At this juncture, with the emergence of postcolonial theory as a determining paradigm for readings into the colonial encounter, and the literary and philosophical writing that it generated since its onset, the publication of République et colonies comes as a timely reminder of the pitfalls of speculative postulations based on generalizations that tend inevitably to lead to historical and epistemological distortions. The author himself needs no introduction: Les contre-littératures (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), Littérature et développement (Paris: Silex, 1984), L'Europe, l'Afrique et la folie (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1993) are familiar to most of us. However, République et colonies adds a new dimension to the works of Bernard Mouralis, for what we have here is really an essay on the history of ideas, delving into colonial theory and practice in order to throw light on its repercussions on contemporary political and cultural formulations, thus counterpoising colonialism with immigration and the postindependence situation. Its significance is manifold and draws equally from the author's forays into an unexplored archival terrain and his perceptive understanding of the questions he deals with, heightened throughout by an underlying exigency to grasp discursive configurations in relation to their habitus.As the title suggests, the book is structured around considerations on two political principles: republic and colony. What the author attempts to highlight here is their correlation as enacted during French domination in West Africa from 1875 till 1960. At its point of departure lies what appears as an irreconcilable contradiction, a paradox, that surfaced particularly with the Third Republic, which allowed the convergence of these two opposing trends by simultaneously bringing about "the definitive consolidation of a republican regime" and "the.