"Going Native: Jean Raspail and the Fictions of Indigeneity" with Olivia C. Harrison
In 1973, Jean Raspail published a novel that was hailed as prophetic by the far right in France: The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian and openly racist account of the invasion of France by a flotilla of migrants from India. Immediately translated into English, Raspail’s novel has continued to circulate globally as a clarion call for “native” resistance to the counter-colonization of the Global North by migrants from the Global South. Central to the dystopian fantasy that plays out in the novel is the substitution of the roles of colonizer and colonized, settler and native. According to Raspail and his followers, yesterday’s indigènes (natives) are now colonizing France. Fifty years after the end of French empire, the settlers of old have “gone native” in the postcolonial metropole, refashioning indigeneity into an exclusivist claim of native belonging. This talk investigates the settler colonial genealogies of nativism by attending to an often-overlooked aspect of Raspail’s literary career: his longstanding fascination with indigenous Americans, from Patagonia to Turtle Island. Reading Raspail’s Indianist writings against the grain of The Camp of the Saints, Harrison will speculate on the enduring legacies of fictions of indigeneity in nativist discourses in France and beyond.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2807957-0
