and entrenchment of elite cultural practice there. An approach combining Atlantic world history, biography, material culture theory, and social history specifically targets expressions of authority through material display, unpacking efforts by colonial officials to adhere to an established set of values and standards that were thoroughly French. Considering their experiences in both France and in French colonies stretching from Canada to Louisiana, this thesis further contextualizes the nearly vanished material worlds of political elites in New France. The interpretive period spans the 1660s, the decade in which French North America was made a royal province, through the 1760s, when it was lost to Great Britain and Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War.

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The aim of this paper is to critically outline the ways in which the question of race shaped the development of the colonial city; and how it [race] rearticulated the progressive rationale of urban planning first developed in the metropolis. Keywords: race, colonial, Africa, miscegenation, eugenics, segregation, Europe, France, Britain.

In 1860, the Anglo-French Expedition to China sacked and looted the Yuan Ming Yuan, or Summer Palace. Generals Hope Grant and Montauban decided to offer the most precious booty to their respective sovereigns, Victoria and and Napoleon III. The objects were selected not for their monetary value, however, but for their close association with the Chinese Emperor and the power he wielded: his shoes and clothing, statues of protective beings, and bâtons de commandement, which conferred state authority upon their bearers.
Most of Napoleon III’s portion would be incorporated into Empress Eugenie’s Musée Chinois at Fontainebleau, a quasi-domestic space for the imperial family and their acquaintances. However, the objects were first exhibited on the Champs Elysées. Publicly displaying the physical manifestations of a symbolic conquest evoked a Roman triumph, and the baton’s visual and functional similarities to its Roman and Napoleonic counterparts integrated the French victory in China into genealogies of sovereignty that resonated in the national imaginary, while the subsequent use of clothing, porcelain, and batons as royal décor in a building associated with generations of French monarchs – including, most pointedly, Napoleon Bonaparte – metaphorically associated the trappings of Chinese authority with the past glories of Imperial France.

The rickshaw came to be the most popular form of transportation in Hanoi and Saigon from the 1910s through the mid 1930s. As these cities developed and grew rapidly, and as French Indochina was integrated into the world economy, rickshaws met an increasing demand for accessible, convenient, and efficient modes of transportation. The rickshaw trade provides an example of European colonizers adopting an “Asian” form of transportation, a hybrid between a sedan chair and Western-style wheels, put into motion using cheap Asian labor. The emergence of a Vietnamese middle class ensured customers for public rickshaws. For much of the urban population as well as a portion of the rural population, rickshaws became an indispensable and integral part of daily life. This essay explores how the circulation of rickshaws gave rise to issues of hygiene, safety, traffic control, taxation, convenience, comfort, aesthetics, accessibility, uses of public space, labor disputes, and ethics.

• The English and French illustrated press between 1880 and 1905 depicted Euro-peans as superior to non-Europeans and rarely questioned the colonizing right of Europe-ans. The illustrated press, such as news magazines The Illustrated London News, The Graphic, and L'Illustration, as well as the newspaper Le Petit Journal, was consumed by colonial news, reported as a series of crises, battles, and frontier troubles, and represented colonial officers and soldiers as heroes. However, a series of imperial rivalries increasingly undermined any collective " European " understanding of the imperial mission. By implicitly and explicitly questioning and criticizing other empires' motives and capacity for colonization, the press came to portray colonization as a power dynamic. Heroism was increasingly tied to nationalism rather than to broader moral principles. The rhetoric and imagery of imperialism were thus fraught with paradoxes and double standards. The press coverage also reveals close links between war and tourism imaginaries.

LE CORPS COLONIAL EN PERFORMANCE :
Perspective afro-française : quelle variabilité sémiotique ?
Résumé

Qu’est-ce qu’un corps colonial et qu’est-ce qu’un corps colonial en performance ? Et qu’est-ce qu’une performance d’ailleurs ? C’est à travers une exploration sémantique puis sémiotique de ces termes et phénomènes (corps colonial, performance) que nous tenterons d’apporter des réponses. La performance est multidimensionnelle dans sa nature, et le corps noir est toujours en performance, bien trop souvent malgré lui dans ce monde du blantriarcat : mais alors est-il possible de retenir la théorie Butlerienne soutenant que la race-même est performée ? Entre regard et « montrer le faire », quelle variabilité sémiotique est possible pour le corps noir ? Pour répondre à la problématique centrale de ces journées d’étude – ou comment penser l’avenir des sociétés après la décolonisation des consciences ? – nous observerons des corps noirs, caribéens, entre colonialité et décolonialité, à travers leur agency ou agentivité, et questionner leur potentialisation par la lentille de l’expérimentation, de l’acte artistique, de la performance.
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Mots-clés : Corps Colonial – Performance – Sémiotique –Agentivité – Regard – Identité


THE COLONIAL BODY ON PERFORMANCE :
Afro-French Perspective : which semiotic variability ?
Abstract

What is a colonial body and what is a colonial body on performance ? And what is a performance by the way ? This is through a semantic and a semiotic explorations of those terms and phenomena (colonial body, performance) that we will try and bring answers. Performance is multidimensional by nature, and the black body is always on performance, far too often unintendedly in this world of Whitriarchy (white patriarchy) : And yet is it possible to hold on the Butlerian theory stating that race itself is a performance ? Between the gaze and the « showing doing », what semiotic variability is possible for the Black body ? To respond this main issue of these study days – or how do we think the future of the societies after the decolonization of consciences ? – we observe Caribbean, black bodies between coloniality and decoloniality, through their agencies, and question the empowerment through the lens of experiment, of the artistic act, of performance.

Keywords : Colonial body – Performance – Semiotiqcs –Agency – Gaze – Identity

Born at the fortified Acadian trading post at Jemseg in 1673, Louise-Élisabeth de Joybert de Soulanges et de Marson grew to assume extraordinary authority following her 1690 marriage to Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil. Six years after her husband was named governor-general of New France, the new marquise de Vaudreuil left her native land to represent her spouse's interests and policies at Versailles and in Paris from 1709 to 1721 and again from 1723 to 1724.

Part of the marquise’s vision for glory included a home worthy of her family’s nobility and her husband’s position as the most senior colonial official in French North America. The governor-general's official residence in Québec, the château Saint-Louis, was an incomplete structure built atop a series of earlier wooden and masonry forts. The marquise de Vaudreuil's unremitting persistence and connections at court finally convinced the Marine Council to fund the renovations and expansion of the château that she so strongly desired, including a separate apartment for herself. Despite the protestations of royal engineers over rising expenses, the château Saint-Louis was brought to the level of a provincial metropolitan residence by the spring of 1724. An inventory of the château taken in 1726 reveals both the quantity and quality of the items used there, including Flemish tapestries, Asian porcelain and lacquer, matching furniture sets, silver serving wares, royal portraits, a multitude of linens, and even a sedan chair and five carriages.

Drawing from a diverse array of archival sources and material culture, this presentation will explore the life and legacy of the château’s most prominent mistress, the marquise de Vaudreuil. A trans-Atlantic perspective will help to situate this extraordinary colonial-born woman within a larger network of aristocratic consumption, colonial sociability, and vice-regal politics in France and New France.

The representation of postcolonial and migrant identities in French society has increasingly been located at the centre of a heated political and cultural debate over the last decades (Mbembe, 2010; Thomas, 2013). In particular, academics and critics in the field of museum and heritage studies have raised their concerns about the ways in which recent immigration is being memorialised through institutional narratives based on notions of cultural assimilation, Frenchness and exoticised depictions of diversity (Fauvel, 2014; Kiwan, 2017), leaving little space for new modes of narrating migrant identities. This article addresses the problematic gaze cast on the story of the migrant as ‘other’ (Hall, 1997) within the permanent displays at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, a museum dedicated to modern and contemporary immigration to France, problematically hosted within an imposing building originally conceived for the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. Drawing on postcolonial museology (Chambers et al., 2014) and on Mouffe’s theorisation of the ‘agonistic’ (Mouffe, 2005; 2013), in this article I will discuss the complexities of the discourse, either conveyed or left implicit and ‘unsaid’, at the MNHI, by referring to the museum’s visual, written and spatial texts. Finally, the article will evaluate to what extent it can be considered as a site for renegotiating collective memory on migrant identities in a transnational perspective.