1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821727203321

Autore

Lorcin Patricia M. E

Titolo

Historicizing colonial nostalgia : European women's narratives of Algeria and Kenya 1900-present / / Patricia M.E. Lorcin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY, : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

ISBN

1-280-68114-4

9786613658081

1-137-01304-4

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (330 p.)

Disciplina

809.89287096

Soggetti

African literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Women authors

Women colonists - Algeria

Women colonists - Kenya

Nostalgia in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p.[273]-305) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Cover; Contents; List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I: 1900-1930. Colonial Women and Their Imagined Selves; 1 Paradoxical Lives: 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: Algeria and Kenya in the Twenties; 4 Writing and Living the Exotic; 5 Women's Fictions of Colonial Realism; Part III: Imperial Decline and the Reformulation of Nostalgia; 6 Nationalist Anger

Colonial Illusions: Women's Responses to Decolonization7 Happy Families, Pieds-Noirs, Red Strangers, and ""a Vanishing Africa"": Nostalgia Comes Full Circle; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sommario/riassunto

This illuminating study of European women's narratives in colonial Algeria and Kenya argues that nostalgia was not a post-colonial phenomenon but was embedded in the colonial period. Patricia M. E. Lorcin explores the distinction between imperial nostalgia, associated with the loss of power that results from the loss of empire, and colonial



nostalgia, associated with loss of socio-cultural standing—in other words, loss of a certain way of life. This distinction helps to make women's discursive role an important factor in the creation of colonial nostalgia, due to their significant contribution to the establishment of a European colonial environment.