![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Migration is not a thing per se but exists in the postcolonial black hole that has been keenly observed since the advent of deconstruction and Subaltern studies, or even in the battle to define and accept any critical terminology (postcolonialism, postcolonial, postcoloniality, coloniality, etc.). We know that postcolonial studies engages with many research fields (e.g. religion, language, history, gender), but where is the room for migration? My question heads in two directions: postcolonial methodology and content. A single explanation/critical pattern seems difficult to establish, especially if one chooses to focus on one country, France. Perhaps the migration question helps document the contested power play between critical constructs such as the global North/South.
Notes
1 The term “nationness” was first coined by Bhabha (Citation1994, 139).
2 Intersectionality is a concept borrowed from early sociology that was reintroduced in recent theoretical discourse by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in her study of gender and racism with African American women. Crenshaw writes: “Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color, women of color are marginalized within both” (Citation1991, 1244). In the postcolonial context, intersectionality addresses the issues of native subjectivity, sexuality, or North–South relations as forms of subordination.
3 The UN-organized International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, declared sexual health to be a fundamental right that must be respected, protected, and fulfilled. The situation of migrants in Europe tells a different story, notably with sex trafficking, poor or no access to medical/gynecological help, high rates of sexually transmitted diseases (e.g., HIV, hepatitis), gender discrimination, and so forth. The collision between health/reproductive needs and European immigration is the worst it has ever been.
4 The term Françafrique was coined in 1955 by Ivorian President Houphouêt-Boigny to describe relationships of appeasement between France and Africa. However, Françafrique was quickly recast to chronicle the French neocolonial undertaking in its many guises (geopolitical, economic, and military).
5 The 2017 French presidential election, with the far-right that is now mainstream, is a case in point of the emotional and instrumental exploitation of national identity, geared against both the European Union and Muslims.
6 Young (Citation2004) first suggested that within the postcolonial framework, Hegelianism could be part of “the structures of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred years: a phenomenon that has become known as Eurocentrism” (33).
7 For a critical discussion of the Islamic headscarf in today’s France and its cultural and political ramifications, see Laroussi (Citation2016, chap. 8).
8 Diallo’s statement was made during a UN roundtable on discrimination, on March 21, 2018. She later explained she did not mean to say the French state is racist, but that its institutions can produce and normalize racism.
9 To a lesser degree, such a shift occurred between the second half of the nineteenth century and World War I, when the French Republic “turned its peasants into French men,” in Eugene Weber’s words, mainly by eradicating regional cultures.
10 In the second volume of the political memoirs of Jacques Chirac, the conservative former president pays tribute to François Hollande, then head of the Socialist Party, for his unconditional support of the law banning religious symbols in French public schools, passed in March 2004 (Chirac Citation2011, 603).
11 On the left, Ségolène Royal, Arnaud Montebourg, Vincent Peillon, and especially Jean-Luc Mélenchon have put the founding of a new Sixth Republic on their agendas and platforms.
12 One glaring example was France’s military intervention in Mali in January 2013, then in Niger in January 2017, to save the African nations’ “democratic institutions”; yet, at the same time, France shrugged at a new Amnesty International report (August 2016) on bias and widespread discrimination against French Muslims.
13 Based on data from the French Ministry of the Interior, in 2014 more than 27,000 illegal, undocumented people – some of them travellers transiting to other European destinations – and people denied asylum were deported. The cost to French taxpayers was between 15,000 and 20,000 euros per person deported.
14 While immigration to France officially ended in 1974, people are still migrating there, be they non-EU students, highly qualified guest workers, refugees, or those entering the country under the family reunification laws. Illegal immigration from western Africa and Southeast Asia remains important and constant, although reliable statistics do not exist.
15 Based on a large-scale study by the French Ministry of Labor in Citation2016, only 36 percent of companies and employers responded with an interview to job applicants with an African or Muslim name. The response rate to candidates with Gallic or Christian names was 47 percent. The results were more dramatic for executive job positions: 28 and 43 percent, respectively (Dares-Analyses, December 2016, no. 076). On a not-so-different topic, while official statistics do not exist in France, in April 2016 an investigation led by National Assembly representatives and journalists produced a report on police violence that reveals a substantial increase in police harassment, home searches without warrants, violent policing during street demonstrations, and the use of deadly force against people of African or Arab descent. Similar to Amnesty International reports on human rights in France, the report underscores how “the war on terror” has opened the door to more targeted violence against citizens of Muslim faith or allegedly to be so. See Martin (Citation2016) and the UN Committee Against Torture’s report on France, dated May 3, 2016: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=19807&LangID=E.
16 A 2016 investigation by UNICEF-France and Doctors Without Borders tells the story of forced labour (including sex work) that directly targets migrant minors, especially in the Calais region.
17 Deleuze (Citation1969), using the skin and dance as metaphors, postulates that everything about the surface actually dispenses meaning and disengages from anything that becomes essentialized by an idea of deep roots.