Infinite Latinité: French Imperial Discourse between L’Afrique Latine and America Latina

Abstract

This essay examines the way the French discourse of Latinité serves as an organizing narrative of racial hierarchization in the national/imperial constructs of L’Afrique Latine and América Latina. By tracing the permutations and evolutions of Latin identity across these two contexts, I argue, we can appreciate Latinité as a field of what Shu-Mei Shih calls “racial triangulation,” in which racial stratifications inhere in response to a panoply of markers both within and beyond national contexts. In this sense Latinité productively alters frameworks for the study of race, nation, and imperialism according to national and linguistic divisions.

Keywords:

• Latinité
• Latin America
• Algeria
• France
• Race

Notes

Notes

1 Dunwoodie stresses this point throughout Writing French Algeria; See also Serrano (70–74) and Graebner (21–70).