Sponsored by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.

Abstract:
What role did plans to create supranational states play in both French and Algerian national projects during Algeria’s revolution? This talk examines new archival sources from French and Algerian archives to suggest both that such projects were more significant than current scholarship admits and that they offer insight into a transnational “era of grands ensembles” (1945-1962). In this period, as the discussions of scholars, anticolonial activists, state planners, and international organizations such as UNESCO reveal, it was presumed that the age of the nation-state had past. What French and Algerian plans emphasize, however, is that many participants in this discussion were also certain that nations would continue to flourish, if they became part of supranational states.

Bio:
Todd Shepard is associate professor of history and co-director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. His research bears on France and its colonial empire in the twentieth century. He is particularly concerned with the intersections between the history of imperialism and the histories of state institutions, national identity, and racial and sexual issues.

His first book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), was translated into French as 1962. Comment l’indépendance algérienne a transformé la France (2008), while his Voices of Decolonization:A Short History with Documents came out in 2014. He is currently preparing two works. The first, La France, le sexe et les "Arabes", 1962 à 1979 (Payot, forthcoming; under review at University of Chicago Press), explores the importance and the role of the representations of male “perversion” in post-1945 political debates. The second, Affirmative Action and Empire: “Intégration” in France (1956-1962) and the Race Question in the Cold War World, bears on a series of innovative programs implemented by the French Republic within the context of the Algerian War that were aimed at correcting forms of discrimination suffered by the “Muslims of Algeria.”