The Diaspora of the Comoros in France

Ethnicised Biopolitics and Communitarisation

Katharina Fritsch

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000614176
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoria: Staatsbürgerkunde & Bürgerrechte

Based on an ethnographic study of mobilisations of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille during political and cultural events, the book examines communitarisation in relation to three thematic areas, namely spaces, cultural markets and local politics.
Drawing on Foucault's concept of the dispositif, the author analyses mobilisations of postcolonial diaspora as part of a dispositif of communitarisation, that is, a set of discourses, practices, institutions and subjectivations of diasporic community. She argues that constructions of 'community' are both shaped by and shape ethnicised biopolitics, expressed by modes of governing diasporic groups along ethnicised divisions and a marking of ethnicised communities as the Other of the French Republic. The performativity of a Comorian community brought into being through political, cultural, economic and customary practices also shows how Comorian communities govern themselves along ethnicised categories, at the intersection with generation, gender, age classes, locality and class. Communitarisation processes as part of ethnicised (self-)governing reveal postcolonial power relations in France as well as practices of negotiation and contestation on the part of Comorian communities.
This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of critical diaspora studies, critical ethnography, discourse and dispositif analysis, postcolonial politics, and the African diaspora.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111665-1

“Welcome to the fifth island of the Comoros: Marseille, a cosmopolitan city, an economic capital of all Comorians” (Carvajal, Hamada Hamza and Fritsch 2016, 00:03:01; translation K.F.). In the documentary Histoires de Twarab à Marseille, the artist Mounir Hamada Hamza introduces the spectator to Marseille in this manner and in so doing articulates a common discourse in the context of the Comorian diaspora in Marseille: By referring to Marseille as the “fifth island of the Comoros”, he ‘diasporises’ the city by illustrating its importance to the Comorian diaspora and the Comoros. Not only has the city been and continues to be central to migration from the Comoros – an archipelago of four islands in the Western Indian Ocean – it has also become a central space for socio-cultural, economic and political practices of the Comorian diaspora (see Ahmad 2019; Direche-Slimani and Le Houérou 2002).

In this book, I analyse mobilisations of the Comorian diaspora by examining political and cultural events in Marseille. It is an ethnographic study for which I developed a conceptual framework that employs a political science perspective on postcolonial diaspora. Given the predominant role of discourses and practices of ‘community’ for the Comorian diaspora, I decided to focus on processes through which the Comorian diaspora in Marseille constitutes itself as well as is constituted as a community. I refer to this twofold process as a dispositif of communitarisation. My analysis is based on a biopolitical approach, as it focuses on governing and self-governing processes in the context of diaspora. In this regard, I underline the role of France as a postcolonial context characterised by ethnicised biopolitics. This ethnicised biopolitics has two elements: On the one hand, ‘migrant communities’ are discursively marked as ethnicised Others opposed to the ‘national community’ (see e.g. Guénif-Souilamas 2006a; Mazouz 2017). On the other, the Comorian diasporic community is brought into being through concrete cultural and political practices, that is, ethnicised self-governing. The main contribution of this book consists in contesting essentialising notions of diaspora and community (see e.g. Anthias 1998; Brah 2003) by showing how diaspora is both the object and subject of governing. Self-representations as a community are hence to be understood in relation to a constant Othering of Black communities and communities of colour in Western societies, in this case the French society.

In this introduction, I first sketch the larger context of the Comorian diaspora, postcolonial France and debates on ‘communautarisme’, a term and concept employed to describe and discredit the political and public affirmation of (ethnicised) community identity in France. Second, I outline the development of my main theoretical and methodological framework of the dispositif of communitarisation, which then leads me to a short description of the analysis chapters focusing on the three main dimensions of this dispositif: the spaces, cultural markets and politics of communitarisation. Throughout this book, I aim at contributing to current debates on the importance of addressing ethnicised power relations in postcolonial France as they shape the governing of diasporic communities as well as diasporic groups’ political and cultural self-governing.

Comorian diaspora, postcolonial France and communautarisme

Comorian populations are among Marseille’s largest non-white populations and are usually estimated to present about 10% of the city’s population. Migration from the Comoros to Marseille is shaped by a postcolonial context. The four Comorian islands – Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Nzwani (Anjouan), Mwali (Mohéli) and Maore (Mayotte) – were subjected to French colonial rule in the mid-19th century.¹ In 1975, three of the four islands unilaterally proclaimed independence, while Mayotte has remained part of France as an ‘Overseas territory’ and became the 101st French ‘Overseas department’ (départment d’outre mer) in 2010 (see Idriss 2013).² The division of the archipelago through the maintenance of neo-colonial borders, represented by the continuous presence of France on parts of the archipelago, has remained a political issue until today (Caminade 2004, 120f.).³ Given this colonial history and postcolonial continuities between France and the Comoros, France and especially Marseille has been a central space for migration from the Comoros. The importance of Marseille is a result of its role in the shipping industry, which also recruited workers from the colonies, in the 20th century (Bertoncello and Bredeloup 1999, 180ff.).⁴ While the migration – of primarily young men – hence also occurred during colonial times, it has increased significantly since the formal decolonisation of the Comoros in the mid-1970s and continues, now including all genders and generations (Direche-Slimani and Le Houérou 2002, 40ff.; Zakaria 2000, 77ff.).

The term ‘Comorian diaspora’ hence refers to different groups, including Comorian migrants who just arrived as well as ‘third-generation’ French citizens of ‘Comorian origin’. More generally speaking, in France, Comorian diaspora concerns individuals with different positionalities in terms of experiences of migration, gender, class or generation. I thus use this term – which also reflects an emic conception – as it allows me to consider very different experiences of migration across different spaces and epochs (see Brubaker 2005; Clifford 1994), thus also including different generations. In this regard, the emphasis on an ethnicised identity as ‘Comorian’ negotiates the neo-colonial division between the three islands of the Union of the Comoros and the fourth island of Mayotte (see Caminade 2010). However, and as I will show throughout this book, ethnicisation processes also reproduce power relations within the Comorian diaspora, as the category ethnicity masks, or rather strengthens, relations of dominance between different Comorian communities. In this regard, the Comorian diaspora in France was and continues to be shaped by a majority with ties to the largest island of Ngazidja, embedded in the relationship between migration and the accomplishment of the customary marriage, called Grand Mariage (“Great Marriage”) which especially shapes societal relations on Ngazidja (see Blanchy 1998; Vivier 1996 on this relationship). Majority relations hence also shape power relations regarding representations and practices of Comorian culture as ‘custom’ referred to by the concept of aada na mila (‘customs and traditions’; Damir 2004, 64).⁵ As I will outline, especially younger generations express a critical standing towards aada na mila and which also goes hand in hand with a positionality as ‘Franco-Comorian’, which I will also employ throughout this book as an emic category. In the French context, hyphenated identities are predominantly used to refer to dual citizenship (see e.g. Sharma 2016). In my discussion of cultural practices of younger Franco-Comorian generations (Chapter 6) and Franco-Comorian politicians (Chapter 7), Franco-Comorianness as a hyphenated identity represents more than a legal category in the context of the Comorian diaspora: It reveals multiple forms of ethnicised belonging in a context of diaspora that contests ethno-cultural particularism shaping French Republican citizenship (Guénif-Souilamas 2006b, 26), while also negotiating homogenising discourses of Comorianness.

The context of the Comorian diaspora is connected to historical and present experiences of African and Black diasporas in the European context (see e.g. Hine, Keaton, and Small 2009; Koegler et al. 2020) and especially in the French context (see e.g. Gueye 2010; Ndiaye 2008; Thompson 2020). The notion of ‘African diaspora’, drawing on the Jewish experience of diaspora, was first used by the historian George Shepperson at a pan-Africanist conference in 1964 in Dar es Salaam, today Tanzania, then colonial Tanganyika (Tölölyan 2012). The term refers to the violent genealogies of the transatlantic slave trade since the 16th century and the ‘Middle Passage’, a term to describe the forced mobility of enslaved Black people from the African continent to the Americas, the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, Europe (Braziel 2008, 18). The history of the Comoro islands is similarly embedded in genealogies of enslavement and forced displacement of African populations, however in the context of the Indian Ocean slave trade and the Omani empire (see Blanchy 2013). Considering these histories of enslavement as well as the genealogies of (Arab) imperialism and (European) colonialism, articulations of Comorianness have especially been shaped by power relations on the basis of dominant notions of Arabness and marginalised Africanness (Blanchy 2010, 14; Walker 2010, 190). I agree with authors, such as the social anthropologist Iain Walker (2010, 14f., 201), who emphasise hybridisation and creolisation processes in the context of the Comoros while also situating the Comoro islands within an African context. However, the Comoros are among the few Sub-Saharan African countries to also be part of the Arab League, reflecting the political, cultural and economic positioning of the Comoros as part of the ‘Arab world’. I hence do not intend to ‘fix’ Comorians within an African identity, but rather show how notions of Africanness are articulated and/or contested in the context of diaspora and contemporary France (see Bloom, Gondola, and Tshimanga 2009). I further follow a widespread understanding of Black as a political positioning (Kuria 2015, 22) that is not reducible to skin colour and which has, especially since the first decade of the 21st century, increasingly shaped academic and activist debates and movements in a Francophone context by articulating experiences as Black French (see e.g. Fais and Smith 2007; Keaton, Sharpley-Whiting, and Stovall 2012; Thompson 2020).⁶ In line with such an argumentation, the sociologist Abdoul-Malik Ahmad (2019) emphasises the relevance of Blackness in his analysis of the intersectional power relations affecting Comorian women’s subjectivities and their informal business activities in Marseille (30f.). Ethnicisation and racialisation processes in the context of the Comoros are hence manifold and are newly articulated in the context of diaspora.

The representation of French Republicanism as a counter-model to British multiculturalism has made debates on political representation as ethnicised and racialised communities very complicated, as these demands are fast dismissed as communautarisme (see Lévy 2005). Literally translatable as ‘communitarianism’, this term does not have much in common with the Anglo-American notion, as it is used in public and political discourse to dismiss any reference to a community which is not the ‘national community’ as the Republic’s Other. As the sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (2006b, 30) outlines, the Othering implicated in the notion of communautarisme is intersectional in that it especially targets sexualised and ethnicised communities. Accordingly, it is

a unified and unifying republicanism that claims to tolerate diversity and difference but in fact imposes a code of invisibility on specific and constructed groups of individuals (homosexuals, disabled, migrants, ethnic and racial minorities, women) in the name of a so-called Jacobin universalism.

(ibid., 24f.)

From a postcolonial perspective, the discourse of communautaris...