As in the recent documentary Decolonizations by Karim Miské, Marc Ball and Pierre Singaravélou, Guillaume Blanc’s book dates decolonization from the first day of colonization. However, make no mistake about it: for the most part, it is indeed the 20th and 21st centuries that are in question here, the author endeavoring to follow, until today, the way in which the various colonized peoples freed themselves from the situations created in the previous century.
“Situated Stories”says Guillaume Blanc, interpreting in his own way the famous article that Georges Balandier devoted, in 1951, to the “colonial situation”. The formula invites us to look at the history of modern European colonization other than as the history of the empires themselves, even by comparing them, and other than as the history of the two continents, Africa and Asia, the most concerned .
Get out of generalities
Each decolonization was indeed a particular situation and, to put on the same level accounts as different as those of South Africa, Algeria, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and Pakistan – to confine ourselves to the cases most often analyzed in the book – we run the risk of abandoning history as it really happened in favor of general theories whose perverse effects are obvious. Not only the “situated stories” proposed by Guillaume Blanc have the great merit of not reducing Africa and Asia to the same otherness, but they allow us to think about the variety of historical forms instead of the great unifying narratives of European expansion (which these accounts denounce or defend it).
We can regret that Guillaume Blanc did not include in his analyzes the fifty or so documents that accompany the book. When he suggests reading the Congo by Eric Vuillard, for example, as a counterpoint to the study of the Belgian Congo, we would like the difference between the vision proposed by the novelist and the reality of the facts established by historiography to be explained. With this reservation, here is a book based on a recent bibliography, borrowed as much from history as from political science and postcolonial studies, which will be useful to all those who finally want to go beyond generalities on decolonization.