The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence by Itay Lotem

Reviewed by: The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence by Itay Lotem M. Kathryn Edwards Lotem, Itay – The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 428 p. In the past 15 years, Europe has been engaged in an unprecedented reckoning with its colonial past. Among myriad examples are the furor provoked by the infamous 2005 French law mandating the inclusion of colonialism's "positive" aspects in school curricula; heated debates over France's central role in the slave trade and its global legacies; the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which took root in Britain after [End Page 210] its inception in Cape Town; and the lawsuit launched by survivors of the 1950s Mau Mau uprising against the British government. In his incisive new book, The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence, Itay Lotem brings us the first extensive comparative study of the memory of empire in Britain and France. The book is engagingly written, and is notable in its ambition, scope, and breadth of research undertaken. Informed by the actions and rhetoric of activists, politicians, historians, and journalists, Lotem documents and explains the very different processes and mechanisms involved in the remembrance of colonialism in Britain and France. The Memory of Colonialism opens with a revealing comparison of the French response to the 2005 deaths of Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna in Clichy-sous-Bois and the British response to the 2011 police killing of Stephen Lawrence in Tottenham, paying special attention to the framing of subsequent protest and violence. In France, Lotem argues, many activists and members of the media framed the 2005 uprisings as evidence of continuities with colonial policies, and, more generally, as a failure to fully process the colonial past. The British response to the Tottenham protests, on the other hand, largely ignored connections with colonial history, framing them instead as a product of race relations with roots in the early 1980s. These two examples are indicative of the stark difference between France's reckoning with the colonial past (albeit with great difficulty) and Britain's comparative silence. The Memory of Colonialism makes several important and timely interventions in the study of historical remembrance and postcolonial identity. More than merely contrasting "active" French memory work with British "silence," Lotem's analysis reveals the multiple factors that shape the processes of remembrance. He demonstrates that "'remembering empire' is often more about how activists, historians and opinion-makers perceive 'memory' … rather than the actual history they commemorate" (p. 17). Specifically, he argues, the French process of grappling with the colonial past has largely been framed by the devoir de mémoire, as well as memory activists' adoption of tactics developed first by Jewish groups working to bring awareness to France's role in the Holocaust. In the absence of a similar vocabulary as model, British activists have addressed colonial legacies primarily in reference to race relations, and, more recently, anti-racist discourse. Lotem also integrates a detailed examination of how deeply memories of empire are enmeshed with postcolonial debates over ethnic and religious diversity in a comprehensive way. He connects the mechanisms of historical memory with parallel debates about how best to govern multi-ethnic societies clearly, arguing that "in both the British and the French case, 'remembering empire' has always been equivalent to 'talking about race'" (p. 17). However, the conversation differs between the two countries. The British model of multiculturalism has led to a primary focus on racial justice and equity that relegates colonial history to the background, even among left-wing commentators. On the other hand, the French colour-blind republican model long suppressed discussions of race, even among activists of immigrant background and racialized identities. Only relatively recently—since 2005—have [End Page 211] some organizations clearly and publicly drawn the connections between France's colonial past and the ongoing failures of republican equality. The book is divided into two parts, each composed of five chapters. The first part examines the French memory of empire, and begins with two chapters that both chronicle and interrogate the notion of a silence surrounding the colonial past. Indeed, while...

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