Postcolonial Courtiers

Performing French Classicism from Versailles to Nouvelle-France

Bibliographic Data

ID23748934
AuthorsJean-Vincent Blanchard (corresponding author)
Year2003
Pages217-235
Publication date2003-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenuePostcolonial Moves (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781403980236_11
OpenAlexW757306526
ISBN9781403980236
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

In the history of Western metaphysics, the dualistic split between mind and body has underwritten numerous claims to superior rationality and political power. The theory of this split has a particularly French history, one that ultimately enabled French colonial discourses of racial superiority. 1 In various ways, the historical narration of the mind/body split in aesthetic discourses, such as rhetorical theory, lent considerable force to colonizers’ discriminatory tales. Colonizers described their own bodies as more evolved because they could narrate the progressive detachment of their minds from their material substance. Locating colonized bodies in history consolidated, in turn, the reliance of Western epistemologies on concepts of disembodied reason and emancipatory teleologies. My purpose here, then, is to examine how this bind between narration and metaphysical dualism emerged in the seventeenth century to constitute, literally, a French body politic. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Body politic · Classicism · Colonialism · Dualism · Epistemology · Literature · Metaphysics · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rationality · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Philosophy

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