Black France / France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness

4.1/5 ( ratings)

In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists from France and the United States address the untenable paradox at the heart of French society. France's constitutional and legal discourses do not recognize race as a meaningful category. Yet the lived realities of race and racism are ever-present in the nation's supposedly race-blind society. The vaunted universalist principles of the French Republic are far from realized. Any claim of color-blindness is belied by experiences of anti-black racism, which render blackness a real and consequential historical, social, and political formation. Contributors to this collection of essays demonstrate that blackness in France is less an identity than a response to and rejection of anti-black racism. Black France / France Noire is a distinctive and important contribution to the increasingly public debates on diversity, race, racialization, and multicultural intolerance in French society and beyond.

Contributors. Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Allison Blakely, Jennifer Anne Boittin, Marcus Bruce, Fred Constant, Mamadou Diouf, Arlette Frund, Michel Giraud, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Trica Danielle Keaton, Jake Lamar, Patrick Lozès, Alain Mabanckou, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall, Christiane Taubira, Dominic Thomas, Gary Wilder

Trica Danielle Keaton is Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion and a coeditor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women and Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, also published by Duke University Press. Tyler Stovall is Professor of French History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and a coeditor of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, also published by Duke University Press.

"Black France / France Noire is the most comprehensive and urgent anthology regarding the questions of citizenship and belonging in France since Pierre Bourdieu's The Weight of the World. There's also a salutary combination of scholarly and personal narratives in this book, which elevates it to the stature of a groundbreaking manifesto, the controversial nature of which will be discussed for years to come."—Manthia Diawara, author of African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics

"In Black France / France Noire, leading thinkers and intellectuals raise challenging questions about how France's history of slavery and colonization, and immigration from its former colonies, are shaping the important, increasingly public discourse about blackness and racism."—Valérie K. Orlando, author of Francophone Voices of the "New" Morocco in Film and Print: presenting a Society in Transition

"Black skin may be officially invisible to France's government bureaucrats, statistics-gatherers, and devotees of French republicanism, but as a lived experience, blackness in France is very real. People of color routinely endure discrimination and find it difficult to gain full acceptance as French. Race matters in France, and the more that people talk and write about it, the more salient a social and political phenomenon race and racism in 'color-blind' France becomes. Black France / France Noire makes a major contribution by directly addressing experiences of blackness and anti-blackness in France."—Edward Berenson, author of Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa

"Black France / France Noire is the most recent and best record of an ongoing and important international scholarly conversation on issues of color, race, ethnicity, exclusion, and belonging. With essays by both French and American scholars, the collection addresses some deeply challenging questions about how prejudice manifests itself in French life. Some of the French contributors are hesitant to employ ethnic categories, as is the case in the United States, as ways to speak of identity, justice, and injustice in French society. But most of them realize that to eliminate color prejudice in France they must talk about color. This collection is essential reading for scholars who study France, Europe, and the politics of racial discourse more broadly."—Herman Lebovics, author of Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies