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This paper traces the press coverage of the South African and Spanish-Cuban-American wars in the Algerian settler colony, examining how observation of conflicts in distant settler colonies framed the thinking of European journalists in Algeria about the political and cultural ties between France and the North African territory at the turn of the twentieth century. Situating the press coverage of these conflicts in the context of settler colonial power dynamics within which European journalists in Algeria sought to assert the difference of the settler community from - at once - an assimilative French national community, and local Muslim and Jewish communities beginning to find expression in the local press, the paper interrogates the ways in which reporting encouraged processes of Latin racial identification. Although settler journalists often presented a global Latin community – with the Algerian settler colony at its helm - as a competitor to an increasingly dominant global community of Anglo-Saxons, the paper suggests the ways in which the political imaginaries of settler journalists ultimately contributed to the inter-imperial construction of whiteness.

SPEAKER

Charlotte Ann Legg is a Senior Lecturer at the University of London Institute in Paris. Her first book, entitled The New White Race: Settler Colonialism and the Press in French Algeria, 1860-1914, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2021. Her current project, supported by a small research grant from the British Academy, examines connected histories of French and British settler colonies, and inter-imperial constructions of whiteness.

Event details

Lecture Theatre Three (0.01)
Bush House North East Wing
Bush House North East Wing, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG