Kyle Francis—Civilizing Settlers: Faith, Foreigners, and Contesting French Identity in Colonial Algeria, 1867-1883

When

October 29, 2014    
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Where

Committee for the Study of Religion
365 5th Ave. Room 5307, New York, NY

Event Type

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This paper examines the contested space occupied by Catholic missionaries in the French government’s attempt to mold a cohesive community out of a heterogeneous group of European settlers in Algeria between 1867 and 1883. It argues that this effort constituted an alternate civilizing mission in which the aim was not to assimilate indigenous colonial subjects, but rather to spread French values to a heterogeneous settler population composed largely of Spanish, Italian, and Maltese immigrants. Whereas many colonial officials hoped to assimilate foreign settlers to their own secular sensibilities and to eradicate their religious difference altogether, Catholic missionaries sought to capitalize on foreigners’ religiosity in order to create a Catholic society they saw as increasingly foreclosed in a secularizing France. For both sides, Algeria served not as a laboratory of modernity whose findings could be grafted back on to metropolitan society, but as a site in which to forge a more radical national identity than the one then emerging in France itself.

Kyle Francis recently defended his doctoral dissertation in history at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The dissertation is entitled “Civilizing Settlers: Catholic Missionaries and the Colonial State in French Algeria, 1830-1914.” Kyle has received numerous academic awards and fellowships, including a Dissertation Writing Fellowship and an Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He currently teaches in the history department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His research interests include French religion and culture, European imperialism and decolonization, and the theory and history of gender and sexuality.

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