A ‘black Parisian’ march in remembrance of slavery: challenging the French collective imagination

ABSTRACT

On the 10 May 2008, approximately 2000 people marched through the center of Paris proclaiming that, ‘Slavery has been abolished, but prejudices not!’ Based on participant observation of this march, this article explores two main issues with regard to the challenges of blackness in contemporary Paris. First, it examines how the ethno-racial category of ‘black’ becomes significant for collective action in the French republican context, specifically in terms of how French black people symbolically occupy the French national imagination by physically occupying Parisian urban space. Second, the article shows that, as a commemorative march, one of its key objectives is to make present-day claims of social justice, namely, a denouncement of ongoing racial discrimination experienced by French black people. The article seeks to understand how the marchers, paradoxically by making themselves visible in public space, are in effect also proclaiming a demand for social invisibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• march
• memory of slavery
• racial discrimination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Created in 2005 (in French: Le Conseil représentatif des Associations Noires).

2. Act of the 23 February 2005.

3. ‘Without documents' refers to those persons who currently reside in France but who do not have the proper legal documentation to remain in the country.

4. ‘Beur' is a colloquial term to designate French-born people whose parents are immigrants from North Africa. The word was coined by reversing and contracting the syllables of the word arabe (Arab in French).

5. This association was founded by the Franco-Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala.

6. Fieldnotes, preparatory meeting of the March, Paris, 6 May 2008.

7. Extract from an interview with an activist (male, 46), Paris, 19 June 2008.

8. Extracts from an interview with an activist (female, 29), Paris, 11 July 2008.

9. Fieldnote, meeting, Paris, 19 May 2009.

10. Fieldnotes, Paris, 6 May 2008, there were roughly 40 people present at that meeting.

11. Article one of the bill (n°2001-434, 21 May 2001): ‘The French Republic acknowledges that the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade on the one hand, and slavery on the other ( … ) constitute a crime against humanity’.

12. Fieldnotes, Paris, 10 May 2008.

13. All the citations of participants: fieldnotes of a debriefing meeting of the CRAN, 19 May 2008.

14. Extracts from an interview with an activist (male, 40), Paris, 13 July 2008.