Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in 19th-Century France

FAIN: FA-56061-11

Dorian Bell
Regents of the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA 92617-3066)

The book project for which I seek NEH support traces the intertwined histories of anti-Semitism and empire in modern France. Drawing on a body of anti-Semitic newspapers, treatises, and novels, as well as on representations of colonial empire, I argue that French colonial expansion helped French anti-Semitism adopt the political, racializing guise that would haunt the twentieth century. I propose that, conversely, anti-Semitism contributed to the imperial project's ideological elaboration and public acceptance. By chronicling how these mutual reconfigurations often took place within literature--and in ways, I suggest, not elsewhere possible--the book provides new models for investigating the ever-unsteady borderland between cultural representations and material realities. It also places into conversation scholarship on anti-Semitism and imperialism in order to gain fresh perspective on how circulations between metropole and colony shaped the emergence of modern European racial thought.

Associated Products

"Hannah Arendt, the Jews, and the Labor of Superfluity" (Article)
Title: "Hannah Arendt, the Jews, and the Labor of Superfluity"
Author: Dorian Bell
Abstract: This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt's famous linkage of European anti-Semitism and imperialism, proposing that the arguments she advances are shaped by anxieties about a constitutive paradox in her notion of the state.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://frodo.ucsc.edu/~dbell1/Arendt_PMLA_article.pdf
Primary URL Description: Bell, Dorian. "Hannah Arendt, the Jews, and the Labor of Superfluity." PMLA 127: 4 (2012): 800-08. (PDF version residing on University of California, Santa Cruz server)
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: PMLA
Publisher: Modern Language Association

"Beyond the Bourse: Zola, Empire, and the Jews” (Article)
Title: "Beyond the Bourse: Zola, Empire, and the Jews”
Author: Dorian Bell
Abstract: This article takes the work of French novelist Emile Zola as a case study for understanding why late nineteenth-century metropolitan tensions produced by the "Jewish question" came so often to be projected onto imperial spaces.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://frodo.ucsc.edu/~dbell1/Beyond_the_Bourse_article.pdf
Primary URL Description: Bell, Dorian. "Beyond the Bourse: Zola, Empire, and the Jews," Romanic Review 102: 3-4 (2011): 485-501. (PDF version residing on University of California, Santa Cruz server)
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Romanic Review
Publisher: Columbia University

"Zola, Nietzsche, Marx: Anti-Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Scale" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Zola, Nietzsche, Marx: Anti-Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Scale"
Author: Dorian Bell
Abstract: This conference paper traced the genealogy of modern European anti-anti-Semitism, focusing in particular on how imperial circumstances similarly informed the anti-anti-Semitic thought of Emile Zola, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.
Abstract: This conference paper traces the genealogy of modern European anti-anti-Semitism, focusing in particular on how imperial circumstances similarly informed the anti-anti-Semitic thought of Emile Zola, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx.
Date: 10/12/2012
Conference Name: 2012 Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium

Prizes

Larry Schehr Memorial Award
Date: 10/13/2012
Organization: Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association
Abstract: Awarded to the best junior faculty essay presented at the annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium

“Hannah Arendt and the Labor of Superfluity” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Hannah Arendt and the Labor of Superfluity”
Author: Dorian Bell
Abstract: This conference paper reconsidered Hannah Arendt's famous linkage of European anti-Semitism and imperialism, proposing that the arguments she advances are shaped by anxieties about a constitutive paradox in her notion of the state.
Date: 1/7/2012
Conference Name: 2012 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention

“Anti-Semitism ‘Old’ and ‘New’: The French Case Reconsidered” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Anti-Semitism ‘Old’ and ‘New’: The French Case Reconsidered”
Abstract: This public invited lecture interrogated conventional assumptions about how present-day French Muslim anti-Semitism is in part a product of colonial history, countering that the way we understand colonial history is itself sometimes the effect of past anti-Semitism.
Author: Dorian Bell
Date: 10/7/2012
Location: Yale University

Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture (Book)
Title: Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture
Author: Dorian Bell
Abstract: Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself. Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism. As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fs160pc
Secondary URL: https://www.amazon.com/Globalizing-Race-Antisemitism-European-FlashPoints/dp/0810136899/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=globalizing+race&qid=1639424839&sr=8-2
Access Model: Print and open-access digital
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0810136899
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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