AS WE NOTED in chapter 3, France and the Francophone zones formed key sites in the postwar paradigm shift in thinking about race and colonialism, with May 1968 forming the high-water mark of Third Worldism. While de Gaulle pursued his independent path between the United States and the Soviet Union, the left mounted massive demonstrations, along with an immense intellectual production in support of Third World revolutions and resistance movements in the United States. The postwar period also witnessed the emergence of an embryonic black movement ensuant to the arrival in France of a new generation of African and West Indian students, thanks to a system of scholarships, leading to a substantial intellectual community. This group reached critical mass in the formation in 1950 of FESNF (Federation of Students from Black Africa in France), along with its official journal, L’Étudiant d’Afrique Noire, bringing continuity to the decolonization struggles theorized by writers such as Césaire, Memmi, and Fanon.
France, and especially Paris, served as a key node in the network of Third Worldist thought, contributing to the postwar critique of dominant trends in the human and social sciences as reflecting the economic and cultural imperialism of the European colonial powers. In the 1970s, the Laboratory for Third World and African Studies, at University of Paris VII, for example, combined African, Asian, and Latin American studies. That postcolonial studies at first found little purchase on the French intellectual scene was thus partly due to the fact that the postcolonial field was seen as already occupied by anticolonial and anti-imperialist writing and therefore seemed, despite the new theoretical wrinkles, a case of “déjà vu all over again.” Present-day postcolonial studies in France, in this sense, cannot be seen as merely as an epigonic or belated copy of work performed outside of France; rather, it must be situated intertextually, in relation to the anticolonial corpus fashioned by these earlier writers.
What could be called “proto-postcolonial” work was also performed by Arab intellectuals in France, in what might seem like a surprising place: French Oriental studies. French-speaking Arab intellectuals formed part of a linguistic, cultural, and scholarly continuum. As insiders/outsiders, they resembled the British-educated “white but not quite” colonial elites or the English-speaking Arab scholars in Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Beginning in the 1950s, Oriental academic institutions in France began to recognize the independence struggles in the Arab world, while also absorbing a few Arab intellectuals into their ranks.1 In 1963, a decade and a half before Edward Said, Anouar Abdel-Malek published “Orientalism in Crisis” in the journal Diogenes (vol. 44, Winter 1963). For Abdel-Malek, Third World independence struggles inevitably impacted Oriental studies by turning those who had been “objects of study” into sovereign subjects. “The hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud [had been] accompanied by Europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples.”2 A decade later, Abdallah Laroui’s La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes (1974) denounced the Orientalist penchant for “speaking for [Arab] others” and attacked the Orientalists as a bureaucratic caste.3
French leftists saw themselves as allied with minority and leftist movements in the United States, just as American (and Brazilian) leftists were inspired by May ’68. The situationists saw the 1964 Berkeley protests as inspiration for their own campus movements. Jean-Luc Godard’s Vladimir et Rosa fictionalized the Chicago 8 trial, while Agnès Varda lauded the black liberation movement in her film The Black Panthers. The Black Power movement was especially influential for the Prison Information Group formed in 1971 by Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert. Foucault had read the Black Panther political writings in the late 1960s, and they perhaps influenced his subsequent theories of the “racial state.” Writer Jean Genet toured the United States in 1970 in support of the Panthers as advocates for a “red ideology in a Black skin.”4 According to Richard Wolin, it was Genet’s support for the Panthers that led Huey Newton to support gay liberation.5
After the left’s defeat in 1968, the 1970s in France formed a period of conflict between the Third Worldist revolutionary paradigm and the more conservative position that was emerging. Defeatism set in on the left, and Third Worldism gave way to the anticommunism of the nouveaux philosophes. In the post-’68 hangover period, in the wake of Solzhenitsyn’s denunciations of the Soviet Gulag, anticommunism came to the center of the discussion, while Camus replaced Sartre as intellectual model. The simultaneous discrediting of Marxism and Third Worldism left the field open, later, for neoliberalism and ethno-national chauvinism. Anti–Third Worldism crystallized with a 1978 polemic in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur, published later as Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche. In Kristin Ross’s account, some former ’68 leftists rewrote history, including their own, as that of leftists deluded into seeing the enemy as colonialism when the real enemy was communism.6 Third World socialism, some ex-gauchistes argued, could only lead to the “gulagization” of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. “Disappeared” in this account were the horrors of Vietnam (conducted first by French and then by U.S. armed forces), the French massacres and torture in Algeria (and even in France itself), the U.S. military/economic domination of Latin America, and the general hegemony of the North. The new anti–Third Worldism bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the colonialists who lauded the “civilizing mission” of the West while deriding all possibility of democratic rule after independence. In both the United States and France, anticommunism became articulated together with anti–Third Worldism (and later antimulticulturalism).7
An important text in this anti–Third Worldist backlash was Pascal Bruckner’s 1983 book Le Sanglot de l’Homme Blanc (The White Man’s Sobs).8 A contemporary reading of Bruckner’s text in the light of the “culture wars” reveals the extent to which Bruckner anticipated the lachrymose tone of hysterical victimization of the right in both the United States and France a decade later. Bruckner does, to be sure, score some valid points. He rightly calls attention to a certain religious (largely Christian) substratum in some leftist thought. (Unfortunately for his argument, the point is equally true, if not more so, of right-wing thought.) He scores the tendency of some Western leftists to project themselves into idealized Third World revolutionaries, romanticizing regimes about which they knew virtually nothing. This charge is certainly accurate in relation to French and American Maoists who turned China into a site of romantic projection, a revolutionary ailleurs, forgetting Mao’s megalomania and the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. But Bruckner places an unnecessarily insidious interpretation on the left’s overly generous assessment of revolutionary movements abroad, reading it as a sign of a totalitarian project, when in fact these sometimes naive projections were often premised on disillusionment, within the binaristic logic that “if the West is so imperialist and racist, the East must be the opposite.” Yet in other cases, First World support for anti-imperialist struggles, for example in Vietnam, was more informed. Although Bruckner also rightly scores the hypocrisies of European Third Worldists who reject U.S. imperialism yet fail to account for the common origins of European colonialisms and U.S. imperialism.
As a kind of camera obscura Fanon, Bruckner offers the white man’s inverted version of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. While Fanon speaks of the colonialist and racist mechanisms that generated self-hatred on the part of the colonized, Bruckner speaks of the ways that Third Worldism itself has imbued white Europeans with irrational guilt and insecurity. Rejecting what he calls Fanon’s “ridiculous” plea to “go beyond Europe,” Bruckner warns that for the peoples of the Third World to become themselves, “they must become more western,” since it “is impossible to ‘go beyond’ democracy.”9 The equation of Europe and democracy is, of course, a staple of Eurocentric discourse. Bruckner makes this equation just four decades after the advent, in the very heart of Europe, of the fascist regimes of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pétain and just three decades after a period when Muslim Algerians under French colonialism were living rules of exception that deprived them of their rightful vote. Fanon had called for going “beyond Europe” precisely because Europe had not been truly democratic itself and had not advanced democracy abroad.
The role of Maurice Papon in events that transpired just two decades before the publication of Bruckner’s book vividly illustrates the limits of Bruckner’s depiction of a democratic postwar Europe. Papon, who had organized deportations of Jews to the concentration camps during his tenure as police chief of Bordeaux during Vichy, served in the 1950s in the French colonial administration.10 On October 17, 1961, Papon, in his function as Paris’s chief of police, presided over a horrific massacre. After a peaceful protest march by thousands of Algerians, police fired machine guns into the crowd and literally clubbed demonstrators into the Seine to drown. Six thousand Algerians were herded into a sports stadium, where many died in police custody. Over two hundred people were known to have died, hundreds were reported missing, and corpses bobbed up all along the Seine.11 The official police-led cover-up relayed by the press claimed that the Algerians opened fire and that the police were obliged to restore “law and order.” Despite Papon’s murderous past toward both Jews and Muslims, he reached the highest ranks of the French government before he was tried and jailed in 1998 for his role in deporting Jews. Long repressed, the memory of the massacre has been recently resurrected in books (Einaudi’s La Bataille de Paris), television dramas (La Nuit Noire), and feature films (Haneke’s symptomatically titled film Caché and Bouchareb’s Hors-la-Loi).
Despite such crimes, Bruckner uses the language of anticolonialism in an upside-down manner to portray the West as the real victim. Here is Bruckner:
Indeed, there weighs on every westerner an a priori presumption of crime. We Europeans have been brought up to hate ourselves, in the certitude that there was at the heart of our world an essential evil which required a vengeance without any hope of forgiveness…. We have been led to regard our own civilization as the worst, after our parents thought it the best. To be born after the Second World War was to be sure that one belonged to the very dregs of humanity, to an execrable milieu which, for centuries, in the name of a supposed spiritual adventure, had suffocated the totality of the globe.12
Poor Europeans! Poor whites! Powerless, persecuted, and penniless all over the globe, oppressed everywhere by the color line, subject to racist taunts, disproportionately imprisoned, harassed by police, their languages forbidden, their land stolen, stereotyped as lazy and criminal, their culture repressed, living in poverty because of their race, “’buked and scorned” because of nothing more than the white color of their skin! It turns out that Bruckner really does not mind “the white man’s sobs,” as long as those sobs are for himself. Anticipating the beleaguered tone of the U.S. right, presumably defending the ramparts of a threatened Western civilization, Bruckner conveniently forgets that the West has been overwhelmingly empowered in military, economic, cultural, political, and mediatic terms. It is as if Bruckner has lived the seismic shift and decolonization of culture as a trauma of personal and collective relativization, a mourning for a lost moral grandeur. But rather than offer a self-reflexive analysis of such feelings of loss, Bruckner recrowns the West and demeans the Rest, in what amounts to a return to the Eurocentric status quo ante.
Like U.S. rightists, Bruckner resuscitates colonialist nostrums as if they were courageous forays in truth telling. He resurrects the hoary canard that the West alone is capable of self-criticism and of “seeing itself through others’ eyes.”13 Bruckner proclaims Europe’s willingness to criticize itself, ironically, at the same time that he displays his own hypersensitivity to criticisms against the West. Bruckner makes this argument, curiously, shortly after demonstrating his own incapacity to see Europe through the eyes of its others, thus undermining his own claims about a unique European capacity for self-critique. The subtitle of Bruckner’s book—“The Third World, Culpability, and Self-Hatred”—reflects a psychologistic emphasis on the “imbecilic masochism” and needless feelings of guilt supposedly forced on white Westerners. The issue, ultimately, is not so much one of guilt over the West’s past and present actions—although guilt is on one level a perfectly normal reaction to the conjugated histories of anti-Semitism, slavery, and colonialism—but rather of lucidity and responsibility to make sure that such ills do not occur again and that their memory be preserved.
The dominant emotion among Third Worldists in the 1960s, whether in Paris or Rio or Berkeley, as Kristin Ross points out, was not guilt but anger:
Third-worldist discourse, far from being masochistic or self-hating in its attention to the unevenness and disequilibrium between rich and poor nations, was an aggressive new way of accusing the capitalist system—multinational firms, aid programs from the United States or Western Europe—the whole neo-imperialist apparatus, culminating in Vietnam. Third-worldists did not feel “personally” responsible for third-world misery, as Bruckner asserts; rather, they were actively pointing a finger at those—the military, state leaders, big business—who they thought indeed were responsible.14
Is Bruckner suggesting, Ross asks, that the United States did well to drop more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by the Allies during all of World War II or that the French empire in Vietnam and Algeria should have been maintained at all cost? Bruckner develops a hysterical discourse of victimization in defense of a West presumably on the verge of extermination yet in fact as dominant as ever, whether in its U.S. “bad cop” form (Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.) or its European “good cop” form.15
Metropolitan France in the postwar period underwent huge demographic changes as it absorbed former colonial subjects seeking jobs, education, or political asylum. The attractive “pull” of the postwar French prosperity, combined with the “push” of postindependence travails in North Africa itself, subsequently reinforced by new French laws facilitating family reunification, led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians in France, along with thousands of West Indian French people and sub-Saharan West Africans, came to form the country’s “visible minorities.” For a period in the 1970s and early 1980s, members of these minorities—and especially the second-generation children of the largely North African migrant workers displaced to the colonial metropole in the 1950s and 1960s—rose up in protest movements in favor of minority and immigrant rights. The high point was the 1983 March for Equality against Racism, dubbed by the media “Marche des Beurs,” modeled on the demonstration, two decades earlier, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in Washington. D.C. The activists of SOS Racisme and other antiracist organizations couched questions of identity in the assimilationist terms favored by the Socialist Party.
While Mitterrand in the early 1980s had endorsed a multiculturalism-light known as le droit à la différence (the right to difference), the left subsequently retreated from that project when confronted by the Lepenisation des esprits. The celebration of a difference-friendly France was cut short when the Socialists, practicing a nonstrategy of avoidance, took refuge in an abstract rhetoric of human rights and republicanism. The result was what some called a “neoracist consensus” shared by the far right and the center left. Azouz Begag is unsparing in his evaluation of this historical error: “The Left carries a heavy historical responsibility for this [neoracist consensus]…. It instrumentalized the question of the banlieues in its political struggle with the Right, stifling the Beurs’ desire for political emancipation by backing SOS Racisme, which, in 1985, snatched out of the hands of the young activists … the political momentum.”16 The return of the right wing to power in 1986 brought the harsh Pasqua laws and the televised debacle of the forced embarkation of 101 Malians onto a charter plane at Orly Airport. The socialist left became cautious, aware that while only a minority might actually vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, a much larger group sympathized with his xenophobic stance. In 1993, the code of nationality was changed so as to require a declaration on the part of children of immigrants, at eighteen years of age, of a desire to be French. The targets of the law denounced it as a way of stigmatizing the descendants of the earlier postcolonial migrants. A decade later, the 2002 election revealed a shockingly strong showing by the extreme right, with Le Pen in second place and the final victory going to the center-rightist Jacques Chirac. (Le Pen was scapegoated, as Žižek correctly points out, for taking the mask off a more general consensus racism.)17
The developing minority movement ran up against what David Blatt calls a “resurgent popular and political xenophobia” rooted in the struggles over decolonization, now reinforced by contemporary social and political developments.18 Post-colonial immigrants and their descendants became “a lightning rod for fears about worsening socio-economic conditions, the breakdown of public order in urban areas, and the erosion of national identity and culture.”19 Nativists such as Le Pen went so far as to call for forced repatriation of Maghrebians to North Africa. As the anti-immigration agenda of the National Front gained ground, a new generation of the immigrants’ children underwent what Begag identifies as a “three-phased disintegration, moving from indifference, to frustration, to la haine (hatred, rage).”20 It was in this context that a politically diverse spectrum of intellectuals, such as Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Pierre-André Taguieff, Régis Debray, and Alain Finkielkraut, while criticizing the racism of the far right, also expressed reservations about what they saw as the American “differentialist” approach to race.
In many cases, the left’s intention was to protect social solidarity and avoid what many in France saw as a fragmentation characteristic of U.S.-style pluralism. The left’s overreaction was in some ways the result of a consensus forged between mainstream political forces of the right and the left with the aim of marginalizing the National Front. As Jim Cohen explains,
According to the prevailing argument at the time, racism and xenophobia could only be combated in the name of a universal notion of citizenship, not in the name of any particular group interests, such as the interests of “minorities” (the very term became a no-no). Otherwise, it was said, two dire consequences would ensue: (1) the minority groups themselves … would be tempted to organize along “community” lines and thus contribute to the rise of “communautarisme,” another definite no-no; and (2) as a result of this (supposed) danger of particularistic expression by ethnic groups stigmatized by racists, the racists themselves would have a good pretext for accusing the dominant order of “favoring” the immigrants, while neglecting the “true” French people—and this would presumably result in a ballooning of the National Front’s share of the electoral vote. By occupying the terrain of national citizenship and by defining it as a non-racialist, non-particularist, universal form of collective belonging, the republican model was conceived as an arm of struggle against the far right.21
The attempt to marginalize Le Pen by appealing to republican ideals ultimately backfired. The National Front kidnapped the idea of “right to difference” to mean “yes, they are different, and let them preserve their difference back in their countries of origin.” As Herman Lebovics points out, Le Pen “cleverly transformed an appeal for a new democratic vision of pluralism into a formula for cultural and racial exclusion.”22
It was in this larger context that multicultural identity politics came to be seen as a pernicious American import. For much of the 1990s, a large swath of the French political spectrum denounced multiculturalism as a symptom of hysterical American identitarianism. Journalists spoke of “une Amérique qui fait peur” (a frightening America). The words “identity politics” and “multiculturalism” were mobilized to evoke all the problems associated with U.S. “race relations” that France presumably did not have and did not want. This united front led to bizarre alignments and strange bedfellows. Appealing to the same tropes of imminent “Balkanization” and “Lebanonization” deployed by the U.S. right, the French left, as incarnated in Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, and Libération, portrayed multiculturalism as inherently divisive. Some even linked the “cult of difference” to fascism, much as Rush Limbaugh spoke of “femiNazis” and totalitarian “thought-control.” Politically diverse figures converged in their rejection; Touraine, Bourdieu, Todorov, Jospin, Le Pen, Chirac, and Finkielkraut were not closely aligned politically, yet they all shared a common hostility to multiculturalism. For very complex reasons, the dominant French line was not so far from that of a Schlesinger in the United States, even though its historical sources and political drift were quite distinct, and even though the French critics sometimes had little else in common.
The language of the French left came to overlap, on a discursive/rhetorical level, with the U.S. right’s view of race and identity-based movements. The same left French intellectuals who would normally have denounced George H. W. Bush adopted a Bush-like stance toward “political correctness.” It was Bush Sr., after all, who weaponized the PC phrase—initially a self-mocking coinage of the left—against leftist campus movements. The right’s goal was to “bury the Vietnam Syndrome” and place all 1960s-derived egalitarian, Third Worldist, and anti-racist forms of activism on the defensive. But this context was often missed by the French left, even though France itself was undergoing its own parallel wave of conservative demonization of the ’68 legacy. Just as the U.S. campus left was absorbing (and transforming) the poststructuralist ideas of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, the French left portrayed the U.S. movements as rooted in essentialist notions of “identity.” Indeed, the paroxysm of this transatlantic short circuit came when the originally “leftist” (later centrist) newspaper Libération turned for an account of identity politics to none other than Dinesh D’Souza, the neoconservative whose book The End of Racism argues, to put it crudely, that slavery was not so bad (and anyway Africans did it too), that segregation was well intended, and that racial discrimination could be “rational.”23
The 1990s, then, brought a spate of French attacks on “American multiculturalism.” A special 1995 issue of Esprit was devoted to what was tellingly called the “spectre” of multiculturalism. The hostility at times became codified even in French dictionaries and encyclopedias. The entry on “multiculturalism” in the Dictionnaire des Politiques Culturelles contrasts U.S.-style multiculturalism, alleged to favor the mere “coexistence” of “separate cultures,” with French “interculturalism,” which stresses the process of exchange. (In fact, both terms have been used to emphasize exchange and interaction.) The Dictionnaire mentions blacks and women as constituent members of the coalition but elides such key groups as Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. It nonetheless adds to the list, in a tone of ridicule, the “handicapped, gays, criminals, non-smokers, and bicyclists.” This derisive kind of surreal enumeration has become a topos in both left (Žižek) and right (D’Souza) attacks on identity politics. In the wake of U.S. right-wing discourse, the entry emphasizes the putative penchant for euphemistic language (“vertically challenged” for “tall”) and repeats the (largely apocryphal) right-wing anecdotes about the supposed purging of bibliographies, the firing of “incorrect” professors, and hysterical sexual harassment suits.24 This caricatural portrait of a censorious multicultural left coincided, ironically, with a historical moment when it was the U.S. right that was censoring the left while busily reshaping governmental institutions in a procorporate and militaristic direction.
An essay by Tzvetan Todorov, “The Cult of Difference and the Sacralization of the Victim,” offers a similar caricature. A moderately progressive humanist thinker, Todorov too derided multiculturalism in terms redolent of those of the U.S. right, seeing it as symptomatic of a competition for victim status, as giving “special rights” to blacks, and so forth. Intoning some of the favorite tunes from the neoconservative songbook, Todorov asks readers if “they would like to be operated on by a doctor who got his diploma through Affirmative Action,” as if Affirmative Action had been designed to grant diplomas to the incompetent. Ignoring the centuries of corporeal abuse and aesthetic brainwashing that made whiteness normative and blackness undesirable, Todorov declares the slogan “black is beautiful” to be racist, since its political equivalent (“black is just”) would never be accepted. Approvingly citing black conservatives such as Shelby Steele, Todorov adopts a “reverse racism” argument that sees blacks as asking for special rights, since “the former victim is now supposed to be treated, not just like all the others, but better than all the others.”25 (A decade later, at a Columbia University conference, Todorov blamed the 2005 banlieue riots on the “dysfunctional sexuality of Muslim youths.”)26
In the 1990s in France, as in the United States and Brazil, animosity toward multicultural identity politics sometimes became linked to an animus toward the “excesses” of feminism. Sliding into the standard litany about the harassment of male professors due to trumped-up sexual harassment charges, Todorov complains that whereas “men and whites used to be privileged, now it is women and blacks.”27 What is it about male intellectuals (of diverse national origins), one wonders, that makes them hypersensitive to something as statistically rare as “trumped-up charges” of harassment even when sexual harassment is not the theme under discussion? What is seen as a paranoid obsession with sexual harassment sometimes gets linked in French antimulticultural discourse—at times even by declared feminists—to the stereotype of “puritanical” and “hysterical” Anglo-Saxon women,28 as when journalist Françoise Giroud repeatedly ridiculed American feminism as an antimale movement with castrating tendencies. Unlike American women, Giroud often declared, “French women love men.”29
A common deep-structural impulse fueled the hostility to both feminism and multicultural identity politics. Since they could not be denounced as “egalitarian”—given that “equality” forms part of the French creed—they were denounced as “identitarian,” “separatist,” and “communitarian.” Whereas American (and French) feminists saw patriarchy as appropriating the universal for the male gender, writers such as Mona Ozouf censured any appeal to gender as “identitaire.” Yet in the political sphere, France did adopt one identity-based policy, to wit, gender “parity” for female political candidates. The critics of parity, as Joan Wallach Scott suggests in her nuanced account, deployed cross-national comparison to denounce the new policy: “Parité was likened to American affirmative action—by definition a failed attempt to reverse discrimination…. The complex facts of the American experience were beside the point in these arguments: it was the image of America, riven by conflicting ethnic, religious, and racial communities, that served as the antithesis of the desired unity of France.”30 French sociologist Michel Wieviorka sums up the general attitude behind these arguments:
In France [the multicultural debate] is almost impossible, and it serves to reveal a deeply rooted political culture which brooks no opposition or discussion. The debate touches on a postulate which is seen as self-evident: [multiculturalism] supposedly constitutes a danger for democracy and for the national collectivity because it would consider recognizing cultural particularisms within institutions and within political life, where it could only have disastrous effects. These particularisms should not flourish outside of the public sphere, and any identitary or communitarian pressure within the public realm should be rejected, repressed, condemned…. The Republic is the best rampart against inter-community tensions, against violence, against political and cultural fragmentation and the destruction of democratic public space.31
Multiculturalism, in sum, became a “repoussoir,” an obscure object of projective hostility. The blanket rejection of multiculturalism conjugated an idealization of the homegrown republican model, on the one hand, and a caricature of an “alien” project on the other. The incantatory appeals to republicanism ended up having an intellectually repressive function. The caricature of an alien movement yielded narcissistic benefits by flattering French readers that they had avoided the absurd fanaticism of the United States. At the same time, the caricatures served to ward off fears of similar movements emerging in France. What Clarisse Fabre and Éric Fassin call (in their Liberté, Égalité, Sexualités) the “American scarecrow” was wielded as part of a demagogic rhetoric that contrasted a sensible universalist French republicanism with the out-of-control particularism of “political correctness.”32
But what cultural intertext, what historical unconscious, and what categories of perception molded this antagonism? What explains the specific forms of these anxieties about race, identity, and multiculturality? A number of factors were at work. First, there was the issue of language, arising from the relationship between two similar yet distinct political cultures, resulting in a problem of translation due to a partial mismatch of vocabularies. Many of the terms common to both French and U.S. discourse have similar connotations, but others are ideological faux amis. Whereas in the United States “Republicans” and “Democrats” refer to the two political parties, in France républicain refers to the République and its ideas of citizenship, while démocrate often refers to a society made up of “communities.” Indeed, the concept of multiculturalisme is sometimes translated as communautarisme (ethnic separatism or communitarianism), seen as a regrettable descent from the lofty abstraction of republican citizenship into basely embodied identities and communities. For many French intellectuals, communitarianisme is reminiscent externally of a fetishized German Volk and internally of those regional monarchist movements that threatened the early republic. Thus, French critics of multiculturalism warn against l’engrenage communautaire, roughly translatable as a dangerous downward spiral into communitarianism. Often linked to Islam, “communautarisme” in French suggests a threat to secular laïcité and thus tends to trigger a reflexive antipathy.
Even the same word can alter its meaning in a novel ideological environment. Whereas in the United States, “identity” and “difference” emerged as critical terms to evoke oppressed “minorities,” in French left discourse, “identity” and “identitarian” are just as likely to evoke anti-immigrant right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists, seen as specular reflections of the same impulse. Some French hostility therefore focuses on terms such as “identity politics,” “affirmative action,” and even “race,” seen as inappropriate foreign impositions. “Affirmative action” is often translated, in France, as discrimination positive, a translation that encodes hostility by framing the concept as a subset of the larger category “discrimination” and thus feeding into “reverse discrimination” arguments. “Race,” especially, is seen as injection of U.S. race obsessions into a presumably race-blind France. (And, indeed, “race relations” discourse does carry the unfortunate implication that objectively distinguishable “races” exist and interrelate, effectively eliding asymmetrical commonalities.)
Second, the anxiety is embedded in the long intertext of French commentary on the United States. Not unlike American commentators on France, French commentators on the United States often generalize about “America” without the benefit of any substantive knowledge. As Jean-Philippe Mathy explains, the French “rhetoric of America” serves local political purposes; judgments passed on the United States from France must be read as discourses about France.33 And while multiculturalism in the United States was seen both by its advocates and by its opponents as a challenge to Anglo-hegemony, in France, paradoxically, it was seen as incarnating that very same Anglo-hegemony. Socialist president Lionel Jospin, for example, publicly rejected what he called “the Anglo-Saxon model of the communities.” That “model,” it must be said, is very much a French-Latinist theoretical construct, since it has never been articulated as a model by intellectuals in the nations in question. In any case, the critics on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to share the Eurocentric and white-normative assumption that U.S. society has an inevitable Anglo-Saxon coloration.
Third, the hostility to “Anglo-Saxon differentialism” correlates with a common view of French society itself as at least in principle unified. Privileging national unity and uniformity over diversity, the constitutions of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Republics all portray France as a “Republic, one and indivisible,” with one legislative body, one centralized administration, and, implicitly, one (Jacobin) ideology. Any questioning of this foundational unity was traditionally seen as a form of complicity with the ancien régime or with external foes. Decentralizing federalizers were viewed, often correctly, as being in league with counterrevolutionary forces. The very precariousness of unity generated panic in the face of multiplicity, symptomatic of a need to overcome centrifugal dispersal through a vast central organization. The threat was of a loss of cohesion triggered by supposedly “inassimilable” differences. French national discourse, as Mathy points out, often lumps together those against whom the French had traditionally defined themselves: the Germans, the English, and, later, the Americans, in sum, the “Anglo-Saxons.”34 French antidifferentialism can thus be located within a specific history embracing both the internal Jacobin and the external assimilationist model by which non-French-speaking provincials, formerly colonized peoples, and noncolonized immigrants were all supposed to repress traces of their dialectal identities and assimilate to the langue of an elusive “Frenchness.” Any sense of hyphenated, conflictual, or polyphonic identity was excluded.
Fourth, the anxiety has had to do with the assumption that nations embody single political models. Herman Lebovics traces the exclusivist idea of one “true France” to a shared French universalism derived from a mélange of “Gallic Catholicism, absolutism, the Enlightenment and Jacobinism.”35 In France, as a result, right and left often argue over what should be the model for French identity and society, in contrast with an imagined single U.S. model, at once suspectly individualist—a brewing Hobbesian war of “each against each”—and as overly communitarian, premised on separate, ethnically defined groups rather than on the universal rights of citoyens. At the same time, French republicanism brings some undeniable social advantages. France has largely avoided, at least in the Hexagon itself, many of the problems characteristic of the U.S. polity. French constitutions, unlike the U.S. Constitution, have never even implicitly endorsed slavery or racism. There is no French equivalent to the “federal ratio” or to the Dred Scott decision nationalizing slavery or to the claim that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The anti-Semitic Vichy regime, revealingly, felt obliged to repudiate the republican triad of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” substituting instead “Work, Family, and Tradition.” Rather than a rigid orthodoxy, republicanism offers a broad matrix of debate. For some analysts, the real debate in France takes place within the republican model, between left-leaning and neoliberal versions of the model or between difference-friendly and difference-erasing models. There is nothing in the republican model itself that requires the prohibition of religious insignia in schools or that prohibits an effective multiculturality. The real problem, for Jim Cohen, occurs when a “dogmatic version” of normative republican discourse and the ideal of the universal equality is “hypostasized into a ‘truly-existing’ equality of opportunity.”36
Fifth, the anxiety has to do with the Jacobin view of the citoyen as blankly universal, somehow “beyond” and “above” race and gender. If the U.S. system is individualistic, the French system is both collective and atomistic, in that it sees the citizen as a substitutable monad interpellated only by the state and not by intermediaries such as “communities.” In the French republican equivalent of “color-blind” ideology, to speak of race is to besmirch republican ideals. A commonplace attitude contrasts the race-obsessed Germanic Volkish idea of the nation with the traditional French idea of the nation as a free association of consenting individuals adhering to a common political project reaffirmed by the “daily plebiscite” of national belonging. Le Penist racism and “separatist” multiculturalism, in this view, form twin subversions of republican unity. The precepts of the republican model as executed by a socially narrow elite, as Blatt puts it, serve to “legitimize and hide the exclusion of identity-based groups and complicate the tasks of minorities attempting to gain a role, either collectively or individually, in the political process.”37
Sixth, the anxiety has to do with a widespread rejection of “race” as shadowed by the memory of scientific racism and Vichyiste anti-Semitism. Acutely aware of the catastrophic results of Nazi race theory, progressive intellectuals hoped that eliminating the pernicious vocabulary of race might also eliminate the evils of racism. Any recognition of ethnic particularity is presumed to dilute the force of the transcendental principle of “equality before the law.”38 Yet denying the existence of race hardly diminishes the reality of racism. And French intellectual history is hardly raceless, since French thinkers played a role in three of the principal forms of racism to emerge in Europe: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and prejudice against people of color.39
Seventh, the anxiety has to do with the projection of cultural movements as separatist. In some French accounts (which mirror and sometimes draw on U.S. right-wing accounts), multicultural identity politics calls for a world in which societies should be divided up into autonomous communities. This caricature acts in tandem with a view of U.S. society itself as ethnically ghettoized. Although the United States is in some ways segregated (especially in residential terms), this pattern has not been actively designed by multiculturalists seeking racial ghettos but rather by longstanding discriminatory policies. While inaccurate, the charge of separatism helps us name the fear lurking behind the virtually consensus rejection of multiculturalism by established French intellectuals in the 1990s.
Eighth, another anxiety, among the literarily inclined, has to do with the critical interrogation of the “canon,” which goes against the grain of the traditional French investment (in all senses of that word) in high literary culture and the arts as “the canonical expressions of what the mission civilisatrice was all about.”40 Like the republic, the canon too was seen as threatened by particularism. What was missed was that the rethinking of the canon in the English-speaking world has also opened it up to Francophone and French writers of color, leading to a new wave of translations and the reshaping of French departments to include North African, West African, and French-Caribbean writers.
Finally, the anxieties are rooted in contemporary anxieties about a double sense of engulfment in the era of globalization. French nationhood, for some people, now seems challenged by infranational forces (Le Pen and the right wing), transnational forces (the European Union, a reconfigured NATO, U.S.-led globalization), and postnational forces (immigration from former colonies). The attack on the multicultural projects comes to allegorize vulnerable self-assertion and l’exception française, a way of saying that we French will deal with these challenges on our own terms. But alongside this legitimate aspiration to sovereignty lurks a malentendu that sees multiculturalism and globalization, as Mathy puts it, “as related manifestations of transnational capitalism, combined to undermine the national idea, the one from within and the other from without.”41
The project being denounced was in many cases not even the same object. For Bourdieu/Wacquant, multiculturalism was simply neoliberalism and imperialism by another name; for Alain Finkielkraut, in contrast, it was a new edition of May ’68 revolutionism. As a result of these superimposed anxieties, the transatlantic discussion, in the 1990s at least, came to have the air of a dialogue des sourds. The “static” of different grids, vocabularies, and prisms meant that much was “lost in translation” due to nonsynchronous repertoires of understanding. Many French intellectuals were conditioned by the “national cultural field” to hear “multiculturalism” as meaning “American,” “Anglo-Saxon,” “separatism,” “globalization,” and “threat to the republic,” while “identity” conjured up the image of French Le Penists or Muslim fundamentalists.
Culture and politics are not always “in sync.” Just as the antagonism to multicultural identity politics was at its height, France was also undergoing a thoroughgoing and irreversible process of multiculturalization, manifest especially in the arts and popular culture. In the ironically titled Paris Est Propre (Paris Is Clean), the Zairian painter Chéri Samba, in pop faux-naïf images, portrays the Third World workers who sweep the streets and pick up canine feces in front of the Trocadéro. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Paris was becoming a capital of African fashion, animated by figures such as the Malian Lamine Badian Kouyaté, the designer who created Xuly Bët with boutiques in Paris and New York, and Alphadi, creator of the Festival of African Fashion. The City of Light had also become the main global center for the diffusion of African and Arab “world” music, a major disseminator of raï music, Salif Keita, Cheb Khaled, Papa Wemba, Youssou N’Dour, Cesária Évora, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The names of popular bands such as Les Négresses Vertes, Mano Negra, and Raffik were redolent of Third World and Afro-diasporic culture. In 1998, the Académie Française gave its Grande Médaille de la Chanson to the rapper MC Solaar. The “beur” or “banlieue” films such as Bye-Bye and L’Hexagone, meanwhile, offered a triangular bouillabaisse of North African, French, and African American culture. Syncretism also took linguistic form in the verlan of the banlieue, which drew on Arabic, African languages, black American slang, and French gangster argot.
As a global phenomenon, hip-hop illustrates the transoceanic crossings of diasporic cultures. As an international lingua franca, rap is performed not only in French and Portuguese but also in Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Aymara, and Yoruba. The U.S. movement that began in the Bronx in the 1970s was energized by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation who mingled pop culture, high art, Caribbean, and Brazilian influences (capoeira). The French version too was simultaneously musical (rap), graphic (graffiti), and choreographic (break dance). Emerging into the public sphere in the early 1980s, hip-hop became the privileged mode of expression of what was variously called “la banlieue,” “la cité,” or “les quartiers sensibles.” Disseminated by DJs such as Sydney and Dee Nasty, hip-hop attracted thousands of fans from the immigrant neighborhoods, providing a cultural alternative to young people for whom neither official French culture nor the Maghrebian/sub-Saharan home culture of origin provided a comfortable fit.42
In France as elsewhere, rap turned social stigmata into a badge of honor. And like rappers in the United States and Brazil, French rap groups such as Assassin and La Rumeur have all denounced the police harassment of young men of color. The group Nique Ta Mère (literally, “Fuck Your Mother”—niquer being a loan word from Arabic), partially modeled on the gangster-rap group NWA, lambasted police brutality and racial profiling. Nique Ta Mere was denounced for cop-killing fantasies such as the 1993 “J’appuie sur la gâchette” (roughly “My Finger on the Trigger”). In July 2002, Sarkozy, then interior minister, pressed charges against the rapper Mohamed Bourokba (a.k.a. Hamé) from La Rumeur for slandering the national police. Both a commercial product and a vehicle of social desire, hip-hop also resonated in France because it offered an open, protean medium for treating social issues common to the Black Atlantic. For Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, rap culture flourishes especially in France and the United States, because both societies “are essentially founded on the idea of the universal combined with a culture of immigration and miscegenation.”43
French rappers do not merely “imitate” African American rappers, however; rather, they address partially analogous situations through distinct artistic forms, within the constantly mutating Afro-diasporic transtextuality of sampling and cut ’n’ mix. Rappers forged their own layered constellation of styles, combining U.S.-style hip-hop with African dance, Islamic majdoub, Japanese butoh, and French avant-garde elements. Styles have ranged from the gross provocations of Nique Ta Mère to the alexandrines of MC Solaar, an Afro-French admirer of Ronsard and Baudelaire. Signifying on Godard’s “children of Marx and Coca Cola,” Elsa Vigoureux calls rappers the “children of hip-hop and Derrida,” since they draw not only on Derrida but also on Deleuze, Said, Fanon, and Bourdieu.44 Just as Brazilian rappers constantly shout out to James Brown, French rappers often cite black American music, as when IAM samples Stevie Wonder’s “Past Time Paradise” to speak of slavery and the Middle Passage. While Brazil offers the soulful Phat Family, France gives us Fonky Family. While African American rappers point to a monumental Egypt as a locus of symbolic pride, and while Brazilian rappers affectionately invoke the homegrown spiritual Africana of Candomblé and Xango, French rappers carry a genetic link to Africa in that many are themselves of direct African descent—MC Solaar is from Chad, Hamed Daye from Mali, El Tunisiano (as his name implies) from Tunisia, and so forth. As practitioners of “polyglossia” (Bakhtin), some rappers shift from French to Wolof and Arabic and back.45
At times, French rappers perform a percussive version of what in an academic context would be called postcolonial critique. Perhaps inspired by Louis Sala-Molins, the rapper Fabe titled one of his songs “Code Noir.” MC Solaar, in the same vein, connects past colonial and present-day exploitation in “Les Colonies,” while Liste Noire (Blacklist) called their first album “Les Damnés de la Terre” (Wretched of the Earth) in honor of Fanon. La Brigade’s “Partir Ailleurs” reminds its audience of the role of Africans in French colonial armies. French rappers, like their counterparts in the United States and Brazil, also denounce racial profiling, corrupt politicians, and the lack of political representation, sometimes in a gendered and masculinist language.46 A rap by Monsieur R., provocatively entitled “FranSSe,” begins with a description of a state of institutional violence and moves to a call for violent opposition:
France is wearing us down
To the point that we don’t trust our neighbor
The laws are conceived to kill us off
With brothers behind bars and now
Our mission is to exterminate the ministers and the fascists
For today it’s useless to yell, it’s like talking to the wall
The only way to be heard
Is by burning cars …
France is a bitch and we got betrayed
It’s the system that makes us hate
And anger that makes us speak in a vulgar way
So we fuck France with our music
We mock their repression
And don’t care about the Republic
and its freedom of expression.
But the song ends with a call for political representation:
We have to change the laws so we can see
Arabs and blacks in the Elysées.
French hip-hoppers (like their Brazilian peers), in sum, identify not only with the percussive kineticism of black American music but also with the social drift of lyrics denouncing police brutality, racial profiling, media stereotypes, and political exclusion.47
Despite (the often legitimate) antagonism to the concept of race in France, everyday life in France is very much racialized. Despite different historical trajectories and despite a well-oiled welfare state that takes some of the edge off the pain of discrimination, French social problems partially resemble those of Brazil and the United States. In Brazil, the victims might be the poor mixed-race people from the favelas of City of God; in the United States, blacks and Latinos from the inner city of Do the Right Thing; and in France, the children of Maghrebian and sub-Saharan Africans from the banlieue of La Haine. Yet despite clear differences, the social situations bear a family resemblance. Accounts of certain aspects of everyday life in the inner cities, in the banlieues, and in the favelas, often seem more or less interchangeable. Here is Azouz Begag’s account of the daily lives of the marginalized children of immigrants in the banlieue:
The social damage arising from the confusion of personal success with financial gain goes far wider than the banlieues and youths of immigrant origin. The question of value at stake here could be summarized in the following terms: “If we take young people living in poverty who have seen their fathers exploited as cheap labor, then thrown onto the scrap heap of unemployment, who have no culture [sic], are completely depoliticized, are subjected to constant racism and are able to express themselves only through violence, how can we expect them to accept a temporary job for a thousand euros a month when they can earn that much in a day or two in the parallel economy?48
A social version of what linguists call a “commutation test” would show that with minor alterations—the substitution of “dollars” or “reais” for “euros” and “favela” or “inner city” for “banlieue”—this text could be describing the life of a clocker in a U.S. inner city or a falcão in a Brazilian favela. But in other ways, the dynamics and histories are distinct and partly untranslatable. Islamophobia and North African immigration, filtered through the bitter memory of the Algerian War, for example, play a greater role in French postwar history. Addressing anti-Muslim discrimination in France, critics speak of the “racialization of religion” and “the religionization of race.” Marine Le Pen of the Front National has compared Muslims praying in the French streets to the Nazi occupation of Paris. Practicing other-demonization as electoral strategy, Sarkozy has maintained a steady drumbeat of anti-Muslim rhetoric, declaring Islamic veils “unwelcome in France” and calling for debates about “national identity” and about “Islam in France.” His focus on the burqa neatly conjoins fears of the “Islamicization of France” with post-9/11 evocations of the Taliban, terrorism, and the oppression of women. It is often noted that in France it is worse to be North African than to be black. At the same time, the current wave of Islamophobia in the United States, and the hysteria about mosques, suggests that the United States is far from immune to the contagion.
The Atlantic world is not only Red, Black, and White; it is also Brown, in the sense of being Arab, Muslim, and even Moorish/Sephardic in terms of the Iberian roots of much of the Americas. Since 9/11 and the “War on Terror,” however, mingled strains of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia have become virulent in both France and the United States. Historically, Orientalism and Islamophobia are embedded in a long intertextual chain: crusading anti-Islamic tales, Orientalist narratives, anti-Semitic protocols, imperial adventure novels and films. The historical conjunctures and discursive genealogies, of course, display national nuances. Whereas France has defined itself against the Islamic world since the Battle of Poitiers in 732, the U.S. hostility to Arabs and Muslims begins a millennium later, with U.S. interventions against the Barbary pirates. U.S. Arab-hating also “borrows” from antecedent racisms exercised against Jews, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos. In the 20th century, preexisting prejudices became superimposed on geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.
Whatever its genealogies, Islamophobia is currently raging in France and the United States. In both countries, politicians exploit racialized divisions—“wedge issues” in the United States; “politique de clivage” in France—as a lever to gain power. A wide range of phenomena—acts of desecration, expulsion, violence, and even murder, alongside racist discourses and tropes—express and foster the resentment of the majority population. Azouz Begag inventories the discursive mechanisms of prejudice (many of which find counterparts in the United States): the rhetorical demonization of “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” as code for hostility toward Muslims; a discourse of false victimization on the part of the majority population that sees itself as “invaded” or even “occupied” by an alien force; the definition of Islam (like Judaism earlier) as a “problem”; the journalistic association of young men of color with crime and illegality; the monologization of “national identity” as a ploy to reassert a normative Frenchness; and the constant otherization of French citizens of North African background, born in France and distanced from North Africa yet told to “go back where you came from.”49 The attack on the veil, we would add, recycles the colonial doxa that positions white European men (and sometimes women) as protecting brown Muslim women from their brown overlords. Thus, French editorialists express hostility to Islamic dress such as the veil or the burqa, seen paradoxically as ostentatoire (showing off) and self-denying; Muslim women are condemned for calling attention to themselves by hiding, in a kind of visible invisibility. A culturally connoted choice of clothing engenders moral panics and irrational hatreds.
The American right, meanwhile, exhorts “real Americans” to “take back” the country, presumably from blacks, Latinos, and Arabs. As in France, politicians fan the flames of xenophobia for electoral purposes. Surges of hysteria about mosques and minarets are carefully orchestrated to coincide with electoral campaigns. Protestant pastors burn the Quran, while rightist politicians warn absurdly of the imminent imposition of Sharia law in the American heartland. Congressional committees, meanwhile, investigate the “radicalization” of Arab neighborhoods, regarded as breeding grounds for terrorism. A panoply of marginalizing rhetorics—exclusionary definitions of Americanness, racist taunts such as “cameljockey,” and the characterization of Islam as an “evil religion”—serve to otherize Arabs/Muslims. The crudeness of right-wing Islamophobia is encapsulated in Ann Coulter’s atavistic call for a new crusade—“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”—hardly an empty threat in the age of the Iraq and Afghan wars.50 Far from marginal, anti-Arabism and Islamophobia have moved to the center of the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party. An important difference separates the French and American versions of xenophobia, however. Unlike the American right, the French right does not hate the welfare state; it simply prefers not to share its benefits with immigrants of color.
Despite differentiated social systems, the complaints of people of color in France resemble those of their diasporic peers in the United States. They concern everyday humiliation, job discrimination, suspicious salespersons, racial profiling, and harassment by the “physiognomists” of the discothèques. According to a Sofres/Cran poll of 581 French blacks, 67 percent said that they had been victims of discrimination, 37 percent had experienced scornful or disrespectful behavior, 64 percent had suffered in public spaces and transport.51 Three quarters of those interviewed recognized the existence of discrimination in housing, and 65 percent recognized discrimination in employment.52 As in the United States, researchers use “testing” (the English word is used) by having blacks and whites apply for the same positions. The tests reveal a multistage discrimination: (1) initial lies to the applicant about the availability of the position, (2) extra demands made on people of color but not of whites, and (3) the stipulation of inferior conditions when the job is offered.53 (The television series Living in a Black Skin staged and illustrated these forms of discrimination.) The refusal to compile race-based statistics has the practical effect of making it difficult to assess the social well-being or material disadvantage of discriminated populations.
The media, meanwhile, are only beginning to offer a sociologically proportionate representation of people of color on television screens. As François Durpaire points out, it took one of the worst air disasters in history—the August 16, 2005, crash that led to the death of 152 Martinicans—for that demographic group to finally appear on French television.54 News anchors in France are rarely black or Maghrebian, and the dominant perspective relayed by the news reports is usually “Franco-Français.” (The situation on French cable television is significantly better.) Black faces on French television were more likely to be from U.S. television programs. The mediatic image of France, in short, does not resemble the France of the streets. Television fictions feature a few stars of color—Mouss Diouf, the policeman in Julie Lescaut, Jacques Martial in Navarro, Sonia Rolland in Léa Parker—but they are the exception. Actors of color in France, like their homologues in Brazil and the United States, point out that roles have to be designated “black” for them to be considered; white casting is the assumed default position. French people of color, again like their peers elsewhere, have formed organizations such as Collectif Égalité to protest discrimination and to organize boycotts and have created black magazines such as Amina (for African women), Cité Black, Miss Ébène, and Couleur Métisse (addressing hip-hop), and Pilibo (for West Indians), clear counterparts to Essence, Jet, and Ebony in the United States and to Raça in Brazil.55
Despite the inveterate racism of U.S. media, some French visitors have been struck by the visibility of minorities in the U.S media. According to Yazid and Yacine Sabeg, members of French ethnic minorities visiting the United States are often astounded “at the spectacle of the American street and the American media: one sees black journalists, lawyers, bankers, prime-time black and Asian anchors and reporters, members of the government, business leaders, high-grade military people, black and Asian Secretaries of State.”56 Azouz Begag offers a similar account of his late-1980s sojourn at Cornell as a visiting professor: “I was struck the most by what I saw on television. Journalists of every color under the sun held front-rank positions in prime-time slots…. And the more they were mixed by ethnicity and gender, the less attention you paid to their origins, and the more you listened to what they had to say and why they were there—the news!”57 This by now taken-for-granted multicolored representativeness constitutes in itself a form of empowerment in a mass-mediated age in which cultural power is certified by media visibility. At the same time, all that “color” does not make the dominant coverage more progressive or less procorporate. In fact, television political talk shows often privilege that social anomaly called the black conservative—some (such as Armstrong Williams) literally in the pay of the right and others serving as tokens for the Republican Party.
One social feature common to the United States, France, and Brazil is the constant police harassment of young men of color. In the United States, police (usually white) have killed hundreds of defenseless blacks and Latinos, often motivated by phantasmatic hallucinations of imaginary weapons, whereby a cell phone or a wallet, especially when in black hands, is perceived as a weapon.58 In Brazil, police and death squads (sometimes composed of off-duty police) have killed thousands of “marginals,” the vast majority black or of mixed race. In France, young children of immigrants are subject to the délit de faciès—the crime of having a certain kind of face. In other respects, of course, the situations are distinct. Stricter gun control in France, for example, makes the situation much less lethal than in Brazil and the United States. The long-term historical contexts are also different. In colonial-settler states such as Brazil and the United States, present-day discrimination emerges out of centuries of conquest and slavery, while in France, it morphs, at least in part, out of a colonialism that was “external.” At the same time, it reflects the historic residues of earlier discriminations both in the colonized Maghreb itself and in the dilapidated bidonvilles of France.
French philosopher Alain Badiou’s eloquent account of an incident involving his sixteen-year-old adopted son testifies to the kinds of harassment all too typical of the multiracial metropolises of the Black Atlantic. In an essay entitled “Daily Humiliation,” Badiou explains that his son had been arrested six times in eighteen months, for doing nothing at all except existing while black, and as a result was interrogated, insulted, and left handcuffed to a bench for hours on end, sometimes for a day or two. Badiou explains in detail one incident in which his son’s Turkish friend buys a bicycle only to discover that it had been stolen. Honorably, they decide to return the bicycle to its rightful owners, even though they would lose the money spent. Badiou describes what happened next:
It is at this point that a police car, brakes screeching, pulls up to the curb. Two of its occupants jump out and pounce on Gerard and Kemal, pinning them to the ground; they then cuff their hands behind their backs, and line them up against the wall. Insults and threats: “Idiots! Arseholes!” Our two heroes ask what they’ve done. “You know damn well. Turn around.” Still handcuffed, they are made to face the passersby in the street: “Everyone should see who you are and what you did.” A revival of the medieval pillory (they are exposed like this for half an hour) but with a novelty: it’s done prior to any judgment, prior to any accusation…. Handcuffed to a bench, kicked in the shins every time a policeman passes, insults, especially for Gerard: “Fat pig.” “Filth.” This goes on for an hour and a half without their knowing what they’re accused of…. At home, I await my son. Two and a half hours later the telephone rings: “Your son is being held in detention on probability of gang assault.”59
It turns out that Badiou’s son was misidentified by a school supervisor and that the police requested, and received, photos and school files of all the black students at his son’s school. Badiou concludes acerbically, “We get the riots we deserve. A state in which what is called public order is only a coupling of the protection of private wealth and dogs unleashed on children of working people and people of foreign origin is purely and simply despicable.”60
Since the postwar seismic shift, racial identifications have taken many twists and turns, as some minority communities have gradually come to be viewed as white, although never quite.61 While Jews have been racialized by anti-Semitic discourse, the U.S. Census has never offered a nonwhite slot for “Jews” or, for that matter, for “Arabs” or “Middle Easterners.” Jewish status in the United States has been ambiguous and floating in relation to normative notions of whiteness. The black-Jewish relationship, meanwhile, has mingled solidarity and tension. In the late 1960s, James Baldwin claimed that blacks identified with Jews because both groups shared a common history of oppression rooted in Christianity: “The crisis taking place in the word, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David but by the old, rugged cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”62 At the same time, Baldwin attributed anti-Semitism among blacks to mingled anger and envy toward Jews who had assimilated into the white mainstream. From the Jewish side, meanwhile, countless Jewish intellectuals declared their problack sympathies. Hannah Arendt, for example, declared, “As a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes, as for all oppressed or underprivileged peoples, for granted.”63
Many authors trace a certain solidarity between the two minorities back to Jewish and black participation in the U.S. Communist Party and in the labor movement in the 1930s and subsequently to Jewish support for Civil Rights in the 1960s, culminating, perhaps, in the moment when Martin Luther King, Jr., about to address the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, was greeted by one thousand rabbis singing “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew. In one narrative of the intercommunal relationship, this initial camaraderie was undercut beginning in the late 1960s by divergent attitudes toward community control of schools, Affirmative Action, Israel/Palestine, and so forth. During the 1980s, public controversies sometimes degenerated at their worst into black accusations of a supposed Jewish domination of the slave trade (e.g., by Leonard Jeffries) and Jewish allegations of black genetic inferiority (by Michael Levin). Overstated claims of unity and alliance in the past have sometimes given way to equally overstated claims of unalloyed hostility in the present. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meanwhile, was falsely portrayed as rooted in age-old enmities of two peoples entangled in a civilizational clash entailing an unbridgeable divide between Arab and Jew, or Muslim and Jew.
In our view, black-Jewish and Jewish-Muslim relations, as well as the interlinked issues of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and antiblack racism, must be framed within a longer perspective that stresses overlapping but also distinct histories over the longue durée. Often forgotten in the discussion is that some Jews are black and some blacks are Jewish and that while Jews are definitionally not Muslim, they can be Arabs.64 But even apart from these hybrid forms, the destinies of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and blacks have been interwoven for centuries. These linked trajectories and submerged analogies can be traced, as we have argued elsewhere, back to the events associated with the cataclysmic moment summed up in what might be called “the two 1492s,” when the conquest of the “new” world converged with the expulsion of Muslim and Jews from Spain. At that time, the ground for colonialist racism was prepared by the Inquisition’s limpieza de sangre, by the expulsion edicts against Jews and Muslims, by the Portuguese expansion into the west coast of Africa, and by the transatlantic slave trade. Spain in the 15th century provided a template for ethno-religious cleansing and the creation of other racial states. The crusades against Muslim “infidels” abroad coincided with anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe itself. Although the limpieza de sangre was formulated in religious terms—Jewishness and Muslimness could be “remedied” by conversion—the metaphor of purity of “blood” prepared the way for biological and scientific racism in subsequent centuries.
Christian demonology about Muslims and Jews thus set the tone for racialized colonialism, equipping the conquistadores with a ready-made conceptual apparatus to be extended to the Americas. Amerigo Vespucci’s travel accounts drew on the stock of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim imagery to characterize the indigenous peoples as infidels and devil worshipers.65 The conquest of the Indians in the West, for 16th-century Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, prolonged the struggle against the Muslim infidels in the East.66 The Hieronymite friars, for their part, referred to the inhabitants of Hispaniola as “Moors.”67 Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest, meanwhile, mingled the traits of African Moors and indigenous Americans. Within a transoceanic drifting of tropes, the frightening figure of the cannibal, first elaborated in relation to the Caribs and Tupi of the Americas, was transferred to Africans. A partial congruency ties the phantasmatic imagery projected onto both the internal non-Christian “enemy” and the external indigenous American and African “savage,” all portrayed as “blood drinkers,” “cannibals,” and “sorcerers.” West African orixas (such as Exu) and indigenous deities (for example, the Tupi deity Tupan), meanwhile, were diabolized to fit into a normatively Manichean Christian schema.
The Iberian wrestling with its legacy of “the Orient,” associated with Africa and the South, and “the Occident,” associated with Europe and the North, persisted in the Americas. In this version, the concept of “Orientalism” functioned as synonym for the negative view of the Moorish Muslim and Sephardic Jewish “Orientalization” of Iberia and consequently of its new territories in the Americas.68 In this expanding Atlantic space, the ritual legacy of the struggle between Christians and infidels, such as the equestrian combats between Spaniards and Moors, continued to be reenacted, for example, in Brazil in the form of Easter Sunday street festivals. “The Christians,” in the words of Gilberto Freyre, “were always victorious and the Moors routed and punished. And Easter Saturday ended or began with the effigy of Judas being carried through the streets and burned by the urchins in what was evidently a popular expression of religious hatred of the Catholic for the Jew.”69 Jews were viewed, in the words of Freyre, as the “secret agent of Orientalism.”70 Thus, before the contemporary Eurocentric erasure, as it were, of the hyphen in the “Judeo-Islamic” and the insertion of the hyphen in the “Judeo-Christian,” the “Jew” and “the Muslim,” or “the Sephardi” and “the Moor,” or “the Morisco” and “the converso” were articulated within the same conceptual space, as one allegorical unit. As a form of Iberian anxiety about its Arabization/Judaization, “Orientalism” was thus carried over to the Americas, where it participated in the shaping of emerging regional and national identities.
Yet, if Iberia witnessed centuries of an ideology that justified the cleansing of the “Orientalized” Moorish/Sephardic past, Latin America, as a complex site of global cultural encounters and of ambivalence toward the colonial metropole, has also witnessed a certain nostalgia for that “Oriental” past. The tropical imaginary has been partly shaped by what could be called “the Moorish unconscious” of Latin America, where denial and desire of that forgotten origin have coexisted simultaneously. The mundane pride of some families in their Moorish Morisco or Sephardi converso lineage has been expressed in popular tales and registered in the work of various writers. From José Martí’s exhortation “Seamos Moros!” to Carlos Fuentes’s celebration of Mexico’s “buried mirror,” the question of the Moor never stopped haunting the Latin American imaginary, even if only on the margins.71 In Freyre’s theorization of Brazilian identity, he gives great weight to the Moorish/Sephardic cultural history of Portugal as actively shaping Brazilian customs and practices. In the early colonial era, Brazilian people maintained Moorish/Sephardic traditions such as the covering of women attending church, the preference for sitting on rugs with legs crossed, and the use of Moorish architectural structures and artistic designs, including the glazed tiling, checkered window panes, and so forth.72 But the programmatic adoption of Occidental-European customs, institutionalized with Brazil’s independence in 1822, catalyzed a detachment from the Moorish/Sephardic heritage.73
Part of a shared cultural landscape, both Muslims and Jews were seen by Iberian and Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be extirpated from a putatively pure body politic. Although one can argue about the degree or the depth of the religious convivencia of Al-Andalus, clearly Muslims and Jews lived in a densely textured cultural intimacy, in which the more potent divide was not between Muslim and Jew but between Christians, on the one hand, and Muslims and Jews on the other.74 A swelling corpus has documented the long history of a cultural continuity and political alliance between Muslim and Jew.75 Key philosophical, literary, grammatical, and medical texts within Judaism were written in Arabic and in dialogue with Islamic writings, while Sephardi (and even some Ashkenazi) synagogues were built in the Moorish style. The Star of David hexagram (also known as the Seal of Solomon) adorned the façades of some mosques such as the Testour mosque in Tunisia, as well as Moroccan coins and the Moroccan flag. Muslims and Jews also revered some shared holy figures, such as Sidi Abu-Hasira, whose graves became sites of pilgrimages for both faiths.
Similar zones of Muslim-Jewish affinity, embedded within a larger Judeo-Islamic cultural geography, mark even the modern period. Although “Arab” and “Jew” have come to be seen as antonyms in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this dichotomy is of recent vintage. In Orientalist discourse, Arabs and Jews were seen not only as speaking similar Semitic languages but also as actively allied or as sharing similar origins. “The Jewish question,” as Gil Anidjar puts it, “has never been anything but the Arab question…. Islamophobia and Judeophobia have always been the two faces of the same and only question.”76 With the emancipation of the European Jew, the Orientalist figure of the single Jewish/Muslim Semite was split into two, in the form of the assimilated European Jew and the backward Muslim Arab, with the Arab-Jew occupying an ambivalent position between the two.77 Approaching the same question with regard to a later point in history, Domenico Losurdo points to the continuities between Judeophobia and Islamophobia. The same charges once advanced against Jews—tribalism, antimodernity, dual loyalty, the refusal to integrate—are now pressed against Arabs/Muslims. The diabolical figure of the Islamo-fascist terrorist has replaced the old Jewish-anarchist.78
Foundational to our approach is an engagement with the inherent relationality of the intra-European and the extra-European, thus rendering problematic the internal/external distinction itself. If Nazi exterminationism in one sense grew out of the millennial “internal” traditions of anti-Semitism, in another sense it grew out of “external” colonialism. The Shoah and colonialism were linked both metaphorically and metonymically, metaphorically comparable in their demonizations of internal and external “others” but also metonymically connected in historical and discursive terms. Hitler, as he began to frame the Final Solution, appealed to the precedent of colonial genocides. Already in a 1932 speech, Hitler hailed the Spanish Conquest of Central America and the British colonization of India as based on the absolute superiority of the white race. The large-scale murder of indigenous Americans, Tazmanians, and Armenians, for Hitler in Mein Kampf, showed that entire peoples could be exterminated with impunity, provided that the people in question were powerless and defined as beyond the pale of the human. Hitler himself cited the North American extermination of “red savages” as an example to be emulated. Around the turn of the century, German colonists themselves had virtually annihilated two southwest African peoples (the Herrero and the Nama) in what retroactively looks like a rehearsal for the later attempt to annihilate the Jews, along with the Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “pathological” bodies.
In this sense, both anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe and colonial annihilations outside of Europe could be seen as training sessions for Nazi genocide of the Jews. While the Holocaust, as the paradigm for exterminationist racism, has its own horrific specificity, it also exists on a historical continuum with other forms of colonial racism. Even Nazi experiments on Jews can be viewed on a continuum with the scientific racism that made the bodies of Africans and indigenous Americans available for experimentation and dissection. To see the Shoah and colonial slavery as completely unrelated, or as involved in a grotesque rivalry over the ethical capital of victimhood, or even worse to lapse into anti-Semitism or antiblack racism by dismissing the historical centrality of either, is not only to miss their inherent connectedness but also to downplay the significance of such affiliations as perceived by racialized intellectuals themselves. To place in relation different histories of victimization is not to rank them in an obscene hierarchy but rather to mutually illuminate them as partially analogous yet also distinct forms of racialized degradation. For Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism, the Holocaust constituted the “crowning barbarism” of a long history of massacres in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.79 Césaire conceptualized the Holocaust as a blowback or choc en retour of colonialist racism. Hannah Arendt, similarly, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, saw the formation of racist societies within imperialism as a key step toward racial exterminationism in Europe itself.80 Delinking the Shoah and colonial genocides downplays zones of historical affiliation and potential coalition and identification.
In the aftermath of the war and the Shoah, Jewish intellectuals played a boldly progressive role in both the United States and France, often becoming key contributors to the seismic shift. Jewish historians such as Herbert Aptheker, Lawrence Levine, Howard Zinn, and Stanley Elkins disinterred the buried histories of black resistance through sympathetic histories of slave revolts. Formed both by the Civil Rights struggle and the vibrant tradition of Jewish radicalism, many Jews became catalytic figures in the 1960s radical movements. Herbert Marcuse, I. F. Stone, George Mosse, Studs Terkel, Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman, Mark Rudd, Paul Wellstone, Bettina Aptheker, Michael Lerner, and Todd Gitlin became highly visible figures on the radical left. Indeed, Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Zillah Eisenstein, Seymour Hirsch, Joel Kovel, Amy Goodman, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Alissa Solomon, Tony Kushner, Naomi Klein, and so many others have formed an indispensible part of left and antiracist movements. (To even begin to list such figures risks implying an impossible comprehensiveness.)
In France, similarly, Jewish writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Henri Alleg, Léon Poliakov, Maxime Rodinson, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Benny Lévy were in the forefront of the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. The communist Alleg, a supporter of the Algerian anticolonial struggle, was imprisoned and tortured (including electroshock, waterboarding, and “truth drug” injections) by the French in Algeria. His 1958 book about the experience (La Question) provoked a firestorm of controversy. Another supporter of Algerian independence, the Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi, in Portrait du Colonisé, Précédé de Portrait du Colonisateur (1957) and L’Homme Dominé (1968), stressed the affinities among oppressed people, including Jews. In France, the mutually respectful structure of feeling between Jews and Muslims became evident in the reaction of prominent Jews to the police massacre of Algerians, on October 17, 1961. Representatives of the Jewish community expressed solidarity with the Algerian Muslim community on the basis of a common memory of oppression. A text largely written by Claude Lanzmann but signed by such figures as Laurent Schwartz and Pierre Vidal-Naquet denounced what might be called an anti-Arab pogrom:
If we do not react, we French will become the accomplices of the racist fury for which Paris has been the theatre and which bring us back to the darkest days of the Nazi occupation. We refuse to distinguish between the Algerians piled up in the Palais des Sports waiting to be “refoules,” and the Jews parked in Drancy before being deported…. The undersigned demand that all parties, unions and democratic organizations, not only demand the end of these terrible measures, but also manifest their solidarity with the Algerian workers by inviting their members to resist any renewal of such violence.81
French Jews and Maghrebian Arabs, in this case, were comrades in arms. But this was hardly the only case of such solidarities. In the post–World War II period, considerable testimony points to alliances within France between Jews and other stigmatized groups such as blacks and Arab/Muslims. Many of the Jewish participants in the May 1968 movement—notably Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar, Alain Krivine, Benny Lévy, Henri Weber, Serge July, Edgar Morin, Benjamin Stora, Ilan Halevi, and Sophie Bessis, to name just a few—developed a rhetoric of solidarity and alliance among the victims of racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. (Conversely, during Vichy, the Paris mosque protected Jews.)
At the same times, many black anticolonialist thinkers expressed an identification with Jews as peers in suffering. In a contemporary context where Jews and Arabs, and Jews and blacks, are often discussed as separate and even antonymical, it is useful to reread Fanon, writing in an earlier historical conjuncture when progressive thinkers often linked Jewish and black oppression. Fanon cites his West Indian philosophy professor as warning him, “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you…. An anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.”82 Fanon’s recollection of his professor’s words reverberates with the broader tradition of diasporic cross-cultural identifications found, for example, in the black allegorization of Jewish biblical stories of slavery, Exodus, and the Promised Land. It is this long historical durée that provides context for the following Fanon statement: “Since I was not satisfied to be racialized, by a lucky turn of fate I was humanized. I joined the Jew, my brother in misery.”83 Drawing parallels between the anti-Semite and the racist, Fanon recalls Sartre’s argument that the Jew is a creation of the anti-Semite’s fixating gaze. For Sartre, “it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew,” just as, for Fanon, it is the white who makes the black.84 The emotional life of both is “split in two” as they pursue “a dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects [them].”85 The attempts by the Jew, for Sartre, or by the black, for Fanon, to assimilate into an oppressive society lead only to the pathologies of self-hatred and inferiority.
Along with identification, “the Jew” and “the black” served as sites of comparative analysis of racism. Expanding Sartre’s dialectics of identity in Anti-Semite and Jew, Fanon delineates the distinct psychic mechanisms that emplot the Jew and the black within the racist imaginary. The assimilated black, unlike the assimilated (European) Jew, remains overdetermined by the visibility of the black body. The Jew is also “a white man…. He can sometimes pass unnoticed, … [while] I am not the slave of the idea others have of me, but of my appearance.”86 Significant distinctions separate anti-Semitic and antiblack imageries, then, precisely in terms of corporeality. “The Negro,” Fanon writes, symbolizes the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.87 While Jews are feared in their presumed “control over everything,” blacks are feared in their mythically “tremendous sexual powers.”88 Seen as possessing self-control and the power to control others in subtle, even invisible ways, the Jew functions as superego, while the black is projected as id, lacking in self-control, signaling immanent chaos. It is in this context that Fanon began to explore the differential overlappings, the Venn diagrams of racism.89 Comparing the violence toward Jews and blacks, Fanon writes,
No anti-Semite would conceive of … castrating the Jew. He is killed or sterilized…. The Jew is attacked in his religious identity, in his history, in his race, in his relations with his ancestors and with his posterity; when one sterilizes a Jew, one cuts off the source; every time that a Jew is persecuted, it is the whole race that is persecuted in his person. But it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked. It is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. It is as an actual being that he is a threat. The Jewish menace is replaced by the fear of the sexual potency of the Negro.90
Fanon’s comparative framework does not conflate the experiences of Jews and blacks, then, but places them in productive relationality.
Affinities in victimization, however, do not guarantee cross-communal identification and may even result in a rolling series of resentful transferences among the oppressed. While different forms of victimization should ideally illuminate each other mutually, they have too often come to overshadow each other.91 Fanon, in this sense, touched on the question of the black in the eyes of the Jew. He writes of Michel Salomon, “He is a Jew, he has a ‘millennial experience of anti-Semitism,’ and yet he is racist.”92 Fanon’s attention to a “racist Jew” in a period immediately following the Jewish Holocaust serves as a harbinger of the later fissures in the black-Jewish alliance. Fanon invites us to reflect on the parallel and distinct forms of interminority racism in comparison with that of “normal” white Christian racism. Fanon’s text anticipates the gradual entry—however tenuous and contradictory—of the Jew into the terrain of whiteness in the post–World War II era, especially in the United States. In Fanon’s text, one finds the seeds of whiteness studies—discussed in chapter 7—and specifically the study of the whitening of the Jew within the general imaginary and even within the social psyche of some Jews.
Although Fanon carved out spaces of black identity in relation to Jewishness and Arabness, and although he saw both anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism as an integral part of French colonial ideology, the question of Palestine and Israel is not present in his work. Yet Fanon’s life and text did not fully escape it. While Fanon was experimenting with new social-therapeutic methods in Tunisia, rival colleagues tried to have him dismissed by accusing him of being a Zionist undercover agent maltreating Arab patients on orders from Israel, an accusation dismissed outright by Ben Salah, then Tunisian minister of health.93 In the wake of the 1967 war, Fanon’s French widow, Josie, then living in Algeria, insisted that the publisher omit Sartre’s preface from the French reprint of The Wretched of the Earth because of his pro-Zionist position.94 Sartre and Beauvoir had been among the most vocal French leftists in support of Algerian self-determination. Their journal Les Temps Modernes offered a crucial platform for denouncing the rampant torture of Algerians and the daily violence generated by the colonial system. Those who supported an independent Algeria suffered retaliation in the form of blacklisting and terror; Sartre was declared “public enemy number one,” and on July 19, 1961, a bomb exploded at the entrance hall to his apartment.95 Yet, in the post-1967 era, many Arab critics found that Sartre had crossed over to the other side by signing a petition describing Israel as threatened by its Arab neighbors.96 The French writer Jean Genet, in contrast, supported the Palestinian cause, just as he supported the Black Panthers in the United States. Retrospectively, one might locate in this post-1967 moment the beginnings of a gradual shift away from the enthusiastic embrace of Israel by some French leftist intellectuals. It was also the moment when a number of Jewish intellectuals in the West, disturbed by Third World support for Palestine, began to move to the right.
It was largely in the wake of the 1967 war and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that the Jewish-black and Jewish–Third World alliance began to fray. Initially associated with the left, a number of Jewish-French figures—notably Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, and Alain Finkielkraut—and Jewish American figures—notably Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and David Horowitz—slowly moved away from solidarity with blacks, Arabs, and Third World causes. In France, some of these figures became associated with the nouveaux philosophes, while in the United States, those associated with the neocons moved even further to the right. An impassioned defense of the state of Israel slowly became knitted together with an anti–Third World “structure of feeling” (Williams). A kind of zero-sum rivalry surfaced within the public sphere, whereby attention paid to racism came to be seen not only as detracting from the fight against anti-Semitism but also, worse, as propagating anti-Semitism. Although simplistic equations between Zionism and Judaism at times stem from anti-Semitism, the response of these intellectuals was not to deconstruct the equation or to engage the dilemmas that Zionism poses to leftist Jews and even to certain Enlightenment principles but rather to forge a new (old) vanguard in defense of “the West.”
In a shift in qualifier and noun, a number of leftists evolved from being “Jewish radicals” to being “radical Jews.” The itinerary of Benny Lévy, the Egyptian-born leader of the radical “Proletarian Left” movement, condenses the rightward turn of some Jewish 1968 leftists in France. An intimate of Sartre, Lévy abandoned his revolutionary nom de guerre Pierre Victor in the mid-1970s as part of an odyssey from “Mao to Moses.”97 Lévy replaced the 1968 slogan “Under the paving stones, the beach” with the more Judaic “Under the cobblestones of politics, the beach of theology.” In 2000, he moved to Jerusalem, where he founded, together with Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, an institute dedicated to the work of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The trajectory of Albert Memmi also personifies a (more mild) turn to the right. The radical anticolonialist of The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) has become progressively more critical of the Arab/Muslim world. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi also voices anxiety about what he calls the “Trojan Horse” of Islamic immigration in Europe itself. He stigmatizes the banlieue youth as resentful “zombies” who adopt the insignia of the hip-hop subculture as a sign of revolt. Although Memmi remains resolutely secular, he also pathologizes and essentializes an “Arab mind” constructed as coherent and without contradiction.98
In retrospect, we can detect an anticipatory sign of the post-1968 turn to the right in Pascal Bruckner’s already discussed 1983 polemic The White Man’s Sobs, which intermittently links Jewish concerns with antagonism to Third Worldism. At times, and especially in the footnotes, one senses that for Bruckner, in the period following the “Zionism is racism” proposition in the United Nations, Israel and Jews are at the very kernel of the West; for him, a threat to one is a threat to the other, as we see in the hyperbolic language of the following very revealing sentence: “No one has the right to declare the West guilty for the sole reason that it exists, as if the West were an insult to creation, a cosmic catastrophe, a monstrosity to be wiped off the map of the world (and that is why the question of Israel is capital: through the non-recognition of Israel, it is the illegitimacy of the West which is really at stake).”99 Here Israel (and by implication Palestine) comes to allegorize the West/East relation generally. Bruckner thus relays a foundational Zionist trope, dating back to Herzl’s notion of “the state of the Jews” as an outpost of Western civilization, a Switzerland in the Middle East. But unlike a Herzl traumatized by the Dreyfus Affair, Bruckner, a century later, rhetorically transfers to the imperializing and often anti-Semitic West the moral authority bestowed by the historical legacy of Jewish pain in Europe. And here we find a contradiction between one of the central premises of Zionism—that is, that Jews need Israel as unique refuge from Western anti-Semitism—and the paradoxically pro-Western bias of Zionism itself, even though the movement’s founding assumption was that the experiment with Jewish safety and equality in Europe had failed, not that it had succeeded.
In hyperbolic language, Bruckner claims that the West’s enemies regard it as a “cosmic catastrophe” and a “monstrosity” to be “wiped off the map.” He thus associates Third Worldist intellectuals with the idiom of exterminationist anti-Semitism. Bruckner asserts a homology between the two issues: just as Israel’s enemy, the Arabs, are presented as wanting to wipe Israel off the Middle Eastern map, so Europe’s enemies are presented as wanting to erase the West off the world map. Bruckner here displays an astonishingly short historical memory. Writing only forty years after the Jewish Holocaust took place in Europe and only in Europe, and after the Vichy government sent thousands of Jews to the death camps, Bruckner portrays the West as innocent. Whereas Fanon mobilized the figure of the Jew to draw analogies and affinities between the various groups oppressed by Western racism, Buckner deploys the same figure to portray the West itself as oppressed. Israel, meanwhile, is for Bruckner the incarnation of Western modernity, while Arabs/Muslims reincarnate traditional anti-Semitism. While assuming the perspective that Zionism was a national liberation project for Jews, the representatives of the rightward turn do not engage the possibility that it was at the same time, within the fraught dialectics of “independence” and “nakba,” a national destruction project for Palestinians.
Bruckner transfers what in Israel has been termed the “siege syndrome” to the West as a whole, imaged as besieged by Third World barbarians yelping at the gates of Europe. Bruckner anticipates the rhetoric of North American neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle, who warn, in An End to Evil, of a new Holocaust, this time directed not at Jews but rather at the United States: “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or Holocaust.”100 The United States is viewed as the potential victim of an imminent Final Solution project—this time conducted by fanatical Arabs/Muslims—analogous to that which victimized Jews during the Shoah. The equation of Arabs/Muslims with Nazis has often served in Zionist discourse to justify the policies of the Israeli state, an equation updated and reconfigured by the post-9/11 neoconservative coinage “Islamo-fascism,” a term that tars a vast and variegated cultural-religious sphere with a totalitarian brush. In a period of anti-immigrant racism and ongoing battles over le voile in France, the nouveaux philosophes have been asserting the metanarrative of “the West.” The U.S. neoconservatives, meanwhile, have been forging a strong “Judeo-Christian” alliance, including with American Christian fundamentalists. (Here the “Judeo-Christian” hyphen not only asserts a strong Jewish-Christian alliance but also embeds a supersessionist Christian teleology implying a progression from the “Old Testament,” i.e., the Jewish Bible, to the “New Testament.”) Although anti-Semitism remains a serious and persistent problem, including among fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, an isomorphism here connects the right-wing Israeli and right-wing American self-portrait; a rhetoric of siege and encirclement depicts vastly militarily and geopolitically powerful nation-states as weak and vulnerable.
Bruckner continues this line of thought in his 1995 book The Temptation of Innocence.101 For Bruckner, the nearly universal condemnation (including by some Israelis) of concrete Israeli actions—settlements, “targeted assassinations,” and so forth—derives not from the actions themselves but rather from resentment against Jews for not conforming to the stereotype of the Jewish victim. What is missed in this pop-psychological diagnosis is that often the same kind of sensitivity to injustice that made some non-Jews sympathetic to Jews as a minority and to Israel as a project also motivates contemporary sympathy for the Palestinian victims of Israeli policies. In our view, anti-Israelism coincides with anti-Semitism only when the critic’s anticolonial passion applies uniquely to Israel or when the criticism becomes entangled with anti-Jewish pathologies and essentialist characterizations of Jews or Israelis in general, or equates Jews everywhere with Zionism and Israeli policies, or forgets that Israeli policies resemble those of settler-colonial states generally (with the difference that Jews, unlike the French in Algeria, had no metropole to which to return and did have an abiding cultural-religious-historical attachment to the Holy Land). Bruckner typifies the ideological mutation by which some Jewish thinkers—and we insist again on this “some”—moved from the antiracist left to the center right of the political spectrum, and to the far right in terms of Israel.102 The New Right thus came to participate in a discourse that frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as about anti-Semitism, thus placing all the weight of European anti-Semitism on the backs of Palestinians, who had no role in the Shoah, while ignoring issues of land, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and autonomy.
Like the neoconservatives in the United States, the nouveaux philosophes are former leftists who now despise everything evoked in the phrase “the 1960s.” In the discursive encounter between some pro-American French and Francophobic neocon American commentators, the analogy between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism has been pervasive, as if Americans had become, in symbolic terms at least, the new Jews. This conflation pervaded American right-wing commentary about France, seen as both anti-Semitic and anti-American in the wake of French resistance to the Iraq War. One has to “look to France,” wrote Charles Krauthammer in “Europe and Those People” in the Washington Post (April 26, 2002), to find “perennial anti-Semitism.” Although it is true that France, like Europe generally, had indeed been the site of a long history of anti-Semitic prejudice and violence, it is also true that France was also the first European country to emancipate the Jews, and many French Jews reached high positions of literary prestige (Marcel Proust), economic influence (the Rothschilds), and political power (Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, Simone Weil, Bernard Kouchner). Setting aside the barefaced anti-Semitism of Le Pen and the Holocaust negationism of Faurisson, most of the denunciations of French anti-Semitism centered on anti-Jewish attacks in France (some perpetrated by right-wing anti-Semites and others by resentful Maghrebian youth scapegoating French Jews for events in the Middle East). Violence against French Jews has usually been followed by strong denunciation by the authorities and often by massive popular protests, for example, in the case of the brutal torture and murder of a Ilan Halimi, a French Jew of Maghrebian origin. The anti-French stance of the neoconservatives also had do with the fact that France did not support the Iraq War and was critical of the Israeli occupation, an attitude taken as emblematic of anti-Semitism by American neoconservatives and by some from the French New Right.
The name Alain Finkielkraut has been a constant reference in the French discussions of multiculturalism, “identity politics,” and Zionism. A charismatic mediatic presence, praised by Sarkozy as a key public intellectual, Finkielkraut combats left antiracist identity politics in the name of a very French Enlightenment that emancipated the Jews and favored the universal over the particular. Over the years, he has become increasingly hostile to people of color and to anti-racist movements. Like his counterparts in the United States, Finkielkraut sets up a series of Jewish-over-black hierarchies, claiming that Jewish immigrants, unlike others, made it “on their own,” without the help of special remedial measures. Ignoring the very different circumstances of Jews emigrating from eastern Europe and of immigration from spaces colonized by France, Finkielkraut adopts a resentful discourse reminiscent of that of some “white ethnics” in the United States by proclaiming his own Jewish group a “model minority.” At the same time, in a French variation of the “Asian Americans as model minority” discourse—a way to subtly marginalize blacks as the “non-model minority”—he contrasts the peaceful hardworking Vietnamese immigrants with the rebellious North Africans. Unlike the others, blacks and Arabs are after “personal gain.”103
In Finkielkraut’s discourse, ethno-national narcissism goes hand in hand with the otherization of Arabs/Muslims and the endorsement of the mission civilisatrice. Finkielkraut expresses a Mandarin disgust for the way “they” speak French, “a French whose throat has been cut.” Finkielkraut has even complained that contemporary school curricula “no longer teach that the colonial project also sought to educate, to bring culture to the savages.”104 In a postrebellion (November 15, 2005) interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, later translated in Le Monde, Finkielkraut resorted to an anti-immigrant version of “love it or leave it!”: “They have a French ID card, so they are French. And if not, they have a right to leave…. No one’s keeping them here.”105 Forgetting that banlieue youth were deeply imbued with the civic values of French republicanism but excluded from its social benefits, Finkielkraut saw the 2005 banlieue rebellions as triggered not by police brutality, unemployment, or institutional racism but rather by the Muslim identity of young blacks and Arabs. The critics of “identity politics,” we see, can also deploy identity as an explanatory principle when it serves a culturalist argument against their adversaries.
Whereas Fanon discerned affinities between the victims of racism and the victims of anti-Semitism, Finkielkraut has increasingly come to equate antiracism both with racism and with anti-Semitism, usually in conjunction with a blinkered adoration of the United States as a supposedly victimized nation-state. Finkielkraut’s most dangerous idea, repeated ad nauseam in his books, is the absurd notion that antiracism is the new totalitarianism. Seduced by the elegance of his own paradoxes, Finkielkraut sees opposition to racism as the opposite of what it is and what it appears to be. Finkielkraut also sees the very idea of a “black people” as racist and anti-Semitic. Those who speak of a black nation, or of a “black people,” as he put it in an October 16, 2005, interview with Radio de la Communauté Juive (RCJ), “are creating a black Ku Klux Klan. And who is their principal enemy? It’s not the white, no, it’s the Jew who is both rival and model. It is the model of the exterminated Jewish people that constitutes the image of enslaved and colonized black people. A model which it tries to combat, discredit, to place out of the competition, in order to supplant it, to occupy its throne.”106 Where others might see historical affinities and affective solidarities, Finkielkraut sees a malicious plagiarism or mimetic usurpation of the Jewish narrative. Just as some Zionists accused Palestinian intellectuals of Jewish “narrative envy,” Finkielkraut laments that the Shoah now belongs to everyone: “La Shoah pour tous!” Refusing to put the “Shoah and slavery on the same level,” Finkielkraut goes so far as to deny that slavery was a crime against humanity. Rather than envision black history and activism in terms of cross-community dialogue, Finkielkraut sees it as encroaching on Jewish terrain in an ethnic turf war.
Parallel to Finkielkraut’s denial of the existence of a black people comes his denial of the existence of a Palestinian people. Melding Sartre’s “the anti-Semite creates the Jew” with Golda Meir’s “there is no Palestinian people,” Finkielkraut regards the Palestinians as merely an epiphenomenon of Israel. “Is there anything in Palestinian identity,” he asks in his book of dialogues with Peter Sloterdijk, “besides the refusal of Israel?”107 Finkielkraut has even claimed that blacks detest Israel because it is not a “pays métissé” (miscegenated country). Here Finkielkraut paints himself into a corner by denying something recognized, now even celebrated, by official Israeli discourse—that is, the multiculturality of Israel itself, with its people “gathered from the four corners of the earth,” a country whose phenotypical spectrum ranges from Russian blonds to Ethiopian blacks and which features a linguistic polyglossia embracing scores of languages both European and non-European (Arabic, Amharic, Farsi, Kurdish, and Turkish, among others). For millennia, Jews have been miscegenated and hyphenated almost by definition, with new Zelig-like mixings even in “the Jewish state.”
And what is the substantive content of Israel “Westernness,” and why would “Westernness” necessarily be positive (or negative)? Here we see that the idea of “the West,” a complex, contradictory, and partly imaginary concept like “the East,” can become a screen onto which very diverse desires are projected. In this sense, Finkielkraut occidentalizes Judaism. But can Judaism, rooted in the geography of the East, be defined simply as a Western religion? Are Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, and Turkish—all spoken by Jews—“Western” languages? How did Jews become part and parcel of a West seen as synonymous with tolerance, given the West’s well-documented history of the oppression of its perennial Jewish other? In demographic terms, is Israel’s majority population of Palestinian Arabs and Sephardi/Mizrahi/Arab Jews “Western”?108 Even Israel’s Ashkenazi Jews (the Ostjuden) came largely from the “East” of Europe. Israeli Westernism, then, is less a demographic/cultural fact than an ideological tropology. Arab Jews, that is, those from the Arab/Islamic world who are Jewish in religion and Arab in culture, complicate neat divisions between East and West. What is their relation, in the dominant imaginary, to the neo-Orientalist splitting of “bad Semite” (the Muslim Arab) and “good Semite” (the Westernized Jew)? A certain Ashkenazi-centrism surfaces in Finkielkraut’s derisive comments about the contemporary exaltation of hybridity and syncretism: “In fact, I have never heard anyone openly proclaim the hybridization of Jews and Arabs, even though that would be a logical consequence of the grammar of absolute mélange.”109 Finkielkraut’s evocation of what he sees as the purely hypothetical possibility of Arab-Jewish hybridization—presented as a “witty” reductio ad absurdum—gives voice to his Arab-versus-Jew Manicheanism. His formulation ignores a millennial history of hybridization between Jews and Arabs, whence the hyphenated existence of Arab-Jews, the long-term product of Judeo-Islamic syncretism. While naturalizing one “Judeo-Christian” hyphen, he declares the other “Judeo-Muslim” hyphen beyond the pale.
Finkielkraut’s defense of French universalism is directed against a specific political target: the anti-imperialist and antiracist left as potential allies of the Palestinians, North African immigrants, and the Global South. The enemy is not always named, however; it is sometimes evoked in villainized abstractions such as “differentialism,” “postmodernism,” “relativism,” and “communitarianism,” representing tendencies that in Finkielkraut’s eyes abandon the very category of “the universal.” (Here we see a partial convergence with the views of leftists such as Žižek, but without Žižek’s Marxism or his capricious embrace of Pauline Christianity.) Despite the ponderous elegance of Finkielkraut’s style and the weight of his cultural baggage, his arguments bear a family resemblance to those of the much cruder David Horowitz in the United States, although a different political spectrum positions Finkielkraut farther to the left than his U.S. peers.
A number of progressive French Jewish intellectuals have lamented the “neoconservatization” of some French Jews. French Jewish intellectuals are extremely diverse in ideological terms, and the debates are much too rich and complex to survey here; but we can provide a rough schema of the issues at stake. An obsessive defense of the state of Israel, in the view of these progressives, has led to a defensive, almost paranoid posture on the part of some French Jews. Jean Daniel, founder of the left-of-center Nouvel Observateur, argues in his La Prison Juive that French Jews have committed a kind of self-incarceration whereby they live in a ghetto of their own construction.110 Many draw parallels with neoconservatives in the United States, with the difference that neoconservatism is now filtered not through the American exceptionalism of “the New American Century” but rather through French republicanism.
Jean Birnbaum, in Les Maoccidents, writes that the French neoconservative “is not a Trotskyist who joins the elite but rather a Maoist who has lost his people, passing from the cult of the Red East to the defense of the West.”111 Birnbaum points to Gérard Bobillier, André Glucksmann, Guy Lardreau, and Jean-Claude Milner as political figures who moved from the extreme left of La Cause du Peuple and Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Mosaic Judaism and Zionism. The alliance with French conservatism was sealed when former Maoist André Glucksmann was granted the Legion of Honor by Sarkozy. Ivan Segré develops a similar thesis in La Réaction Philosémite, criticizing a number of intellectuals (Jewish and non-Jewish) for whom Islamophobia, Zionism, and a turn to the right go hand in hand.112 The total embrace of Zionism has led to the veritable excommunication of any Jews who dare to criticize the state of Israel: Edgar Morin (known for a half century of principled leftism) is accused of negationism, that is, Holocaust denial; Eyal Sivan, Israeli filmmaker, is accused of the same thing on the basis of his film (made with Michel Khleifi) Route 181; Stéphane Hessel, diplomat son of the Jewish German writer Franz Hessel (prototype for the “Jules” of Jules and Jim, model of the flâneur for Walter Benjamin, and a victim of Vichyiste anti-Semitism), is prosecuted by the tribunals of BNVAC (National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism) for having supported economic sanctions against Israel.
Guillaume Weill-Raynal, meanwhile, has denounced in a series of books, the ways that Zionist pressure and propaganda have made it virtually impossible to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict in a rational manner. He speaks of a “climate of McCarthyism” surrounding any criticism of Israel. Emphasizing disinformation, he criticizes public intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre-André Taguieff, who have created the phantasm of a “new anti-Semitism” in France. The idea of a Judeophobic France and Europe has spread around France, the United States, and Israel. In Une Haine Imaginaire: Contre-Enquête sur le Nouvel Anti-sémitisme, Weill-Raynal argues that figures such as Taguieff, Finkielkraut, and Jacques Tarnero, allied with media elites, have constructed an “imaginary hatred,” whereby the struggle against anti-Semitism has been “instrumentalized” as an arm of intimidation and disqualification.113 Those diasporic “more Israeli than the Israelis” Jews find anti-Semitism everywhere. In Les Nouveaux Désinformateurs, Weill-Raynal speaks of “an ensemble of procedures and precise mechanisms through which opinion is manipulated,” in this case through the “marketing” of Israel and the demonization of the Arabs, Muslims, and the pro-Palestinian left.114 The point of this manipulation is to cast in an anti-Semitic light even the most mild and indirect criticism of Israel. Within the “new anti-Semitism,” it is argued, Israel is being vilified, demonized, Nazified. For Weill-Raynal, these attitudes have led to the worst forms of racism and Islamophobia, resulting in a double standard: the mildest statements are taken to be anti-Jewish, a comment about Jews and commerce, a remark in the “some of my best friends” genre, if pronounced by a critic of Israel, is taken to be Hitlerian, while the pro-Israeli side can say the most outrageous things. Weill-Raynal cites numerous examples from the website of the UPJF, the Union of the Jewish Managers and Professionals of France: claims that there are “too many mosques in France,” that there is no “economic migration” from the Islamic countries but only a fourteen-hundred-year Caliphate conspiracy to take over Europe. The same kind of “verminization” of the other practiced against Jews in anti-Semitic Vichy newsreels is now recycled in the idea that Arabs/Muslims “breed like mice.” Instead of the conspiracy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” we have an emplotment of the “Elders of the Caliphate.”
The figure of the Jew has been mobilized in remarkably diverse ways by intellectuals in France. For Finkielkraut, the Jew is virtually consubstantial with the West, much as Israel was preimagined by Zionism as a Jewish Switzerland. Jews in this discourse become a metonym for Europe, the threatened part representing the Western whole. For the Tunisian French writer Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, meanwhile, the figure of the Jew is the paradigmatic example of historical victimization. Some people might object that this equation positions Jewish people, à la Sartre, as lacking any history or identity apart from anti-Semitism, but that is not really Kacem’s point. The Jew, for Kacem, has become the emblematic figure of alterity through which to think all oppressions. Those who protest racism constantly invoke the Jewish analogy as a kind of “gold standard” for prejudice : “Would you say that about a Jew?” The question itself recognizes that anti-Semitism bears a historical-existential kernel that makes it analogous to other racisms. Historical conditions, Kacem argues, have laid down a “just and salutary taboo against anti-Semitism,” since the Shoah represented the only time that the West came close to fulfilling “its morbid fantasy of exterminating the other.” At the same time, Kacem warns against the “instrumentalization of anti-anti-Semitism” as part of the constitution of new “second-zone” racisms. For Kacem, Auschwitz concerns all of humanity; it is not an ethical capital to be exploited in a victimological competition. “Never again,” for Kacem, cannot mean “never again” only for Jews; it must mean “never again” for everyone.115
If for Kacem the Jew forms the very paradigm of irreducible alterity, for the Moroccan American Anouar Majid, in We Are All Moors, it is the Moor who becomes emblematic of exclusion, but a Moor who is very connected to the Jew, a Moor who might actually be a Jew. If for the 1968 supporters of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands,” for Majid, “nous sommes tous des Maures.” Writing in the wake of Victor Frankel, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Gil Anidjar, Majid sees the Nazi nomination of the most helpless and abject Jews as Muselmänner (Muslims) as historically overdetermined by the intertwined status of the two groups as the expellable others of European purity. Through a process of crisscrossing analogy, Jews and Muslims have sometimes occupied the place of the other, and at times identified with one another. The dichotomous discourse generated by the Israel/Palestine conflict, unfortunately, has too often conspired to drown out the voices of analogy, identification, and affiliation. In Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East, Christopher Wise suggests that Jacques Derrida at times envisions the Messianic Jew as the appropriate figure for all non-European people, including African Muslims. Wise points out both the major limitation of Derrida’s thinking on these issues—his failure ever to challenge Zionism—and the advantages offered by a deconstruction that could be amplified and opened up to be more inclusive than its articulation in Derrida’s own writing.116
Like progressive Jewish intellectuals in the United States, many French Jewish intellectuals have taken nuanced positions combining condemnation of racism and anti-Semitism, criticism of Zionism and of Israeli policies, and solidarity with racialized minorities in France. While deploring the anti-Semitism both of Le Pen and of some Muslim/Arab militants, Joëlle Marelli writes that “Jews have shared with non-European peoples and particularly with colonized peoples, the fate of being considered as belonging to a specific ‘race’ seen as inferior to the white European race.”117 Although anti-Semitism has a specific history, those specificities exist on a continuum with other forms of racism. Figures such as Bruckner, in Marelli’s view, isolate anti-Semitism from other racisms, resulting in a hierarchy that delegitimizes other antiracist struggles. In contrast to the rightward turn of the nouveaux philosophes, French Jewish intellectuals such as Henri Alleg, Alice Cherki, Maxime Rodinson, Benjamin Stora, Edgar Morin, Eric Hazan, Joëlle Marelli, Ilan Halevi, Emmanuelle Saada, Simone Bitton, Eyal Sivan, and Sophie Bessis do not see Jews as consubstantial with the West but rather as allied on some levels with the West’s internal and external others. The identification, to put it in “figural” terms, is with Jews as the slaves in Egypt and not, as with the neoconservative Pentagonites, with the modern “Pharaohs.” Since the 1980s, Jewish-black and Jewish-Muslim collaboration has persisted through such groups as Perspectives Judeo-Arabes, the Black Jewish Friendship Committee, and Les Indigènes de la République, which have given concrete political expression to this coalitionary impulse.118
Jews have been an integral part of the leftist coalition and indispensible contributors to the left antiracist intellectual corpus. A long tradition of Jewish activism has supported revolutionary causes, and countless radical thinkers have fought for justice and equality, although they have not necessarily spoken as Jews. The American group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), for its part, has offered robust solidarity with people of color, while working on the grassroots level against discrimination, racial profiling, police harassment, and so forth. Such activists, acknowledging both Jewish advantages via whiteness and the Ashkenazi dimension of their Jewishness, also resuscitate the progressive history associated with the New York Yiddishkeit that faded with postwar embourgeoisement and the post-1967 turn to Zionism. As signified by the slogan “Not in Our Name,” these leftists refuse the idea that the dominant Zionist organizations speak for all Jews. JFREJ calls attention to the hybrid spaces of Jewishness of those of mixed backgrounds, as well as to the sexual diversity of the Jewish community. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, founded by Deborah Kaufman and Janis Plotkin, meanwhile has shown what can be done on the cultural front; the festival began in the 1980s to encourage a filmic dialogue not only between Jews and non-Jews but also between Jews and Muslims/Arabs and between Israelis and Palestinians.
Many Jewish intellectuals are finding new ways to formulate diasporic Jewishness, delinking it from Zionism. In Destins Marranes, Daniel Lindenberg argues that the Marranism provoked by the Spanish Inquisition, resulting in the philosophy of heroes of reason such as Baruch Spinoza, furnished the matrix not only for Jewish emancipation but for European emancipation generally.119 In Figures d’Israël: L’identité Juive entre Marranisme et Sionisme (1648–1998), Lindenberg speaks of the “Marranism” of Menasse Ben Israel, Sabbatai Tsvi, and Spinoza as alternatives to nationalist mythologies.120 In The Jew and the Other, Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias explore the long tradition of openness to the other in many of the earliest strands of Jewish thought.121 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, for her part, speaks of “radical Diasporism” as an answer to Zionism: “Where Zionism says go home, Diasporism says we make home where we are. The word Zionism refers uniquely to Jews; Diasporism deliberately includes the variety of diasporic experience…. Diasporism is committed to an endless paradoxical dance between cultural integrity and multicultural complexities.”122 This social and cultural activism has challenged hegemonic definitions of Jewishness, opening Jewishness up to gay and lesbian Jews and to Arab Jews, all in collaboration with multicultural, critical race, and whiteness scholars. Kaye/Kantrowitz’s book The Colors of the Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism and anthologies such as Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon’s Wrestling with Zion and Adam Shatz’s Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel have charted alternative paths for Jewish leftists.123
Although we have been critical of the positions of some French intellectuals on issues of race and coloniality, it is worth recalling the achievements of French and Francophone intellectuals, as well as the many features of French social system—universal health care, virtually free education, worker benefits—that meliorate the situation of all citizens, regardless of color. Despite political corruption and Enarchist elitism, a relatively well-lubricated welfare state does make life less anxious and more egalitarian than in the United States. Unlike George W. Bush’s “ownership society” that left the largely black victims of Hurricane Katrina “on their own,” the French social system offers a much more secure safety net for the entire population. The collective life, as a result, is less Social Darwinist and in some ways more equal, although this rough equality has not yet reached the virtually all-white political class in France (including the Socialist Party). Nonetheless, the 2005 banlieue rebellions demonstrate that the welfare state is simply not sufficient. Although French police do not kill people of color at anything like the rate that applies in the United States or, even more, in Brazil, scores of young men of color have been killed by French police. Playing with the resonances of the word banlieue, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem calls the banlieue the “place of the banned of the republic,” recalling Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, the dead man outside of the law yet caught up in the mechanism that bans him, perpetually in relation with the power that bans. Kacem links the word “banned” to “ban-dits,” the half-human, half-animal “scum” (racaille) denounced by Sarkozy. For the first time since the war in Algeria, Kacem points out, we find “states of exception,” ethnically defined curfews, and the “Palestinization” of the banlieue, generating a kind of “Euro-intifada.” Kacem expects little from a French Parliament that is male, white, bourgeois, and heterosexual and “has not represented anyone for a long time.”124
The Bourdieu/Wacquant screed against multiculturalism was published, ironically, just as French public debate was on the cusp of a massive discursive shift. In the first decade of the 21st century, many people on the left moved from a broad rejection of race-conscious critique and postcolonialism toward a partial embrace of both projects. Clarisse Fabre and Éric Fassin, in their book Liberté, Égalité, Sexualités, point to an ironic trajectory, in France, from a position that “the culture wars in the United States have absolutely nothing to do with us” to a position that “they have everything to do with us.” A 2000 book by Fred Constant, titled simply Le Multiculturalisme, offers evidence of this shift. The French model, Constant asserts, privileges unity against diversity, while the Anglo-American model constructs unity through diversity. But Constant rejects a reified dichotomy between pluralism and assimilationism that would make the models seem more opposed than they really are: “In France, not only has the State always been the agent for the definition and structuration of identities, but also the republican model has accommodated identitary groups and communities much more than is generally admitted.”125 In a generally unacknowledged convergence, “pragmatism tends to triumph over the rigidity of abstract models and the purity of ideal types.”126
Given the new respectability of diversity arguments, some on the French right are now less preoccupied with American multiculturalism than with French multiculturalism. The January–March 2005 issue of the conservative French journal Géopolitique on the theme of “le politiquement correct” offers a striking exemplum of this trend. In an idiom redolent of the U.S. right, the issue associates PC with censorship, feminism, totalitarianism, anti-Christianity, and, paradoxically, both moral relativism and moral rigidity. But now, as French conservative Paul Thibaut asserts in his essay “Exception Française!,” these feared trends have reached French shores. In the 1990s, he recalls, French intellectuals had seen multiculturalism and political correctness as typically bizarre products of American idiosyncrasies. Thus, “American Puritanism” could explain “the aggressivity of feminism,” the absence of an aristocratic tradition could explain the populist critique of the canon, and so forth.127
This falsely reassuring discourse, for Thibaut, implied that “none of this nonsense would ever come to France.” Yet it is now France, he laments, that has introduced gender parity in politics, has flirted with quotas and “positive discrimination,” and has framed laws against Holocaust denial and racism. While the United States has “survived” political correctness—thanks to what Thibaut sees as the “far-seeing policies of George W. Bush” and the brilliant analyses of Allan Bloom—France has revealed itself to be even more vulnerable to “the multicultural epidemic” than the United States itself. Like Ronald Reagan speaking of a paradisal time “back when we didn’t have a race problem,” Thibaut conjures up an idyllically unified prelapsarian France subsequently fractured by identity politics. The situation has become so extreme, he complains, that people now feel free to denounce Christianity while regarding Islam as sacrosanct. While political correctness was “marginal in the U.S.,” he notes, “it is not at all marginal in France.”128 In a remarkable turnabout, multiculturalism, once derided as an “American thing,” has now become, at least in the mind of this French rightist, a thoroughly “French thing.”