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One and the Same Struggle: Francophone Intellectuals, Global Solidarity, and Third Worldist Publishing from Paris to Algeria and Québec, 1959-1974

Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In 1959, a young Frenchman founded a bookstore in Paris’ Latin Quarter. For the next two decades, François Maspero’s bookstore and publishing house were central nodes of a unique transnational print network that brought together anticolonial militants across the francophone world. Through a close study of the social history of ideas, One and the Same Struggle traces the expansion, impact, and eventual collapse of these networks between 1959 and 1974, arguing that print media played a unique role in allowing diverse left-wing militants to feel as though they were working together for human liberation. Following Maspero’s own engagement, first in the Algerian War for Independence, then in diverse other anticolonial struggles, this dissertation shows how Algerian, Québécois, and French militants came to rely on print media not only for information about the rest of the world but as a way to feel connected to one another as they constructed a shared discourse of anticolonial revolution. I argue that, for militants in the 1960s, print media became a site of identity formation, the object of transnational intellectual exchange, and the reason that individuals could make sense abstract global theories of decolonization in light of their own specific struggles. Through print, authors and readers shaped the ideas with which they engaged—from decolonization to nationalism to racism—and attempted to reify the commensurate solidarity they believed tied them together. In the early 1970s, however, a combination of shifting domestic pressures, state repression, and internal conflicts led to the collapse of this global anticolonial movement—and, with it, an expansive idea of commensurate solidarity. This history of francophone universalism in the context of anti- and post-colonial revolt helps us understand how the very opportunities that made Marxist anticolonialists’ use of media so powerful, creating unusual constellations of solidarity, were also central to their downfall in the 1970s: abstractions led people to talk past one another and papered over fundamental differences. Despite the best efforts of a robust network of francophone publishers, these differences and silences eventually, undercut the universalist argument militants made for anticolonial liberation through shared struggle.
DOI: 10.17615/wqxs-1y92
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161960243
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