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ABSTRACT
The recent ‘postcolonial turn’ in France, and the concomitant concern for various forms of identity politics that accompany it, signal a shift of considerable importance within a social order that has historically been built on an ideal of transcending difference. Much of this movement is concentrated in and on the troubled French suburbs that, for the past two decades, have become both the focus and source of considerable anxiety about the state of French society generally and the republican social contract in particular. In this article, Epstein focuses on the paradigms of American racial history and multicultural approaches to difference that constitute a part of this debate. These rhetorical practices allow a discursive space from which to consider racial matters that are otherwise difficult to address in France, at the same time that they position race, in a marked departure from the French republican ideal, as a meaningful basis from which to think through problems of social justice. These phenomena need to be considered within the context of a rapidly shifting global economy that has diffused the potential for social integration promised by the republican social contract, and reflect efforts to locate readily identifiable sources of disenfranchisement when the far less visible reasons for lack of opportunity have moved off-shore.
Notes
1 Seminal texts translated into French during this time include Edward W. Said, Culture et impérialisme, trans. from the English by Paul Chemla (Paris: Fayard 2000); Judith Butler, Trouble dans le genre: pour un féminisme de la subversion, trans. from the English by Cynthia Kraus (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2005); Gayatri Spivak, Les Subalternes peuvent-elles parler?, trans. from the English by Jérôme Vidal (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam 2006); Homi K. Bhabha, Les Lieux de la culture: une théorie postcoloniale, trans. from the English by Françoise Bouillot (Paris: Payot 2007); and Paul Gilroy, L’Atlantique noir: modernité et double conscience, trans. from the English by Jean-Phillippe Henkel (Lille: Kargo 2003). Much of this scholarship was influenced by French philosophers whose work, as François Cusset notes in French Theory, had a greater impact across the Atlantic than in France: François Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle des Etats-Unis (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2003).
2 See the special issue of Public Culture, ed. Janet Roitman, particularly Jean-François Bayart, ‘Postcolonial studies: a political invention of tradition?’ (trans. from the French by Andrew Brown), Achille Mbembe, ‘Provincializing France?’, and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial aphasia: race and disabled histories in France’, Public Culture, vol. 23, no. 1, 2011, 55–84, 85–119 and 121–56, respectively.
3 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye [1970] (New York: Vintage 2007).
4 My interest in this project grew out of an ethnographic methods course I developed for American university students studying at New York University-Paris. Over three successive years, different groups of students participated in the project which they then used as the focus for their ethnographic work. The interactions between these students and their younger French counterparts, and the insights they gained during the course of the experience, add another layer to the French-American millefeuille that I explore in this paper, but that I do not have space to examine here in detail.
5 See, among others, Jeremy Jennings, ‘Citizenship, republicanism and multiculturalism in contemporary France’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 30, no. 4, 2000, 575–98; and Cécile Laborde, ‘The culture(s) of the Republic: nationalism and multiculturalism in French republican thought’, Political Theory, vol. 29, no. 5, 2001, 716–35.
6 Mehdi Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM (Paris: Syros 1993).
7 The renewed rise to prominence of the extreme-right Front National is the most visible manifestation of these trends. On the growing so-called ‘Islamization’ of the suburbs, associated with the long-term social and economic degradation of these areas, see Gilles Kepel et al., Banlieue de la République (Paris: Institut Montaigne 2011); and Dominique Schnapper, ‘L’échec du “modèle républicain”? Réflexion d’une sociologue’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 61, no. 4, 2006, 759–76.
8 Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), ‘Commune de Villiers-le-Bel (95680)—Dossier complet’, 2011, available on the INSEE at www.insee.fr/fr/themes/dossier_complet.asp?codgeo=COM-95680 (viewed 2 February 2016).
9 American support for the project at the Collège MLK was part of a larger initiative of the American Embassy to locate and encourage talent in the French banlieue, an offer received with some reserve on the part of the French government as a case of Americans giving lessons where none had been requested. See Luc Bronner, ‘Banlieues et minorités sous l’œil attentif des Américains', Le Monde, 1 December 2010, 20; and Scott Sayare, ‘Quand les Américains débarquent’, Courrier International, 22 October 2010. While beyond the scope of this paper, these interventions raise compelling questions about the interestedness of these American parties, and the multicultural model they seek to defend.
10 It is worth noting that the principal of the Collège MLK, a staunch and energetic defender of the republican public school and herself of North African descent, supports the project only warily at best. The students, she contends, are not ready for Morrison’s text, and do not need more sadness in their lives.
11 Élise Palomares, ‘Le racisme: un hors-champ de la sociologie urbaine française?’, Metropolitiques (online), 11 September 2013, available at www.metropolitiques.eu/Le-racisme-un-hors-champ-de-la.html (viewed 2 February 2016).
12 See, among others, David Beriss, Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (Boulder, CO: Westview 2004); Trica Danielle Keaton, Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2006); and Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007).
13 Mayanthi L. Fernando, ‘Exceptional citizens: secular Muslim women and the politics of difference in France’, Social Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 4, 2009, 379–92 (390).
14 See the film Kofi chez les Français, co-directed Beth S. Epstein and Carlyn Saltman (In the Moment Productions 1993), about Kofi Yamgnane, a Togolese-French man elected mayor of a small Breton village and celebrated nationally as a ‘model immigré’. Yamgnane’s story embodies these ambiguities precisely. Born in a small village in northern Togo, he was helped by missionaries to come to France where he attended university and the elite Ecole des Mines. An engineer, Yamgnane was elected mayor of the small village where he settled with his Breton wife, and then named Secretary of State for Integration under Edith Cresson, just as ‘immigration’ was becoming headline news. As Yamgnane himself is aware, his case is exemplary and yet exceptional, and media-worthy precisely because he is African, an immigrant and black.
15 Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London and New York: Routledge 1992).
16 At the end of the permanent display at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, visitors are invited to enter a tent filled with foreign-origin objects that, once ‘exotic’, are now a regular part of everyday life in France: tea, rice, pasta, couscous, the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa? Even this celebrated icon of French cultural heritage, a mainstay of the French tourist economy, has its origins outside of France. The museum, opened in 2007, reflects efforts to educate the French public about the nation’s important immigration past.
17 The US Civil Rights Movement has also found an echo in other recent manifestations in France. In addition to the CRAN, see also François Durpaire, France blanche, colère noire (Paris: Odile Jacob 2006); Lilian Thuram, François Durpaire, Rokhaya Diallo, Marc Cheb Sun and Pascal Blanchard, Appel pour une République Multiculturelle et Post-Raciale (Paris: Respect Mag 2009); and Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy 2008). On the redemptive tradition in American racial politics, see George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008).
18 See, among others, Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000); and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, ‘Banlieues françaises et ghetto noir américain: éléments de comparison sociologique’, in Michel Wieviorka (ed.), Racisme et modernité (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 1992), 140–67.
19 James Baldwin, ‘Take me to the water’, in James Baldwin (ed.), Collected Essays (New York: Library of America 1972), 353–403 (402).
20 On the history of the banlieue, including the eventual settlement of immigrant populations, see Annie Fourcaut, ‘Les premiers grands ensembles en région parisienne: ne pas refaire la banlieue?’, French Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, 195–218; Annie Fourcaut and Thierry Pacquot, ‘Dossier: Le grand ensemble, histoire et devenir’, Urbanisme, no. 322, January–February 2002, 35–80; Françoise Gaspard, A Small City in France: A Socialist Mayor Confronts Neofascism, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 1995); Lallaoui, Du bidonville aux HLM; Neil MacMaster, ‘The “seuil de tolérance”: the uses of a “scientific” racist concept’, in Maxim Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse and Power in France (Aldershot, Hants: Avebury 1991), 14–28; Colette Pétonnet, On est tous dans le brouillard: ethnologie des banlieues (Paris: Editions Galilée 1979); Michel Pinçon, ‘Habitat et modes de vie: la cohabitation des groupes sociaux dans un ensemble H.L.M.’, Revue française de sociologie, vol. 22, no. 4, 1981, 523–47; Martin A. Schain, ‘Immigrants and politics in France’, in John S. Ambler (ed.), The French Socialist Experiment (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues 1985), 166–90; and Danièle Voldman, ‘Aménager la région parisienne (février 1950–août 1960)’, in Danièle Voldman (ed.), Les Origines des villes nouvelles de la région Parisienne (1919–1969) (Paris: Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent 1990), 49–54. On the notion that ‘ghettoization’ leads to conflict, the example of the United States is often cited, the country held up as a place where people live in segregated ethnic enclaves and where the free-wheeling, free-market flourishing of multicultural ideas and practices end in social conflict, as the Los Angeles or Crown Heights riots would attest.
21 See, for example, Geoffroy de Laforcade, ‘“Foreigners”, nationalism and the “colonial fracture”: stigmatized subjects of historical memory in France’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 47, no. 3–4, 2006, 217–33; Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds), Post-colonial Cultures in France (London and New York: Routledge 1997); Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation; and Susan J. Terrio, Judging Mohammed: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration, and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2009).
22 This has been the point of much new scholarship, most of it focusing on the continuities and contradictions of the French republican project in the colonies. See, for instance, Alice L. Conklin, ‘Colonialism and human rights: a contradiction in terms? The case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 2, 1998, 419–42; Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie; les métis de l’empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2007); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2006); and Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005).
23 Alexis Spire, ‘Semblables et pourtant différents: la citoyenneté paradoxale des “français musulmans d’algérie” en métropole’, Genèses, vol. 4, no. 53, 2003, 48–68.
24 The cités were intended for people of both French and immigrant origin. Despite their temporary status, some families wound up living in the cités for upwards of twenty years.
25 MacMaster, ‘The “seuil de tolérance”’; Jean-François Laé and Numa Murard, L’Argent des pauvres: la vie quotidienne en cité de transit (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1985). For more on the uses of ‘balance’ and ‘mixing’, and debates on how best to regulate the problems of the banlieue, see Beth S. Epstein, Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2011); Beth S. Epstein, ‘Régime moral dans la sphère publique: intégration et discrimination dans une ville nouvelle française’, in Anne Raulin and Susan Carol Rogers (eds), Parallaxes Transatlantiques: vers une anthropologie réciproque (Paris: CNRS Editions 2012), 53–78; Pinçon, ‘Habitat et modes de vie’; and Sylvie Tissot, ‘Une “discrimination informelle”? Usages du concept de mixité sociale dans la gestion des attributions de logements HLM’, Actes de la Recherches en Sciences Sociales, vol. 4, no. 159, 2005, 54–69. For a view of how the upper classes have been exempt from these considerations, see Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Les Ghettos de Gotha: au cœur de la grande bourgeoisie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2007).
26 Conklin, ‘Colonialism and human rights'.
27 For an interesting case study on two different approaches to ‘absorbing’ immigrant populations in the 1960s and 1970s, see Melissa K. Byrnes, ‘Liberating the land or absorbing a community: managing North African migration and the bidonvilles in Paris’s banlieues', French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 3, 2013, 1–20.
28 INSEE, ‘La Plaine de France, un territoire en mutation’, INSEE Ile-de France à la page, no. 200, August 2001, available on the INSEE website at www.insee.fr/fr/insee_regions/idf/themes/alapage/alap_2000_2006/alapage200.pdf (viewed 2 February 2016).
29 Organized by activists and young people, many of North African origin, the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme started in Marseilles in October 1983 and ended six weeks later, some 100,000 strong, in Paris. It is frequently cited as one of the first manifestations of immigrant solidarity in the current period.
30 Stéphane Beaud and Olivier Masclet, ‘Des “marcheurs” de 1983 aux “émeutiers” de 2005: deux générations sociales d’enfants d’immigrés’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 4, no. 61, 2006, 809–43.
31 Many observers expressed bewilderment when, during the events of 2005, teenagers caught up in the events torched the neighbourhood gyms and community centres ostensibly set up to serve them. Not least of these was President Chirac, who saw in the young people’s actions signs of a ‘deep malaise’. Yet, when sources of inequality are so dispersed, does it not make sense that people express their discontent against those markers of authority they see closest to home? See John P. Murphy, ‘Protest or riot? Interpreting collective action in contemporary France’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 4, 2011, 977–1009.
32 This has become especially heightened since the attacks on the Charle Hebdo satirical magazine in January 2015. See, for example, the ‘Onze mesures pour une grande mobilisation de l’École pour les valeurs de la république’ (11 January 2015), launched by the Minister of Education just after the attacks. For an earlier example, see the ‘Charte de la laïcité à l’École’ (6 September 2013), posted in all state schools starting in the autumn of 2013. Both documents available on the education.gouv.fr website at www.education.gouv.fr/cid85644/onze-mesures-pour-un-grande-mobilisation-de-l-ecole-pour-les-valeurs-de-la-republique.html, and www.education.gouv.fr/cid73666/charte-de-la-laicite-a-l-ecole.html, respectively (viewed 2 February 2016).
33 On the making of ‘sensible evidence’ that both constitutes and reinforces the status of the banlieue and its residents as ‘dangerous things’, see Mustafa Dikeç, ‘Immigrants, banlieues, and dangerous things: ideology as an aesthetic affair’, Antipode, vol. 45, no. 1, 2013, 23–42.
34 Jamel des Lilas, ‘“À Villiers-le-bel, la souffrance est la même”: a propos le procès en appel de cinq noirs’, 21 October 2012, available on the Etat d’exception website at www.etatdexception.net/a-villiers-le-bel-la-souffrance-est-la-meme-2 (viewed 3 February 2016).
35 See, for example, Didier Fassin, ‘The biopolitics of Otherness: undocumented foreigners and racial discrimination in French public debate’, Anthropology Today, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, 3–7; Didier Fassin, La Force de l’ordre: une anthropologie de la police des quartiers (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2011); Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin (eds), De la question sociale à la question raciale? Répresenter la société française (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2006); and Terrio, Judging Mohammed.
36 Frantz Fanon’s articulation of this ‘infernal circle’ remains exemplary: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. from the French by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press 1967). See also, among others, Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock 2008); Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press 2004); Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond “identity”’, Theory and Society, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, 1–47; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press 2004); and John Hartigan, Jr, ‘Culture against race: reworking the basis for racial analysis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 3, 2005, 543–60.
37 The 2008 debate on whether to allow the collection of ‘ethnic statistics’ as part of the official census data in France offers an exemplary look at this tension. Various proposals to allow such data collection have on several occasions been struck down, for fear of their ‘perverse effects’, most notably the risk of a ‘rise in communitarian tensions and resentments’: Johan Prorok, ‘La commission animée par Simone Veil se prononce contre la discrimination positive’, Le Figaro, 17 December 2008. See Alain Blum and France Guérin-Pace, ‘From measuring integration to fighting discrimination: the illusion of “ethnic statistics”’, French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, 45–61; and Patrick Simon, ‘The choice of ignorance: the debate on ethnic and racial statistics in France’, French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, 7–31.
38 This is perhaps especially true in relation to the United States, where racialized concerns often lead to polarized divisions between distinctly defined racial groups, obscuring the histories of mixing and métissage that have been so strongly constitutive of American society. See Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2007); Sara Le Menestrel, ‘Créolisation, imaginaire racial et marché musical franco-louisianais’, in Raulin and Rogers (eds), Parallaxes Transatlantiques, 79–108; and also Ghassan Hage, ‘The limits of “anti-racist sociology”’, UTS Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, 59–82.
39 Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 67.
40 See Loïc Wacquant, ‘From slavery to mass incarceration: rethinking the “race question” in the US’, New Left Review, no. 13, January–February 2002, 41–60.
41 See, for example, George Shulman’s analysis of Toni Morrison’s later work: ‘Morrison needs to be positioned in relation to a post-civil rights and feminist era: She would come to terms with the legacy of a second Reconstruction, and not only a slave past, which means digesting profound political disappointment in the civil rights era and its “American” promise and taking in enormous change in the world of those she calls my people. Acute disjuncture defines this moment: an enlarged black professional class but a growing “underclass” and staggering rates of black incarceration; political consensus against overt racism but a national culture that still uses black bodies symbolically.’ Morrison's endorsement of Bill Clinton, who would go on to promote neoliberal policies that hurt large swathes of America's poor, as ‘our first black President’, is a striking example of the odd bedfellows created by this confusion of matters of race, culture and social class. Shulman, American Prophecy, 187, 216–21.
42 As John Murphy writes, young people in the disadvantaged outer-cities demand ‘the right to indifference: that is, the right to the invisibility of racial and cultural markers of diversity when it comes to dealing with law enforcement, renting an apartment, applying for a job’: John P. Murphy, ‘Baguettes, berets and burning cars: the 2005 riots and the question of race in contemporary France’, French Cultural Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2011, 33–49 (45).
43 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press 2007), 83.
44 The irony here is that by positioning racial subjects as such, these forms of reasoning assume that, before having their consciousness raised, racial or ethnic Others are poorly positioned to imagine themselves as thinking subjects, and so poorly positioned to act.
45 ‘For the past two decades’, Fassin writes, ‘expressions of intolerance and an imaginary of war have been maintained, incited even, by authorities who continue to invoke both the notion of national identity in danger and the republican order under threat’: Fassin, La Force de l’ordre, 75. See Dikeç, ‘Immigrants, banlieues, and dangerous things’; and also Mustafa Dikeç¸ Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2007).
46 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Identity in the globalizing world’, Social Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001, 121–9 (129).
47 Ibid., 128.
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Notes on contributors
Beth S. Epstein
Beth S. Epstein holds a PhD in anthropology and is Associated Director of Academic Affairs of New York University-Paris. Her research focuses on questions of integration in France in relation to the development of the French banlieue, as well as on the intersections between French and American perspectives on the history and meanings of race, diversity and difference. Her book, Collective Terms: Race, Culture and Community in a State-Planned City in France, was published by Berghahn Books in 2011.