For a North-South Rebalancing in Commonwealth Studies: Insights from the Reception of Postcolonialism in France

Abstract

Like area studies, Anglophone studies, which includes “civilization” as one of its fields of specialization, has a privileged relationship with major transnational intellectual currents such as postcolonial studies, which became institutionalized in universities throughout the English-speaking world from the 1980s onwards. In France, postcolonial studies provoked a remarkable outcry in academic circles in the early 2000s, testifying to a hostility eerily similar to the virulent polemics surrounding decolonial studies, which have dominated media, political and academic discourse since the late 2010s. Two questions preside over my reflections here: firstly, in what way do the critiques of postcolonialism in France – past and present – allow us to think about the place of the French university in the international division of intellectual labor? Secondly, what role do Anglophone “civilizational” studies play in the reproduction of an academic imperialism towards the so-called Commonwealth countries? The aim is twofold: (1) to contribute to the current project of historicizing the epistemological positioning of Anglophone studies by studying their relationship to postcolonialism in the French context, and (2) to assess the contribution of decolonial critiques to Commonwealth civilizational studies (more particularly those concerning the African continent).