Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia

Patricia Lorcin is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, USA. She is the author of Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (1995), editor of Algeria and France 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, and Nostalgia (2006), and co-editor of several collections of essays including France and its Spaces of War: Experience, Memory, Image (2009).

PART I: 1900-1930. COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR IMAGINED SELVES Women and their Colonial Worlds Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen PART II: 1920-1940. POLITICAL REALITIES AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS Reality Expressed; Reality Imagined: Colonial Women in Twenties Algeria and Kenya Writing and Living the Exotic [The Twenties] Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism [The Thirties] PART III: IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE REFORMULATION OF NOSTALGIA Nationalist Anger; Colonial Illusions: Women's responses to Decolonization Happy Families, Red Strangers and 'A Vanishing Africa': Nostalgia Comes Full Circle