Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics

Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States in Comparison

Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, Gert Oostindie, Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen, Gert Oostindie

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857453273
• eBook ISBN: 9780857453280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

These transfers of sovereignty resulted in extensive, unforeseen movements of citizens and subjects to their former countries. The phenomenon of postcolonial migration affected not only European nations, but also the United States, Japan and post-Soviet Russia. The political and societal reactions to the unexpected and often unwelcome migrants was significant to postcolonial migrants' identity politics and how these influenced metropolitan debates about citizenship, national identity and colonial history. The contributors explore the historical background and contemporary significance of these migrations and discuss the ethnic and class composition and the patterns of integration of the migrant population.

CHAPTER 1

POSTCOLONIAL IMMIGRANTS IN FRANCE AND THEIR DESCENDANTS

The Meanings of France’s ‘Postcolonial Moment’

James Cohen

The French ‘Postcolonial Moment’

In the ongoing controversy over the meaning of ‘the postcolonial’, different actors have different ways of defining for themselves what is ‘past’ about colonialism and what is still part of the present; what is new and what is not so new. Researchers may shed much light upon these questions but cannot claim neutrality or immunity from political controversy in which these same questions are posed in other, more immediate and sometimes plainly instrumental ways. The particular form of scientific legitimacy that academic researchers bring to the discussion cannot exist unto itself and should no doubt accept its inevitable interaction with public debate.

In France, the postcolonial has been a category of public and not just academic discussion since 2005. The postcolonial controversy is far from absent from the academy but university research is not what has driven current debates. These are best understood as a crystallization of several convergent political controversies over the effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The publication in September 2005 of the collective work La fracture coloniale¹ – a product of public intellectuals (social scientists and journalists of the left) – and the subsequent explosion of books and articles on the postcolonial,² is no great surprise if one understands this wave as a response to emerging debates over the ‘republican model of integration’, including the question of how to treat ethnoracial discrimination, and how to treat religious diversity – in particular as embodied by Islam; over the notion of ‘race’ which many sociologists have begun to consider in spite of strong republican presumptions against the legitimacy of the notion; and, last but not least, over the memory of colonialism, slavery and abolition, and the role of public authorities in recognizing and conserving this memory. The urban riots of November 2005 added a graphic and dramatic dimension to these debates and gave them an echo in the media that they would otherwise never have had to the same degree.

In its academic dimension, the postcolonial ‘boom’ followed a long period of an embargo on such discussion, which can be explained mostly as a function of the institutional organization of the French university and research, which does not favour interdisciplinary experiments – except in a few privileged spaces – especially when conducted in an openly critical perspective. It took an organized effort to subvert institutionally enforced disciplinary boundaries in order to inaugurate the emerging field of postcolonial studies. Nonetheless, what France has before it today is a debate which is first of all about public policy, the form of citizenship and the concrete possibility of social justice in terms of both ‘distribution’ and ‘recognition’.³

The main, propelling theme of the postcolonial debates is the idea – a certainty for some, a hypothesis for others – of a substantial continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods, as evidenced above all by continuing racism and discrimination affecting, in particularly serious ways, the life chances of descendants of colonial subjects from North Africa and West Africa; a certain predominant ill at ease in French society, in spite of proclaimed secular (laïc) norms, about the growing presence of Islam; and a certain resistance in French society to a coming to terms with colonial domination and its possible lingering effects.

Clearly, some activists are less interested in examining social-scientific hypotheses than in mobilizing the idea of colonial continuity as a certainty, and in some cases even as the basis of a political identity. From a research standpoint, we must treat these ideas as hypotheses to be examined with all due social-scientific rigour even as we admit that there is no one objective, ‘god’s eye’ view of the matter. That is what I shall attempt to do here, with no claim to exhaustiveness but with some effort to draw on the wealth of materials that are now becoming available to interested researchers.

Our subject of course involves processes at work not just in the first years after decolonization, but also many years after the arrival of the first postcolonial immigrants, when the central concerns are not those of the immigrants themselves but rather their descendants. The children and grandchildren of postcolonial immigrants are indeed often perceived and referred to as ‘foreign’ or ‘different’ (culturally, ethnoracially or both) and may, according to the hypothesis, experience something quite specific as ‘postcolonial subjects’, descendants of colonial subjects, that other categories of immigrants may not experience, or not in the same way, which of course does not mean that conditions cannot be extremely unfavourable as well for other categories who have immigrated more recently (Turks, Sri Lankans, and so on) – not to mention exiles and refugees.

That, of course, is why our collective effort also involves examining ‘paths to integration’, including the questions of social mobility and participation in public life, as well as ‘models of integration’ (or ‘models of citizenship’), that is, sets of norms that condition public policy. In France this means examining the prevailing model of reference, generally known as the ‘republican model of integration’. We shall explore how the political significance of this republican reference has evolved under the impact of recent debates occurring under the critical sign of the postcolonial, broadly defined. We will look, further, at the forms of organization and participation in public life of immigrant groups and their descendants, in order to determine to what extent the category ‘postcolonial’ is pertinent as a political designation, referring not just to a category of actors but also to certain forms of consciousness and distinct modes of political mobilization.

The main argument we shall set forth here is that there are forms of racism and discrimination specific to the colonial/postcolonial condition and which significantly affect in specific ways the life chances of descendants of postcolonial immigrants. Although the French system of demographic statistics does not allow for a precise measurement of the impact of discrimination on given ethnoracial categories, it is clear enough from a growing body of research and from everyday observation that the ongoing effects of racism and discrimination disproportionately affect the descendants of immigrants from North Africa, West Africa and also – though in different ways – those from the Caribbean. A second and related claim is that certain aspects of the reception of Islam in French society, and in the French political system, reflect processes of ‘othering’ which can plausibly be traced in part to colonial contexts among other roots of course.

As to whether ‘postcolonial’ also describes given forms of political consciousness, the answer in a nutshell is that most citizens with origins in the postcolonial immigration experience do not consistently invoke such a reference. The frequency of such references is growing, however, thanks mostly to certain small circles of political activists and intellectuals who promote it as a centrepiece of their analysis and a frame of collective action. Their ideas may occupy a critical fringe outside the consensus of the republican model, but their critical questionings have nonetheless provoked broader debate about the model’s underpinnings. Their influence in public life far outweighs their own modest numbers.

One further clarification about the delimitation of our subject: it is often assumed that discussions about postcolonial immigration refer exclusively to subaltern social categories: peasants, workers, or the unemployed; often poor, often illiterate. It is important, however, to complete this image, because the full set of ‘postcolonial immigrants’ also includes other categories who were in a literal sense immigrants from the former colonies but who were not among the subaltern sectors of colonial society. Their numbers were lesser but without them the examination of postcolonial immigration would not be complete. The first of these categories is made up of colonial settlers from Europe, referred to in the case of Algeria – by far the largest French colony of settlement – as ‘pieds noirs’ (literally ‘black feet’). About a million pieds noirs came to metropolitan France after the Algerian war and the Evian peace agreements in 1962. Among them were about 130,000 Algerian Jews, who had been granted French citizenship in the 1870s and who, by the time of the Algerian war, had become a relatively privileged group.⁴ The integration of the pieds noirs into French society occurred under conditions that were traumatic and yet materially more favourable than for immigrant workers. The point here is not just to broaden and diversify our portrait of postcolonial immigration, but also to take full account of these categories’ impact on French society. For example, as we shall see further on, pieds noirs in southern France have been disproportionately present among the supporters of the anti-immigrant National Front.

From to Colonial to Postcolonial Migration: Themes and Perspectives

We shall now review a few important themes of French postcolonial immigration history, in particular those which shed light on contemporary debates about the postcolonial heritage, with no claim to exhaustiveness.

Postcolonial migrations in the literal sense, referring to the arrival of those who came to metropolitan France after the independence of their home country, cannot be understood apart from the significant migratory flows that occurred between the colonies and the metropole during the colonial period itself and in particular its final decades. During the two world wars the colonies supplied large numbers of soldiers to France; during and between the wars and just after the Second World War, they supplied large numbers of migrant workers. According to historian Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, during the First World War (1914–1918) there were roughly 480,000 soldiers and 225,000 workers in France from the colonies, including 172,000 Algerian soldiers, 78,560 Algerian workers, 134,000 West African soldiers, and 49,000 Indochinese workers.⁵

The contribution of colonial subjects to the French military effort in both world wars has long been, and remains to this day, an important stake in defining the colonial heritage. The figure of the tirailleur sénégalais (the Senegalese rifleman) has been invoked by generations of immigrant associations and immigrants’ rights movements as a ‘reminder’ to French society that in an earlier period African colonial subjects made great sacrifices in blood for the greater glory of France, which is of course to suggest that France has an obligation or ‘debt’ to welcome Africans on its soil today. In a similar vein, the film ‘Indigènes’ (2005), directed by Rachid Bouchareb, a fiction starring three well-known Maghrebi and Franco-Maghrebi actors, is a graphic fictionalized account of the involvement of North African soldiers in the Second World War. The film’s final scene features a written appeal to the public to recognize the plight of thousands of war veterans, now in old age, who never collected a full pension because of their loss of French nationality following the formal decolonization of their countries. President Jacques Chirac answered this appeal a few months after seeing the film, making sure that pensions for soldiers from other countries were equal to those of French citizens.

Immigrants to France in the early twentieth century were officially classified in essentializing and racializing fashion, with the attribution of qualities and defects to certain groups being incorporated into official thinking. Care was taken to isolate immigrant workers and their customs from native French people. One of the most important figures in formulating French policy from the 1930s to the 1950s was the demographer Georges Mauco, whose doctoral thesis, defended in 1932, is recognized today to be full of stereotypes about the inassimilable character of immigrants of certain origins: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Postcolonial Migrations and Identity Politics: Towards a Comparative Perspective
• 1 Postcolonial Immigrants in France and their Descendants: The Meanings of France’s ‘Postcolonial Moment’
• 2 Postcolonial Migrants in Britain: From Unwelcome Guests to Partial and Segmented Assimilation
• 3 Postcolonial Migrants in the Netherlands: Identity Politics versus the Fragmentation of Community
• 4 Postcolonial Portugal: Between Scylla and Charybdis
• 5 Return of the Natives? Children of Empire in Post-imperial Japan
• 6 Postcolonial Immigration and Identity Formation in Europe since 1945: The Russian Variant
• 7 The Puerto Rican Diaspora to the United States: A Postcolonial Migration?
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index