Atelier n°16 : Civilisations post-coloniales (Société d’Études Post-coloniales – SEPC)

Responsables de l’atelier

Marilyne Brun
Université de Lorraine
marilyne.brun@univ-lorraine.fr

Bernard Cros
Paris 8 Saint-Denis
bernard.cros02@univ-paris8.fr

Deirdre Gilfedder
Université Paris Dauphine
deirdre.gilfedder@dauphine.psl.eu

Helena Francis-Granger
Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 – EMMA EA741
helena_fran@yahoo.com

Transcending Borders: Navigating Migration, Identity Negotiation, and Homeland Reinterpretation among Malaysians in the United Kingdom

In the context of the culture of migration, the Malaysian diaspora in the United Kingdom has experienced a proliferation in recent decades. This proliferation is largely attributed to individuals and families seeking new opportunities in education, employment, or lifestyle changes. This study will explore the experiences of the Malaysian diaspora in the United Kingdom, with an emphasis on the complex process of border crossings that these individuals have had to navigate. The act of migration, however, presents its own set of challenges. These encompass the process of self-transformation, the pursuit of a sense of belonging, the diasporic reimagining of their homeland’s culture, life, and society, leading to the creation of diasporic spaces. In addition, this paper will analyse the emergence of hybrid identities within the diaspora, and investigate the unique challenges faced by recent immigrants. Employing a qualitative approach, the research will gather data through in-depth interviews with first-generation Malaysian immigrants in the United Kingdom. This methodology seeks to offer a comprehensive understanding of the under-researched lived experiences and perspectives of this diaspora. This research aspires to enrich the existing body of knowledge on postcolonial and diaspora studies by illuminating the processes of identity negotiation and strategies Malaysians use to create and sustain diasporic spaces. By examining these aspects, the research strives to provide valuable insights into the challenges, aspirations, and resilience of this diasporic community.

Biography

Helena Francis-Granger is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in British/Malaysian Studies under the supervision of Professor Anne-Marie Motard at the University of Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, and is a fellow member of EMMA research center. Her thesis focuses mainly on migration, identity transformation and cultural hybridity of the Malaysian diaspora in the United Kingdom.

Nadia Malinovich
Université de Picardie Jules Verne/Ecole Doctorale
EPHE/ Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (GSRL, UMR 8582)
nmalinovich@gmail.com

From Morocco to Canada and the United States: Jewish Migrants in Post-Colonial Perspective

For migrants whose histories are part of charged historical and geo-political conflicts, the question of whether their departures were “forced” or “chosen” can be a thorny one. Jewish out-migration from the Muslim world after 1948 provides one such example. These departures have generally been understood through a political framework as a direct consequence of decolonization, Arab nationalism and the creation of the state of Israel. My forthcoming book, Crossing Borders, Shifting Identities: Oral Histories of Jewish Migration from the Muslim World to Canada, France and the United States, draws on seventy interviews with Jewish migrants from across the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate the limits of politicized meta-narratives in explaining their departures. This emigratory wave, my evidence suggests, is best understood within the framework of a global phenomenon of accelerated, post-colonial international migration that began in the decades following WWII. Political pressure points combined with long range economic, cultural, and educational forces simultaneously pushed and pulled Jewish populations from their ancestral homes in the Muslim world towards Israel, Europe, the Americas and beyond over the course of several decades. More often than not, these individuals exercised considerably agency in making emigration choices. In this paper, I will explore these questions through a presentation of the emigration narratives of my interviewees from Morocco who resettled in Los Angeles and Montreal between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. In analyzing the ways in which they narrate their departures, I will pay particular attention to how their framings have been shaped through the lens of the particularities of the social, cultural and political contexts of the United States and Canada (and in particular Montreal/Quebec) respectively. I will also consider the role of widely circulating, transnational meta-narratives emanating from Israel and elsewhere in influencing how these individuals make sense of their individual and collective past.

Biography

Nadia Malinovich, who holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan, is currently Maîtresse de Conférences HDR at the Université de Picardie–Jules Verne. She is a member of the Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (GSRL/CNRS), where she runs the research network Judaismes contemporains, religion, culture, migration: approche comparatiste, and of the doctoral school of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). She originally studied the social and cultural history of Jews in France at the beginning of the 20th century, and published extensively on the subject: French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. French version: Heureux comme un Juif en France : intégration, identité, culture, 1900-1932, Honoré Champion, 2010). She also co-edited The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities (Brill, 2016) with Zvi Jonathan Kaplan. She is currently interested in the history of Jews from the Arab-Muslim world who left their land of origin to settle in France and North America, between the 1940s and 1970s. Her forthcoming book is entitled Crossing Borders, Changing Identity: Oral Stories of Jewish Migration from the Muslim World to Canada, France, and the United States (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation/Liverpool University Press).

Camille Martinerie
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA
camille.MARTINERIE@univ-amu.fr

University as Border in Postcolonial Contexts: The case of South African exiled intellectuals under Apartheid

For the past fifty years, decentring national and imperial narratives has been on the research agenda of most postcolonial, subaltern or third space intellectuals (Whitchurch, 2012) regardless of their geopolitical locations across the globe. Greater inspection of the histories of colonialism and imperialism revealed, amongst other things, the complex effects of the international division of labour between the global North and the global South (Gupta et al., 2018) on knowledge production, universities and intellectuals (Said, 1976; Alatas, 2000; Connell, 2007; Connell et al., 2016; Mamdani, 2016). Nonetheless some critics argue that postcolonial approaches only managed to recentre colonial Empires in the histories of former colonized and indirectly reduced the colonial relationship to the unilateral exchanges between a “centre” and “periphery”, downplaying the political, cultural and intellectual circulations from the peripheries to the centre or between peripheries. In that respect, postcolonial universities would have failed the test of de-territorializing knowledge (Mignolo, 1987). In South Africa, the settler colonial legacies on higher education, research and teaching (Taylor, 1991; Rich, 1993; Sanders, 2002) have been the object of renewed debates since the 2010s (Ramohai, 2014; Mapaya, 2016). However, no study has yet paid attention to the impact of apartheid on black intellectual life from the perspective of South-North connected histories. In this paper I come back on the consequences of apartheid on South African intellectual life (Ally, 2005; Ally and Ally, 2008; Soudien, 2011) by looking at the case of South African intellectual exiles in the North. I argue that a socio-historical investigation of the social and intellectual trajectories of postcolonial scholars is one of the missing threads to better appraise the challenges and predicaments of the postcolonial university as a border between science and society.

Bibliography

Alatas, S.H. (2000) ‘Intellectual Imperialism: Definition, Traits, and Problems’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 28(1), pp. 23–45. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24492998 (Accessed: 4 November 2021).

Ally, N. and Ally, S. (2008) ‘Critical Intellectualism: the Role of Black Consciousness in Reconfiguring the Race-Class Problematic’, in A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander, and N.C. Gibson (eds) Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–188.

Ally, S. (2005) ‘Oppositional intellectualism as reflection, not rejection, of power: Wits Sociology, 1975-1989’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 59(1), pp. 66–97. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2005.0045.

Connell, R. (2007) ‘The Heart of the Problem: South African Intellectual Workers, Globalization and Social Change’, Sociology, 41(1), pp. 11–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038507072281.

Connell, R. et al. (2016) ‘Toward a global sociology of knowledge: Post-colonial realities and intellectual practices’, International Sociology, 32. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580916676913.

Magubane, Z. (2004) Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. University of Chicago Press.

Mamdani, M. (2016) ‘Between the public intellectual and the scholar: decolonization and some post-independence initiatives in African higher education’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17(1), pp. 68–83. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1140260.

Mapaya, M.G. (2016) ‘The fourth and fifth generations of African scholars: A South African case study’, Acta Academica, 48(2), pp. 76–90. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa48i2.3.

Ramohai, J. (2014) ‘“Marginalised Access” in South African Higher Education: Black Women Academics Speak!’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p2976.

Rich, P. (1993) Hope and Despair: English-speaking Intellectuals and South African Politics, 1896-1976. London: British Academic Press. Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/hope-and-despair-9781350184558 (Accessed: 1 August 2021).

Said, E.W. (1976) ‘Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World’, p. 22.

Sanders, M. (2002) Complicities: the Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press. Available at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/complicities (Accessed: 1 August 2021).

Soudien, C. (2011) ‘The Contribution of radical Western Cape intellectuals to an indigenous knowledge porject in South Africa’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 76(1), pp. 44–66.

Taylor, R. (1991) ‘The Narrow Ground: Critical Intellectual Work on South Africa Under Apartheid’, Critical Arts, 5(4), pp. 30–48. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02560049285310051.

Whitchurch, C. (2012) Reconstructing Identities in Higher Education: The rise of ‘Third Space’ professionals. Routledge.

Biography

Camille Martinerie is a former student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris-Saclay) and holds a joint-PhD degree in African and Anglophone Studies at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Aix-Marseille Université (France) where she also teaches as a contract lecturer (ATER). Her thesis entitled “Deconstructing ‘de/colonized knowledge’ in the South African liberal university: the limits of radical academic history under apartheid (1960-1991)” investigated the complex histories of intellectual colonization and decolonization and their impact on history education under apartheid. Her research interests revolve around historiography, intellectual history and education linked to (post)colonial and radical political theories. Her latest publication include:

Martinerie, C. (2024). Disciplinary failures and decolonial pitfalls: A retrospective on the case of radical academic history in South Africa. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 46.1 (article soumis, en attente d’évaluation, à paraître en 2024)

Martinerie, C. (2024). Revaluating the Postmodern Challenge in South African Historical Studies: A Reception Study. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 46.1 (article soumis, en attente d’évaluation, à paraître au printemps 2024)

Martinerie, C. (2024) « Décoloniser l’histoire à l’université en Afrique du Sud : enjeux politiques, historiographiques et épistémologiques » dans Kouamé, N. et Michel, A. (dir.) (2024). Encyclopédie des historiographies : Afriques, Amériques, Asies (volume II – Figures, Ecoles, Débats), Presses de l’Inalco (à paraître)

Michel Olinga
Université de Technologie Belfort-Montbéliard
michel.olinga@utbm.fr

The Cameroon-Nigeria Border Settlement over the Bakassi Peninsula: Some Humanitarian Challenges

Following the First World War, the German protectorate of Kamerun (1884 -1916) was partitioned between France and Great Britain. The British Cameroons (Southern Cameroons and Northern Cameroons) was governed as an integral part of British Nigeria, as there was every indication, particularly in the period preceding decolonisation that Britain intended to integrate the territory fully into Nigeria despite its UN trust territory particular status. As a matter of fact, there was no real border between British Nigeria and the British Cameroons during British colonisation, which was conducive to the large-scale migration of Nigerians to the British Cameroons. Decolonisation and the reunification of former French Cameroun and the Southern British Cameroons in 1961 re-established the international border between Nigeria and the former British Southern Cameroons now part of the Republic of Cameroon, completely changing the legal status of Nigerian migrants living in the territory. Another consequence of decolonisation and reunification was the conflict between Cameroon and Nigeria over the border. The conflict, which started in the 1960s, was epitomised by regular skirmishes between the two armies and culminated in the 1990s in a drawn-out war over the sovereignty of the Bakassi peninsula; a highly coveted area presumably rich in natural resources.

The presentation will focus on the humanitarian challenges pertaining to the settlement of this border issue by the International Court of Justice in 2002, in favour of Cameroon. The challenges include the displacement and resettlement of Nigerians, human rights concerns, security issues and international cooperation between Cameroon, Nigeria and the international community.

Biography

Michel Olinga earned a Doctorate degree in Anglophone Studies from the University of Paris – Sorbonne (Paris IV) and teaches English and the societies of the English-speaking world at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM). His general research interests bear on British and Commonwealth cultural studies. He is also the Head of UTBM University Press.

Lindsey Paek
Bordeaux Montaigne
lindseyjpaek@gmail.com

Exploring In-Betweenness and Hybridity Embedded in the Identity Journeys of 1.5-Generation Korean Immigrants in Canada

Despite increasing levels of interest, the 1.5-generation literature remains an under-explored area of research compared to the first- and second-generation literature. This holds true for Canada, whose Census data effectively distinguishes between the first and second generations of immigrants but categorizes the 1.5 generation as the first-generation. Consequently, the in-between and heterogeneous nature of this group can be overlooked. This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of the 1.5-generation Korean Canadian literature by presenting findings from individual interviews with ten 1.5-generation Korean immigrants in Toronto and examining varied patterns of their identity construction and outcomes.

Exploring the identity journeys of participants revealed three distinct phases: initial acculturation during childhood, active ethnic identity exploration during adolescence, and the strengthening of Korean Canadian identity during adulthood. The resulting sociocultural identity was inherently and evidently hybrid and multi-faceted, based on self-perceptions in relation to us (in-groups) and them (out-groups). The findings demonstrate that the processes of identity negotiation are constant and complex, encompassing diverse life experiences associated with family, ethnic community, school, work, media, racial discrimination, and transnationalism, among others. Participants often saw their Korean identity evolving into an increasingly symbolic representation, while their Canadian identity was enriched over time and through accumulated life experiences in Canada, as well as through heightened awareness and sensitivity to Canadian multiculturalism. Overall, the findings shed light on the complexities of identity negotiation in-between ethnic, racial, and national communities and, moreover, underscore the need for further investigations into the experiences related to the 1.5 generation, as well as diverse immigrant groups situated in different sociocultural contexts.

Biographie

A Member of CLIMAS at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne & LEADS at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, Lindsey Paek holds a PhD in Anglophone Studies and specializes in hybrid identities in Canada, with a particular focus on Korean Canadian identity. Her research interests lie in exploring multifaceted layers of identity on both individual and collective levels, as well as examining the dynamics of immigrant identities across generations. Additionally, her teaching experiences have sparked a keen interest in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). She is currently teaching and doing research in ESP as an ATER at the Language Department of the ENS Paris-Saclay.

Fabien Poète
Université Paris Dauphine
fabien.poete@dauphine.psl.eu

New Zealand’s Roads at the Edge of the Universe: Erasing Physical Borders, Perpetuating Cultural Borders?

In the lead-up to Aotearoa New Zealand’s October 2023 general election, Channel Three’s news service invited the leaders of four political parties to make their case to the electorate in the “Newshub Nation Powerbrokers’ Debate”. As Te Pāti Māori leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer stressed that Māori voters “were raised in a system that wasn’t designed for us”, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters argued that “they just want the roads fixed”.

During the electoral campaign, all three parties which are now in government – Christopher Luxon’s National party, David Seymour’s Association of Taxpayers and Consumers (ACT) and Winston Peters’ New Zealand First (NZF) – insisted on the geographical, physical barriers that still impact rural and urban New Zealanders alike to oppose the left’s attempts to focus on cultural barriers.

Over the six years that it stayed in power in various shapes or forms, the Sixth Labour Government led a general effort to adapt policy-making to Aotearoa New Zealand’s Māori population, with the extension of co-governance, the adoption of Māori names for government agencies and certain road signs, the introduction of a “cultural” indicator to measure budgetary efficiency, and more generally speaking the beginning of a different approach to health and the judicial system to better take into account Māori traditions and thought.

This paper argues that land transport policies, and more particularly those focused on road-building and road-fixing, have become a rhetorical and political tool to drive voters away from a decolonial approach to policy-making and to try and ressuscitate the majoritarian approach which was thriving until the David Lange years in the 1980s.

Roadbuilding has indeed been a significant factor in the construction of a New Zealand identity from the late 19^th century to the early 1980s, as it was used to extend a majoritarian, Pākeha economic and societal system deep into the country. In more recent years, although roads still received the lion’s share of transport budgets, the Sixth Labour Government had reviewed its rhetoric to focus more on rail and cycleways and to put forward the use of Te Reo Māori in the field of land transport. Finally, the coalition agreements signed between National and its partners ACT and NZF in November 2023, as well as the campaign led by each of those three parties, seem to oppose the erasure of physical borders (through roadbuilding and road-fixing rhetoric) to the previous government’s efforts to tackle cultural barriers.

Biography

Fabien Poète worked on New Zealand’s national imagery (Kiwiana) as a student at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, which also gave him the opportunity of spending two years in the New Zealand capital.

After focusing on teaching activities for a few years, he studied economics, public law, and public finances at the Institut d’études politiques de Toulouse.

He has worked as a Teacher of English as a Second Language (PRAG) at Paris Dauphine-PSL’s Department of Organizational Sciences since 2021, while also giving classes at Sciences Po Paris since 2022.

To be published:

February 2024. “New Zealand’s Well-being Budget: Social Laboratory, Decolonial Answers?” in Postcolonial Cultures Journal. Studies and Essays, vol.2. Société d’Étude des Pays du Commonwealth.

Julie Raviri
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA
julie.raviri@etu.univ-amu.fr

From District Six to Mitchells Plain: Crossing the Urban Boundaries of Apartheid

Space has played a significant role in the history of South Africa. During apartheid, spatial segregation was a fundamental aspect of the ideology of separate development, with the government using space as a tool for social control and oppression.

The narrative of displacement, marginalization, and resilience is an important element of the so-called Coloured identity in Cape Town as the community moved across the urban boundaries, navigating the harsh realities of apartheid’s racial divisions and the enduring struggle for social justice and equality.

In Outcast Cape Town, social geographer John Western tackles this question as he analyzes the urban spatial planning of the 1950 Group Areas Act. He argues that “the most effective plan for societal control by spatial manipulation in apartheid is that of continual removal” (Western, 46).

The story of District Six is one sadly famous example of this systematic process of displacing individuals to maintain segregation and exert control over the non-white segments of the population. District Six, once home to a vibrant and racially diverse community at the heart of the city of Cape Town, was declared a white-only area in the 1960’s. It was subsequently demolished and its Coloured inhabitants forcibly removed and scattered, for the most part, throughout the Cape Flats, a sandy area on the outskirts of the city. Mitchells Plain, one of the townships of this region, was established by the apartheid government in the 1970’s to accommodate the Coloureds who had been removed from other areas under the Group Areas Act of 1950. This exodus has had a profound and traumatic impact on the displaced as the social fabric and the physical place that made District Six were torn down.

This presentation will lean on Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese American geographer, who extensively wrote about the concepts of space and place, periphery and center, and their importance in the formation of human experiences and identities. As stated by Tuan, “a person, over time, invests parts of their emotional life in their home and, beyond the home, in their neighborhood. To be forcibly expelled from one’s home and neighborhood is to be stripped of an envelope which, through its familiarity, protects the human being against the disarray of the outside world” (Tuan, 99).

This socio-geographical approach highlights the ideas of “topophilia” and “topophobia”, the relationship between emotional and cultural connections to specific places, which govern our understanding of the world. The feelings of loss and uprooting nourished and exacerbated this deep sense of belonging to District Six, a residential area which has become a symbol of identity for a large part of the Coloured community in Cape Town, and undoubtedly in Mitchells Plain.

While the township has been struggling with unemployment, poverty, and violence, its inhabitants have been resiliently working towards (re)building a sense of community that could heal the wounds of the past.

Biography

Julie Raviri is currently pursuing a PhD in Post-Colonial Studies under the supervision of Professor Gilles Teulié at Aix-Marseille University and is a member of the LERMA research center. Her research focuses on the spatial element of the Coloured identity in the township of Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. She also teaches law at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Aix-Marseille University and British History at the University of Toulon.

Jill Royal
Paris Cité
jill.mary.royal@gmail.com

Imagining Australia’s Urban-Rural Divide

In this paper, I will examine how the urban-rural divide in Australia has been and continues to be articulated as part of settler society. From its roots in the colonial frontier to its modern permutations in both politics and media as well as through the attitudes of those who live within these communities. Settler Australia is commonly divided into these two separate spaces: the urban and the rural. While the vast majority of Australian citizens live in the cities and suburbs, there is a long-standing belief that the traditional heart of the nation resides in the rural and isolated zones. This notion once served the purpose of forging a common identity within settler Australia and is still visible in the attitudes towards both spaces. In the cultural landscape, the rural is shown as an incarnation of authenticity while the urban has often been derided as characterless and pale imitations of their European counterparts. Yet, these spaces have arguably never truly been separate and thus the barrier is rather a convenient framing for projecting desirable cultural imagery. Over the last 50 years, their differences have only continued to shrink with the decline of agriculture and the need to attract urban migrants to sustain rural communities. These lifestyle movements of the 1970s onwards have brought visibly cosmopolitan elements to the Bush yet they also attest to the perpetual “imaginative lure of the rural frontier” (Davison 19). As more ex-urban migrants move to regional Australia, the representations of these spaces are not only shaping attitudes to the land but also providing representations of what it can mean to be Australian today.

Biography

Jillian Royal is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Paris Cité currently working as a teacher at the Université Paris-Sorbonne For her thesis, she is exploring the changing socio-environmental attitudes of urban-rural migration from 1970-2010 in Australia. Her broader interests include the representations of identity and place in the cultures of Britain and the Commonwealth.

Gilles Teulie
Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA
gilles.teulie@univ-amu.fr

Challenging the Legacy of the Imperial Gaze: The South African Postcard Industry and the Construction of Oppressive Mental Borders

In the wake of the debates that question the positive or negative role of European Empires, this presentation seeks to challenge the imperial gaze and try to elaborate a reflexion on how to deal with it. Coined by E. Ann Kaplan (Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, 1997), the expression imperial gaze (or otherwise labelled colonial gaze) infers that it is the imperialist’s set of values and representations that establishes the dominant norm to define the colonised ; the latter may then adopt (or resist adopting) what he thinks is his intrinsic self and thus may believe (or not) it is according to his own choice and freewill that he constructs his identity.

Material and popular culture is a token of the legacy of what seems a bygone era, even though European empires have only been dismantled recently, while some purport they are still there. Writing about the entertainement park, The Lost City near Johannesburg, Jeanne Van Eeden claims: “[…], it seems ironic that, while buzzwords such as postcolonialism and political correctness ostensibly inform interaction with culture and history, the colonial legacy continually asserts itself in popular culture and reinscribes a politics of power in the entertainment landscape.” (“The Colonial Gaze: Imperialism, Myths, and South African Popular Culture” Design Issues, Spring, 2004, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 18-33. 18).

This presentation will examin the South African postcard industry at the turn of the 19th and 20th century which formalised and developped existing mental borders inherited from European mind sets, meant to infantilize, mock and depreciate the colonised. I will lean on the business of Sallo Epstein, “the largest publisher of view-cards and types of South Africa and Transvaal,” according to the Rhodesian Study Circle, who, for commercial purposes offered his customers what they were expecting from the coloniser-colonised relations. Finally, this presentation wishes to tackle the becoming of the imperial gaze today, analysing its mechanism to denounce it but without exposing and thus unwillingly promoting its racial bias, two aspects which have, recently, triggered debates about the writing of history.

Biography

Gilles Teulié is Professor of British and South African Studies at Aix-Marseille University. He has written extensively on South African history but also on postcards and Empire. He has published a book on the Afrikaners and the Anglo-Boer War (2000) another one on racial attitudes in Victorian South Africa (2015), a history of South Africa (2019) and a history of South African Protestantism and the racial question (2022): He is the editor and co-editor of several collections of essays among which: Healing South African Wounds (2009), L’Afrique du Sud de Nouvelles identités? (2010) and Spaces of History, History of Spaces (E-rea on-line 2017) and Another Vision of Empire. Henry Rider Haggard’s Modernity and Legacy (E-rea on-line 2020), Showcasing Empire (CVE on-line 2021) and The Legacy of a Troubled Past: Commemorative Politics in 21^st Century South Africa. (With Mathilde Rogez and Bernard Cros, Liverpool University Press / Presses Universitaires de Provence 2022).