French colonial education. The empire of language, 1830--1944
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Description
My dissertation, 'A l'ecole du francais: Politiques coloniales de la langue 1830-1944,' confronts current debates surrounding multilingualism, the language of instruction, and the rewriting of history in former colonial sites. Applying historical, educational and socio-linguistic theories to accounts of colonial education, I argue that French administrators enforced different ideologies of education and language in their different colonial territories, offering a limited and fluctuating politics of francisation. My primary inquiry centers on an understanding of the conditions that made possible the exportation of an educational system. The diachronic aspect of my study focuses on the understanding of the different phases of French domination as delineated by reforms undertaken by educational administrators and the impact of colonial language policy and its legacies in the former colonies. I analyze the reasons they did not promote and modernize certain 'indigenous' languages---Wolof in Senegal, Creole in Martinique, or Arabic or Berber in Algeria---and why, instead, they promoted Vietnamese in Indochina and Malagasy in Madagascar. I argue that a discrepancy between language planning and language policy led to teaching different varieties of French: standard French, simplified French or petit negre. My goal is to explain why standard French never fully reached the status of a vernacular language in the colonies The dissertation gives an historical overview of language planning policy from late nineteenth century until the Brazzaville Conference in France and in the colonies. This broadly imposed policy was culturally, economically and politically motivated, yet the link between language policies and socioeconomic development has never been adequately explored in a comparative way. It is crucial to determine if there were any differences and/or similarities in the diffusion of the educational and linguistic policies first between France and the colonies and then among the colonies themselves Drawing on archival and literary research undertaken in France, I reappraise the logic of the Civilizing Mission's francisation policy and its mirage, which ambiguously promulgated the politics of 'l'unique et le meme,' by contrasting five unique facets of l'ecole coloniale in Algeria, the Annam province in ex-Indochina, Martinique, Senegal, and Madagascar