Medical Imperialism In French North Africa

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Maps -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Situating Regeneration: Medicine, Science, and "Modern" Bodies -- 2. Regenerating Space: Destruction and Divided Communities -- 3. Regenerating Space, Part 2: Not All Ghettoes Are the Same -- 4. Regenerating Youth: The Role of the Alliance and the Rise of Zionism -- 5. Regenerating Women: The Assertion of Reproductive Control -- Conclusion: A Brief Reflection on Identity -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward "modernization," and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a "modern" city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral "regeneration" of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women's negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city's Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.

From 1900 to 1944, public health was a pillar of the French colonial project in French West Africa. African medical workers became the backbone of the Native Medical Service, which sought to "grow the race" (faire du noir) and popularize French cultural ideals while improving the general health of the African population and combating epidemic diseases. Through successive yellow fever and plague epidemics, the Medical Service honed a set of health measures that it utilized in epidemic outbreaks. These health measures remained largely unchanged throughout the period. The political environment and the reactions of African residents, especially residents of the Four Communes, to these anti-epidemic measures did change though. Intermittent popular resistance to health measures, along with persistent personnel shortages, budget constraints, the sparsely settled population, and the vast land area of West Africa conspired to make the goals of the Native Medical Service difficult to achieve. An examination of the internal profile (personnel numbers, job descriptions, evaluations, organization and organizational changes, and policies) of the Native Medical Service from 1900 - 1944 demonstrates some of the aspects of how the ideology of French colonialism was at odds with itself and with colonial realities. The Native Medical Service was an arm of the colonial government in areas where it was weak, such as spreading French civilization and appreciation for French culture. Despite being used to compensate for some of the government's shortcomings, the Native Medical Service experienced disjunctions between its goals and the means to achieve them that hindered its effectiveness. The ideological core of French colonialism was built around the Civilizing Mission, development (la mise en valeur), and the myth of the indissolubility of Greater France. The widespread French belief in African inferiority and that the benefits of French imperial rule to the subject peoples outweighed the drawbacks both worked against the success of French goals in West Africa to spread their civilization, foster economic and human development, and form a lasting addition to France Outre-Mer.

Spencer D. Segalla examines natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization in Algeria, Morocco, and France and explores how environmental catastrophes impacted the dissolution of France’s empire in North Africa.

This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from sexual hygiene to national hygiene to imperial hygiene. Taking British colonialism and White Australia as case studies, the book examines public health as spatialized biopolitical governance between 1850 and 1950. Colonial management of race dovetailed with public health into new boundaries of rule, into racialised cordons sanitaires .

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.

Multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the region. The creative interaction of Moroccan Jewry with the Arab and Berber cultures was noted in the Jews’ use of Morocco’s multiple languages and dialects, characteristic poetry, and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and popular texts and proverbs. In Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists analyze this culture, in all its complexity and hybridity. The volume’s collection of essays span political and social interactions throughout history, cultural commonalities, traditions, and halakhic developments. As Jewish life in Morocco has dwindled, much of what is left are traditions maintained in Moroccan ex-pat communities, and memories of those who stayed and those who left. The volume concludes with shared memories from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual from Morocco, a Moroccan Muslim scholar, an analysis of a visual memoir painted by the nineteenth-century artist, Eugène Delacroix, and a photo essay of the vanished world of Jewish life in Morocco.

Centered around a massive ecological disaster in which eight hundred thousand Algerians died between 1865 and 1872, Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria explores how repeated performance of divisions across an expansive ecosystem produced modern imperialism in nineteenth-century Algeria.

The Battle for Algeria offers a new interpretation of the Algerian War (1954-1962) that highlights the social dimensions of the National Liberation Front's winning strategy, specifically its health care and humanitarianism programs, which targeted the local and international arenas and directly contributed to Algerian sovereignty.

Since the 2005 urban protests in France, public debate has often centered on questions of how the country has managed its relationship with its North African citizens and residents. In Making Space Melissa K. Byrnes considers how four French suburbs near Paris and Lyon reacted to rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians before, during, and after the Algerian War. In particular, Byrnes investigates what motivated local actors such as municipal officials, regional authorities, employers, and others to become involved in debates over migrants’ rights and welfare, and the wide variety of strategies community leaders developed in response to the migrants’ presence. An examination of the ways local policies and attitudes formed and re-formed communities offers a deeper understanding of the decisions that led to the current tensions in French society and questions about France’s ability—and will—to fulfill the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity for all of its citizens. Byrnes uses local experiences to contradict a version of French migration history that reads the urban unrest of recent years as preordained.