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Pomona
College Professor Gary Wilder Receives $195,000
Fellowship
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Gary Wilder, an associate professor of history at Pomona
College, has received a $195,000 New Directions Fellowship,
from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to research the links
between colonialism and today’s trend of capitalist
globalization. The Fellowship was only one of 10 awarded
nationally for 2006.
 Wilder
is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State:
Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars
(University of Chicago Press, October 2005), which analyzes
France between the world wars as an imperial nation-state.
The book examines governmental strategies in French West
Africa organized around economic development, social
welfare, and cultural preservation as well as a community of
African and Caribbean colonial elites living in Paris who
formulated a new type of cultural nationalism.
The New Directions Fellowship will fund research for
Wilder’s new project “Parasites and Parastates: Mercenary
Imperialism from Decolonization to Neoliberalism.” The
book-length project will explore “parastates” such as
colonial development projects and penal colonies,
postcolonial oil companies, and current security and mineral
conglomerates that are at once commercial and governmental,
public and private, bureaucratic and despotic, and visible
and covert. This includes the role played by transnational
groups of semi-private mercenaries, both military and
financial, in France and Francophone Africa since
decolonization and the novel forms of postcolonial
imperialism that are developing today.
Among the areas of special focus are the parastatal networks
surrounding Elf Oil, the French state, and the international
arms market through which French foreign policy in
postcolonial Africa was conducted during the cold war,
through analysis of a string of recent corruption trials
regarding Elf and Total Oil companies. He will also examine
the emergence of private military corporations (PMCs), since
the end of the Cold War, in relation to the restructuring of
global capitalism, and the worldwide proliferation of
neoliberal policies and ideology. The latter will include
analysis of the international human rights campaign against
PMCs conducted through the United Nations, the Organization
of African Unity, and African non-governmental
organizations.
Ultimately, Wilder says, he plans to trace a genealogy of
state-sanctioned extra-parliamentary international
intervention from the period of romantic mercenarism during
decolonization, through the postcolonial years of
non-military corporatism, to the current moment of fully
privatized military corporations. It will seek to link the
eras of late colonialism, the Cold War, and current global
transformations.
A member of the Pomona College faculty since 1998, Wilder
teaches the courses Race and Racism in Modern Europe; Europe
from the Periphery: Imperial Projects and Colonial
Societies; Postcolonial France; and Topics in Modern Europe;
among others. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from the
University of Chicago and his B.A. from Cornell University.
Pomona College, founded in 1887, is one of the nation’s
premier liberal arts colleges. Located in Southern
California, its hallmarks include small classes, close
relationships between students and faculty, and a wide range
of opportunities for student research. Pomona is also one of
a handful of colleges that meet the full financial need of
every accepted student. For more information on Pomona
College, visit www.pomona.edu. |
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