Leisure, Power, Medicine and French Colonial Hill Stations
Eric Jennings

My paper will explore an important and overlooked trope of modern colonialism through a postcolonial lens. Taking as a starting point Edward Said's contention that colonialism is first and foremost a struggle over geography, (Edward Said, Culture and lmperialism, p. 7), I intend to discuss the question of French colonial highland "therapy," tracing the broad countours of this subject, and delving into several specific case studies.

This topic can be situated at the crossroads of cultural studies and the histories of medicine and colonialism. Indeed, as the medical historian Warwick Anderson has pointed out, postcolonial approaches have yet to be applied on a systematic basis to the field of colonial medicine (Warwick Anderson, "Where is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?" Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79:3, Fall 1998). While scholars have certainly underscored the gendering of colonialism, the construction of colonial cultures, and the discourses of the colonial project, few have attempted to examine through a postcolonial perspective how colonial medicine was articulated in the first place.

At the basis of the French colonial highland resorts which I study, rested the assumption that the "tropics" were inherently toxic. Far from being universally considered an Eden, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the colonial realm continued to instill great fear as the "white man's grave" (See Philip Curtain's Death by Migration, and David Arnold's Colonizing the Body). This fear, I argue, gave rise to, and justified, a form of topographical apartheid so prevalent at the British colonial hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling, and a construction of sites of colonial power in the colonial highlands. The French colonial case, which has yet to be examined systematically by any scholar, presents an additional facet. Indeed, in French colonial spas (whether in Madagascar or Martinique), hydrotherapy was used to reimmerse the colonial's body into the motherland; mineral waters, in other words, were believed to act as agents of whiteness, providing at the very least the "comforts of home," and at best a veritable panacea for allegedly curing everything from malaria to home-sickness. By elucidating how the colonial body was immersed into these "whitening" waters, and by considering the subsequent fate of these quintessentially colonial resorts in the postcolonial era, I will contribute to growing bodies of literature on whiteness, on postcolonial readings of colonial practices, and on the legacies of colonialism in the postcolonial era.