An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914

An Empire of Facts presents a fascinating account of the formation of French conceptions of Islam in France's largest and most important colony. During the period from 1870 to 1914, travelers, bureaucrats, scholars, and writers formed influential and long-lasting misconceptions about Islam that determined the imperial cultural politics of Algeria and its interactions with republican France. Narratives of Islamic mysticism, rituals, gender relations, and sensational crimes brought unfamiliar cultural forms and practices to popular attention in France, but also constructed Algerian Muslims as objects for colonial intervention. Personal lives and interactions between Algerian and French men and women inflected these texts, determining their style, content, and consequences. Drawing on sources in Arabic and French, this book places such personal moments at the heart of the production of colonial knowledge, emphasizing the indeterminacy of ethnography, and its political context in the unfolding of France's empire and its relations with Muslim North Africa.

Author: George R. Trumbull IV
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/01/2010
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780521516549

About the Author
Trumbull IV, George R.: - George R. Trumbull IV is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.