Deceit by Design: Colonial Fabrications of Care and Countercolonial Subversions in North Africa

It is axiomatic to say that the cultural politics of legitimating the modern colonial enterprise depended on the discourses of paternalistic care and protectionism. In the territories of French colonial North Africa, the rhetoric of care and benevolence surfaces pervasively across the archival and material record. This panel will examine the ways in which the material cultural, bureaucratic, militaristic, infrastructural, and spatial operations of French paternalistic care were intimately bound up with acts of deception, in convincing indigenous populations that the actions of the French administration were tantamount to protection. The language of paternalistic care was often the public-facing mask obscuring the economically exploitative extractions at the heart of colonization. Simultaneously, the historical record asserts examples of autochthonous peoples' skepticism, suspicion, and distrust of French protectionist claims, embodied in acts of subversion. Deceit also worked as a strategic tactic in mobilizing decolonization. How is it that institutions, systems, or infrastructures of humanitarian import--social housing, medical facilities, or schools--worked to discipline and snuff the possibilities for self-determination or sovereignty? And inversely, how did colonized North Africans work to undermine these disciplinary frameworks that structured their everyday lives, through visual and material culture? How can we see these interventions operating within decolonization, broadly? How might we reframe colonial and decolonial histories by reading against the grain of the archival sources, material culture, or the architectural record? This interdisciplinary panel welcomes contributions from scholars working with diverse media: art and architectural history, photographic history, urban studies, design history, and the history of science.