| FA-56061-11 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Dorian Bell | Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in 19th-Century France | 11/1/2011 - 10/31/2012 | $50,400.00 | Dorian | | Bell | | | | Regents of the University of California, Irvine | Irvine | CA | 92617-3066 | USA | 2010 | French Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
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. |