Bringing the Empire Back Home

Lebovics Herman Lebovics

Description

Thirty years ago, an international antiglobalization movement was born in the grazing lands of France's Larzac plateau. In the 1970s, Larzac farmers were joined by others from around the world in their efforts to prevent the expansion of a local military base: by ecologists, religious pacifists, and urban leftists, and by social activists including American Indians and South American peasant leaders. In 1999 some of the same farmers who had fought the expansion of the base in the 1970s-including Jose Bove-dismantled the new local McDonald's. That gesture was part of a protest against U.S. tariffs on specified French exports including Roquefort cheese, the region's primary market product. The two struggles-the one against expanding a French army camp intended to train troops for postcolonial wars, the other against American economic might-were landmarks in the global campaign to preserve local cultures. They were also key episodes in the decades-long attempt by the French to define their cultural heritage within a much changed nation, a new Europe, and, especially, an American-dominated world.In Bringing the Empire Back Home, the inventive cultural historian Herman Lebovics provides a riveting account of how intense disputes about what it means to be French have played out over the past half-century, redefining Paris, the regions, and the former colonies in relation to one another and the world at large. In a narrative populated with peasants, people from the former colonies, museum curators, former colonial administrators, left Christians, archaeologists, anthropologists, soccer players and their teenage fans, and, yes, leading government officials, Lebovics reveals contemporary French society and cultures as perhaps the West's most important testing grounds of pluralism and assimilation. A lively cultural history, Bringing the Empire Back Home highlights not only the political significance of France's efforts to synthesize the regional, national, European, ethnic postcolonial, and global but also the chaotic beauty of the endeavor.

Sujets

• Europe
• Cultural studies
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 23 juin 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386117
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BRINGING THE EMPIRE BACK HOME

RADICAL PERSPECTIVES

A series edited by Barbara Weinstein

and Daniel Walkowitz

BRINGING THE EMPIRE BACK HOME

France in the Global Age

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

h e r m a n l e b o v i c s

Durham & London 2004

∫2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Rebecca Giménez Typeset in Adobe Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

f o r e t h a n a n d r a c h e l ,

j e s s e a n d m e l i s s a

1

2

3

4

5

CONTENTS

Illustrations

i

x

About the Series

Preface

xiii

Introduction

1

xi

Gardarem lo Larzac!

1

3

‘‘What You Did in Africa, Can You Come Back to France and Do It?’’

Combating Guerilla Ethnology

83

The E√ect Le Pen: Pluralism or Republicanism?

The Dance of the Museums

Conclusion

Notes

191

179

Acknowledgments

Index

223

219

143

115

58

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. José Bové speaking from the bed of a construction truck during the deconstruction of the Millau McDonald’s, 2 2. Bové shaking hands with well wishers, 3 3. Poster announcing the harvest festival for the Third World in the Larzac, 14 4. In behalf of the Kanak people, Jean-Marie Tjibaou prepares to sign the documents that transfer a piece of the Larzac to the New Caledonians’ Kanaky, 1988, 16 5. Cartoon from the Larzac militants’ newspaper showing the oppressed regions of France, 19 6. A later visit of Kanak representatives to Larzac, 40 7. Cheyenne representatives of the American Indian Movement arrive to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Larzac victory, 1991, 40 8. Delegates of the Japanese farmers’ movement, whose land was being condemned to build Tokyo’s big new airport, visit the Larzac, 41 9. Woman passing outGardarem lo Larzacnewspaper to military recruits, 44 10. The militant activist Pierre Burguière confronts a military o≈cer about the camp’s extension, 44 11. Local sheep do their bit to deny the country roads to the military, 46 12. Poster for the united regionalists’ mobilization of summer 1975, 46 13. Larzac tractors in convoy on a highway adjoining the base, 47 14. Poster calling for support of the occupation of the Champs de Mars by the Peasants of Larzac, 47 15. The Larzac sheep on the Champs de Mars with the Ei√el Tower above them, 1972, 48 16. Poster announcing production of a play by the Groupe de la Cartoucherie on the historical resistance of the peasants of Occitanie against various incarnations of the Beast, 53