La racialisation des identités à travers les publications à caractère pédagogique au sein de l’Empire colonial français

Abstract

Abstract:The notion of human race took on considerable importance in the nineteenth century, supported by an active and recognized scientific community. The classificatory approach, which sought to order the world, took place in a context of violent economic and political dominations—slavery, followed by colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and led to a vast enterprise of hierarchization. Among the vectors of production and circulation of this racialization of colonial identities, school textbooks and publications of a pedagogical nature held a prominent place. Several generations of French schoolchildren thus learned the inequality of races in their textbooks. The introduction in the colonies of a different form of teaching than metropolitan education also led to the inclusion of racial inequality in school textbooks for colonized populations. (In French)