School of the South

""This revelatory book exposes how colonialism provided the crucial conditions of existence for twentieth-century intellectual life in France. School of the South permits us to ask the question that decades of scholarship have failed to ask: would French theory have been possible without colonial domination?"" Julian Go, author of Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory ""What happens if the centre of French theory is not Paris but the Mediterranean, and metropolitan France is balanced by the experience of the colonized parts of North Africa? Building on biographies and other sources, Onur Erdur provides a fascinating and provocative reorientation of several famous figures, tracing their formative experiences and the impact on their thought."" Stuart Elden, University of Warwick ""School of the South is a brilliantly conceived and seamlessly executed work. Its central premise – that what we call 'French theory' is impacted, through and through, with numerous and variegated encounters with colonization and decolonization – is unimpeachable. And yet, the principal interest of Erdur's work may lie in the extent to which this obvious truth has remained an underdeveloped aspect of research in and around the field."" Adam Rosenthal, Texas A&M University ""School of the South is an important new history of French theory through an analysis of the experiences in the Maghreb of eight leading thinkers born between 1915 and 1940, including Bourdieu, Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault. Onur Erdur demonstrates how the colonial experience shaped their thinking about identity and other key issues. He explains why these ideas remain relevant today and shows how the postcolonial world is still marked by the colonial past. The book is a powerful work of intellectual history and, beautifully written, it is a delight to read."" Joachim Whaley, University of Cambridge