The interactions between metropolitan France and its former colonies have been complex, often hegemonically skewed, and typically strained. Still, any understanding of francophone literature and culture should, I think, attempt not to isolate it but to explore its contested relations with the metropole and with figures and intellectual or cultural forces that are themselves not simply metropolitan but often internally complex, self-contradictory, hybridized, or riven.
American historian
Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
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Genealogical history in both Tocqueville and Foucault begins with an important if not burning issue in the present and traces it back to its often concealed or repressed roots in the past. The purpose of such inquiry is not purely antiquarian. History for both men involves an at times intense involvement or implication of the historian in the object studied and an active exchange between the present and the past in ways that may be useful in shaping the future.