| This dissertation is about the construction of meaning in the French colonial archive. I describe the development of communications technologies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as allied with the magnification and expansion of the human senses. I demonstrate that the technological projection and pedagogical orientation of a Condillac-inspired sensationalism forms the foundation for the French colonial enterprise under the Third Republic. As an agent of modernity par excellence, cinema, defined by the apparatus itself as well as a corpus of films, unlocks a technological imaginary that frames the French colonial archive. An analytic instrument which pictures movement in space and time, the cinema is the projection of an imagined political and social order.; I present the French colonial archive as an epistemological ordering, which rests upon a series of interlocking dichotomies that include: self and other, civilized and savage, degenerate and pure, normal and pathological, as well as education and barbarism. Like Michel Foucault's invocation of "a certain Chinese encyclopedia" that relegates animals to a series of unfamiliar realms, the French colonial archive forms a series of more familiar modernist taxonomies.; The dissertation itself is divided into two parts. The first part charts the evolutionary heritage of the moving image. It locates the cinema as part of an emerging physiological conception of visual mechanization used to measure and analyze human and geographical difference. The second part discusses the development of official propaganda film initiatives developed through a complex interaction of seeing, knowing, and educating, while assigning particular roles to the metropolitan citizen and the colonized subject. |
