Medical Imperialism in French North Africa

Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis

Richard C. Parks

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780803268456
• eBook ISBN: 9781496202871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurieswitnessed shifting concepts of identity, includingvarying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward "modernization, " and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realizeideas of a "modern" city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral "regeneration" of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemessuch as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women's negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city's Jewish quarter, Parks fillsthe gap in current literaturebyfocusingonthe broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Situating Regeneration
• 2. Regenerating Space
• 3. Regenerating Space, Part 2
• 4. Regenerating Youth
• 5. Regenerating Women
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Richard C. Parks
• Series List