The idea that historans should be selective in only writing about periods or groups to fit some agenda of political activism is a scandal.
Yet that is precisely what the new French law proposes. An
activist political agenda, probably in the most literal
sense of political, i.e. action by the governing party or
coalition of the French state in pursuit of electoral gains,
is forcing a selective and partial teaching of French
colonial history onto French schools and teachers.
Claire Dehon has repeatedly said she wishes to stand for
nuance in the scholarship and teaching about colonialism.
This law is neither scholarly nor nuanced. It does not
provide for a complex portrayal of colonialism, but a
tendentious, uncritically nationalist one. If Professor
Dehon really stands for nuance, one is at a loss to
understand why she would defend this law.
It is well to remember that the many evils of colonialism
were visible and openly and widely criticized from *within*
imperialist and colonialist societies for most of the
effective colonial period in Kmt. Take Joseph Conrad's
_Heart of Darkness_, which gained prominence not for its
uniqueness but as part of a much broader intellectual
current.
One needs to analyze its racist aspects and its reflections
of problematic conceptions of social evolution based on
stereotyped images of primitiveness to fully appreciate his
achievements, their limits and his role as a maker as well
as a product of his times. Even so, Conrad's novel clearly
damns imperialism and colonialism as viciously, murderously
violent, as crassly exploitative, and as racist, all
inherently so (despite an unpersuasive sop to British
nationalism that he puts in Marlow's mouth, which may be
ironic on Conrad's part, or may be a sentimentality
occluding Conrad's vision).
At the heart of Conrad's critique is acute though not
comprehensive perception of key contradictions in the
ideology of "the civilizing mission." Conrad's preception
includes the fundamental impossibility of separating
relatively well-intentioned (which is not to say
well-conceived) motives for colonialism from those of greed,
desire for power both petty and large, and sadism. The
result portrayed in the novel is that the good intentions,
even when they start honestly, function to protect the evils.
This inextricability of "good" and "bad" motives and effects
bears on the current discussion in two ways.
First, critics of colonialism are not anachronistically
projecting a contemporary moralism onto hapless people in
the past caught in the limits of the context of their times,
a curious objection which one sometimes hears, usually in
defense of their own "national ancestors," from people
otherwise inclined to reject moral and cultural relativism.
In fact people of all shades of opinion and action with
respect to colonialism had critical information and
arguments easily available to them in their own context. To
deny those who chose to support and enact colonialism
recognition that they made deliberate choices is to
disrespect both history and them, in their status as moral
actors.
Second, such inextricability presents us with a criterion
for what we should mean by nuance. It exposes as inadequate
ideas like "the colonial balance sheet," under which we will
tot up credits and debits to be awarded to colonialism,
according to some arbitrary and illusory system of
quantification, and declare colonialism on balance a good
thing or a bad thing. The mental separations necessary to
such a method are the same ones that enable the meretricious
historical ideology now promulgated as educational law in
France, and that apparently allow Claire Dehon to believe
she is somehow promoting nuance in defending an entirely
unnuanced law.
Stowell Kessler says it is a sad commentary that any
historian should find it necessary to plead for the
inclusion of all aspects of history, apparently referring to
Claire Dehon's call for nuance. Sad indeed then that many
historians should have to plead for inclusion of a full
picture of colonialism that promotes critical thought rather
than defensive nationalist ideology against forcible
imposition of the latter by state power in France.
However, that sad fact also reflects the fact that we are
not just arguing about history, but about the present. The
issues in the debates at the turn of the last century still
are very much with us, although the institutional mechanisms
and the social and material circumstances of inequality,
violence and domination have changed in some significant
ways.