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).

"This book builds on recent moves in the historical discipline towards interdisciplinary, transnational history, providing a unique, comparative account of colonial nostalgia throughout the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first century ... Lorcin masterfully intertwines historical narrative with literary analysis." - French History "In this masterful study, Patricia M. E. Lorcin systematically compares two different places, cultures, and empires over an extended period of time - French Algeria and British Kenya - within the overarching framework of colonial nostalgia and women's writings. Colonial women's literary output serves as an entry point for understanding critical, but shifting, relationships: individual and collective sensibilities, gendered narratives, and self-formation or identity. Lorcin's triangulation between competing understandings of modernity, various literary and experienced forms of nostalgia, and women's roles in and experiences of settler colonialism represents a real tour de force." - Julia Clancy-Smith, professor of History, University of Arizona, USA "This is a fascinating and thoughtful book. Patricia M. E. Lorcin's study of women writers in the colonies of French Algeria and British Kenya is original and, by turns, illuminating and disquieting. Well-conceived and imaginatively constructed, the book is elegantly written and forensically clear. It will be of huge interest to a general readership as well as to specialist scholars of colonial and imperial history, women's history, and historical memory. Lorcin's study offers a welcome corrective, its value evident in the new perspectives it reveals." - Martin Thomas, professor of History, University of Exeter, UK

• PART I: 1900-1930. COLONIAL WOMEN AND THEIR IMAGINED SELVES 1. Women and their Colonial Worlds 2. Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen PART II: 1920-1940. POLITICAL REALITIES AND FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS 3. Reality Expressed; Reality Imagined: Colonial Women in Twenties Algeria and Kenya 4. Writing and Living the Exotic [The Twenties] 5. Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism [The Thirties] PART III: IMPERIAL DECLINE AND THE REFORMULATION OF NOSTALGIA 6. Nationalist Anger; Colonial Illusions: Women's responses to Decolonization 7. Happy Families, Red Strangers and 'A Vanishing Africa': Nostalgia Comes Full Circle