Colonial influence is not a single center but multiple Frances layered by history.

Evidence

I felt close to France in both Haiti and Martinique, but to different Frances: in Haiti, the “France” of the Old Empire, which the Haitian Revolution (the explosive fusion of African slave resistance and French Republican traditions in the demand for liberty under Toussaint L’Ouverture) brought to its knees; in Martinique, the “France” of the New Empire—of Republicanism, Gaullism, Parisian “chic” crossed by the transgressions of black “style” and the complex affiliations to “Frenchness” of Fanon and Césaire. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 833

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the colonizer itself as internally split — a nuance carrying into how downstream Islamophobia readings treat Orientalist ‘the West’ as a homogeneous vantage. — connects to: Cultural formations are constituted by sedimented histories, not single colonial moments. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 702
• DEFINE: Illustrates that ‘the Empire’ being resisted is a composite of distinct iterations (Old vs. New), a key disambiguation for colonial theory vocabulary.