From exoticism to authenticity. Textbooks during French Colonization versus Global Tourism

International audienceThis article will explore the French fascination with « the primitive » and « the exotic » in the post-World War I years through a study of representations of the French colonies in textbooks intended for primary and secondary school children. It will underline continuities between these « exotic » representations and contemporary discourses centered on non-Western peoples « authenticity », particularly in the world of international tourism. After the First World War, exoticism asserted itself in all its variety, from colonial exhibitions to Negro dances, from schoolbooks to literature (with André Demaison, André Gide or Henri Michaux, for example). It revealed itself, through various scientific and artistic forms, in a fascination for otherness and for the primitive, which, by creating a distance, essentialised difference. We will focus, first, on this notion of exoticism, in between the ideology of the Noble Savage and a form of Romantic heritage, reconsidering its foundations, its distinctive features and its geopolitical and hegemonic purposes. Our investigation will rely on a selection of history and geography textbooks in which the colonies are mentioned. Today, at a time when cultural diversity is taking over interculturality, the notion of exoticism is being superseded by that of authenticity. We will then turn our attention, looking at recent ethnographic data, to the new representation of the Other, particularly present in globalized tourism, in order to show that it remains the hidden face of a distanced and reified building of otherness with a view to retaining power and which is nonetheless set, to some extent, in the line of the Roaring Twenties exoticism