Locating African European Studies

Interventions, Intersections, Conversations

Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark U Stein, Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark U Stein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429956867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Drawing on a rich lineage of anti-discriminatory scholarship, art, and activism, Locating African European Studies engages with contemporary and historical African European formations, positionalities, politics, and cultural productions in Europe.

Locating African European Studies reflects on the meanings, objectives, and contours of this field. Twenty-six activists, academics, and artists cover a wide range of topics, engaging with processes of affiliation, discrimination, and resistance. They negotiate the methodological foundations of the field, explore different meanings and politics of 'African' and 'European', and investigate African European representations in literature, film, photography, art, and other media. In three thematic sections, the book focusses on:

• African European social and historical formations
• African European cultural production
• Decolonial academic practice

Locating African European Studies features innovative transdisciplinary research, and will be of interest to students and scholars of various fields, including Black Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, African American Studies, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, African Studies, History, and Social Sciences.

Part I

African European social and historical formations

1 “We have to act. That is what forms collectivity”

Black solidarity beyond identity in contemporary Paris

Vanessa Eileen Thompson

Whereas the analytical category of race was formerly officially written out of the hegemonic political archive of the French Republic, the first decade of the twenty-first century was marked with issues of race and the “black condition” (Faes and Smith 2006; Ndiaye 2008; Gueye 2010; Keaton et al. 2012; Célestine and Fila-Bakabadio 2015). This shift is strongly informed by self-identified black movements, their responses to the French Republic’s avoidance of thematising its vital colonial legacies, and the pivotal status of institutional anti-black racism under the constitutive umbrella of an abstract universalism.¹

However, the emergence of the “black question” (Faes and Smith 2006) is neither a complete novelty (Célestine and Fila-Bakabadio 2015; Gueye 2006; Germain 2016; Boittin 2010) nor are forms of black activism without divisions over notions of blackness, including complete detachment from the label black by some Afro-descendant organisations (Célestine 2011; Gueye 2013). Many studies on blackness in France discuss contemporary black activist movements either as the necessary emergence of the collective agency of black people as a visible minority (Lozès 2012; Gueye 2010) or as a deep challenge of the socio-political spaces of, for instance, certain French Caribbean organisations (Célestine 2011). This chapter introduces an alternative argument by drawing on a notion of black collective solidarity beyond identity that is inspired by critical ethnographic research with a predominantly black grass-roots group from the underprivileged outskirts of Paris, the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie (BAN).

I argue that this conception of black collective solidarity, which seeks to escape the pitfalls of (liberal) identity politics on the one hand and of abstract universalism (which often disqualifies anti-racist activism as “identity politics”) on the other, provides a novel twist to anti-racist solidarities in postcolonial societies as it: a) recognises the multiplicities of black experiences and identifications without subsuming them under a black collective identity as a unifier for political mobilisation, b) takes seriously the epistemological value of lived experiences of anti-blackness, and c) provides the basis for inter-racial solidarity based on notions of urban conviviality and collective action.

In what follows, I will present and discuss this conception of black political action vis-à-vis an engagement with the activist practices of the BAN and theoretical conceptions of black solidarity (Shelby 2005) and collective action (Arendt 1958).

However, I will first briefly sketch out the (historical) relation between racism and French Republican universalism as well as historicise formations of black political activisms within the context of French Republicanism.

Unsettling French Republican universalism

In officially and constitutionally distancing itself from a primordialist conception of nationhood (for instance, the conception of the German nation-state) as well as from forms of state-sanctioned multiculturalism (for instance, in US or Canadian state formations), the founding principles of the French Republic rely on a contractual notion of citizenship and national belonging (Brubaker 1992; Fernando 2009). This contractual form is based on four Republican principles, namely liberté, égalité, fraternité, and (later, institutionally) laicité, and can be traced back to the French Revolution in 1789. It officially detaches itself from any form of group-related differences or loyalties such as racial, ethnic, and/or religious identity because they are perceived as a threat to the universalist integrity of the French Republican nation. This national conception “is defined by its ambition to transcend particular affiliation—biological, historical, economic, social, religious, or cultural—through citizenship, to define the citizen as an abstract individual, without identification and without particular qualifications” (Schnapper 1998, 35, original emphasis). Whereas there are various versions of Republican citizenship, their commonality includes that they operate within a “race-less” framework that continues to provide the guiding principles for hegemonic French society, legislation, political, and societal affairs (Fassin and Fassin 2006; Fernando 2009; Jennings 2000; Salmi 2011).

However, the relation between universalism, particularism, and race is rather intertwined. Various race-critical and postcolonial scholars have demonstrated that the universalist conception of the Republican nation is bound to an inherent ethno-cultural particularism and cultural racialism (see, for instance, Wilder 2005; Balibar 1994; Fernando 2009; Silverman 1992; Stam and Shohat 2012; Mbembe 2005; Guénif-Souilamas 2006). They argue that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of abstract French Republicanism because it is a particular history and communality that is bound to French Republican citizenship (Silverman 1992; Fernando 2009), which thus universalises the particular by rendering another constructed (and racialised) particular the non-universal other.

What was implicit in reference to the internal body of the Republican nation, i.e. a cultural racialism inherent to the contractual notion of citizenship, was clearly made explicit in its external articulation. Forms of racism legitimised French Republican colonial enslavement, legalised by the Code Noir (Black Code), the longue durée of French colonialism as well as shape (post-)colonial migration regimes (Balibar 1994; Césaire 2000; Stam and Shohat 2012; Mbembe 2005).

Snapshots of black activisms within the context of French Republicanism

Not only were and are anti-black and other forms of racism inherent components of French Republicanism, they furthermore brought about formations of transnational black resistances and counter-discourses. The conjunctures of racism in metropolitan France and its colonies were challenged in significant ways throughout history, and blackness was used in various subversive ways by colonial subjects racialised as black in the metropoles, in the plantation economies, and in the colonies (Boittin 2010).

Whereas I cannot provide an exhaustive overview of the history of black resistances and their shifting connotations within the French Republican context (i.e. metropolitan/hexagonal France as well as former plantation economies and colonies of France), I will sketch out crucial cornerstones as mere snapshots, with a particular focus on the mid-twentieth- and early twenty-first century. I do this to show that there is a long history to what is often referred to as the “new black movements” in France and that various and distinguished notions of blackness were employed within these emancipatory struggles. This not only suggests that there were diverse political distinctions at work within black activist communities but also that the way they operated with race was highly distinctive (Boittin 2010).

Studies on the black population in metropolitan France during the eighteenth century demonstrate, for instance, that the political engagements of black people were part of broader abolitionist projects against French enslavement (Stovall 2006; Peabody and Boulle 2014). Enslavement did not officially exist in metropolitan/hexagonal France at that time on the basis of the “Freedom Principle”. Black people who lived in France were not officially enslaved—many worked as private servants or tradespersons, and a few individual blacks belonged to the upper classes; however, this principle was deeply ambivalent and framed by an anti-black logic. Not only was it used by black people in both hexagonal France and the Caribbean to argue that setting foot on French metropolitan soil automatically rendered enslaved black people free, it was also employed by the royal government to argue that enslaved people (mainly black people) had no right to live or reside in France. The very existence of black people in metropolitan France can be considered a part of the black abolitionist struggle; for example, enslaved people from the Caribbean who only stayed in France for a period of time “successfully petitioned French courts for manumission based on their presence in France, so that the very existence of the black community in France constituted part of the struggle against slavery” (Stovall 2006, 206). These struggles for socio-political rights have to be understood as part of a wider realm of cultures of maroonage, fugitivity, and resistances that resulted in events like the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) (Dubois 2004, Dubois et al. 2013; Ehrmann 2015; Robinson 1983; Trouillot 1995).

By acting in concert against the foundations of colonial enslavement, the enslaved subjects of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, not only unravelled universal humanism from its colonial impregnation but further employed a conception of blackness that went beyond collective identity formations (Thompson 2017). The text of the Haitian Constitution of 1805 reveals the usage of “black” as a political project based on lived experiences of enslavement, subordination and dehumanisation.² This notion of blackness constituted a new concept of maroonage citizenship. It did not reproduce logics of “raciology” (Gilroy 2000, 12), as it was defined through a decolonial humanism grounded in the critique of lived experiences of subordination (Ehrmann 2015, 2018). Here, even certain white subjects could be defined as black as long as they actively and unapologetically opposed and struggled against the logic of racism and colonial enslavement.³

However, several developments took place that contributed to the reconfiguration of notions of blackness, shifting it towards more (often strategically) essentialised (albeit non-homogenous) conceptions. The reestablishment of enslavement by Napoleon in 1802 (after it was abolished in 1794) and the normalisation of the biologistic racism that underlined it, advanced by the expansion of France’s colonial projects in West Africa, proliferated such shifts immensely. References to a black collective culture and identity as well as anti-colonial employments of the category of the nation became more prominent, as the rise of various forms of Black Nationalism as counter-movements to colonisation demonstrate. Based upon the workings of the global colour line, black collective identity formations, what Stuart Hall has described in terms of “one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’ ” (Hall 1990, 223), also began to strongly shape formations of political blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

Whereas black, anti-imperialist, working-class groups of the 1920s in Paris used, for instance, the term and concept of race in various ways to characterise their shifting relationship with the French Empire (Boittin 2010), the Négritude movement, which drew significantly from the awareness and consciousness of black workers in the 1920s, mainly employed blackness as a cultural and political unifier based on a black collective identity within the struggles for decolonisation.⁴

The post-war period in hexagonal France was marked by various forms of black activisms performed by students, workers, and intellectuals, and was tied both to anti-colonial struggles as well as to struggles for black rights in hexagonal France. Although linkages between black people from the Caribbean and black people from West Africa were braided together within these organisations and associations alongside the nuances of differences and similarities, the majority of Caribbean and African migrants organised rather separately from one another (Germain 2016).⁵ However, black activism reemerged through colonial labour migration as a new genre in the genealogy of political struggles within the African Diaspora (Germain 2016). The mid-1960s and 1970s saw large numbers of African migrants engaged in labour and rent strikes, such as those seen at the SONACOTRA (Société nationale de construction de logement de travailleurs) foyers (in which labour migrants were housed) in 1975 (Dedieu and Mbodj-Pouye 2015).⁶ Black feminists collectives, such as the Coordination des Femmes Noires, organised women of both African and Caribbean descent and linked struggles against racism and imperialism to struggles against sexism and patriarchy (see Châabane 2008).

The 1980s, in which the far-right gained more power and racist policing increased, marked the advent of mass mobilisations of anti-racist movements, especially enacted by broad-based, post-migrant organisations consisting mainly of youth whose parents migrated to France from the North of Africa. Although associations of black people participated in these mobilisations (Gueye 2010), others, such as the anti-racist and anti-fascist urban collective Black Dragons, were highly invisibilised and/or criminalised; the emergence of a “new black activism” (Germain 2016) and the rise of debates on the black condition (Ndiaye 2008) were not achieved before the late 1990s. It was also then that the term noire, which had commonly been used by Afro-descendant associations and organisations before World War II but was thereafter largely replaced by the terms African for people from African countries and French Caribbean or Afro-Caribbean to name people from the Overseas territories, started to reemerge (Célestine and Fila-Bakabadio 2015).

The issue of blackness that recently evolved as a major point in public debates in France is a culmination of social conflict in specific areas, including colonial enslavement and its memory, the legacies of French colonialism, institutional racism, the 2005 urban revolts in the impoverished outskirts of Paris, and the renewed question of what should constitute French identity. An important pillar in the landscape of black activist formations that demonstrates the diversity of existing collectives and associations, including their variegated ways of operating with race and ethnicity (Célestine 2011), was the 150th anniversary of the abolition of enslavement, which occurred in 1998.

The national motto of the commemoration introduced by the French government, “All of us were born in 1848”, implies that the French nation and the Republic were born when enslavement was abolished (Chivallon 2012), thereby constructing the French nation simultaneously as the victim of French enslavement and as its saviour. This led to outrage from severa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: African European studies as a critique of contingent belonging
• PART I: African European social and historical formations
• PART II: African European cultural production
• PART III: Decolonial academic practice
• Afterword
• Index