Races on Display French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886-1940 [Paperback]

While European commerce in race was substantial, the colonial trade in ideas of race was highly profitable as well. Looking at official propaganda and commercial representations in France during the Third Republic, this book explores the way the French increased the value of their racial identity at home at the expense of their colonized brothers and sisters. The French did not create the identity-effacing stereotypes of Africans, Arabs, and Indochinese. Instead they refined or remolded these images, and as they did so they redefined and remolded their images of themselves. Focusing on worlds fairs, colonial expositions, and mundane manufacturers trademarks, Races on Display shows not only the prevalence of racial stereotypes, but also how complex these representations prove to be.

. . . very clear and straight-forward. The introduction is brief and refreshinglyunencumbered with theoretical jargon; indeed, the work as a whole is free of the commonly cumbersome and overly complex intellectual gymnastics of many postcolonial studies of racial images. In these opening pages, Hale lays out her argument and gives the reader a clear blueprint for the text. Throughout the work, Hale blends historiography into the narrative flow in an almost seamless manner.April 2009

Dana S. Hale received her Ph.D. in Comparative History from Brandeis University and taught history at Howard University from 1998 to 2005. She is author of several essays.

Dana Hale's book provides an overview of the French case from the 1880s until the First World War, focusing on exhibitions (particularly in Paris in 1900, 1931 and 1937 and in Marseille in 1922) and on trade-marks used for advertising.37.3 Sept. 2009. . . a worthy addition to the literature on colonial representation and French colonial history.Vol.30.1 2009Races on Display is a rich work. If its conclusions are not as novel as its wealth of detail, it will nonetheless appeal to an interdisciplinary audience and provoke the solcc