IT IS IN FRANCE, one of the key sites of Enlightenment thinking, that the contemporary debates are most explicitly seen as continuous with early debates around Les Lumières and the Revolution. Both the popular media and high-profile public intellectuals portray the conflict as one between universal secular Enlightenment and religious and communitarian particularism. As we saw earlier, the dominant line in French intellectual life during much of the 1990s was antagonistic to discourses of critical race, identity politics, and multiculturalism. Until recently, postcolonial theory too formed a structuring absence in the dominant French discourse. This absence contrasted not only with the Anglo-American academic world but also with other parts of Europe (the Netherlands. Germany, Scandinavia) and with many parts of Asia and Africa, all sites where postcolonial studies have been a significant presence for decades. In France, the word “postcolonial” functioned largely as a chronological marker, a synonym for postindependence rather than as an index of a discourse or field of inquiry.1 For complex reasons, many French intellectuals ignored at best, and maligned at worst, a constellation of interrelated projects such as postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies. There was a manifest hostility to what were perceived as Anglo-American currents in general, whether in the form of multi-culturalism (associated with the “Anglo-Saxons”) or cultural studies (associated initially with the United Kingdom and later with the United States) or postcolonial theory (associated with the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and the Anglophone zone generally). Thus, the debates have taken on national-allegorical overtones, in terms of both how French intellectuals imagined their own role and how they imagined the role of intellectuals from other nations.
There was in France a postcolonial terrain, however, occupied not by postcolonial studies but rather by work within the traditional disciplines. Whereas post-colonial studies in the Anglophone world was initially the product of scholars in English and comparative literature and the humanities generally, what one might call “proto-postcolonialist” studies in France was dominated by anthropologists and historians. Already in 1971, anthropologist Georges Balandier, for example, anticipated Homi Bhabha’s notions of “sly civility” as a coping mechanism within colonialism by speaking of “collective reactions that could be called clandestine or indirect” or of “calculated manifestations of passivity” as subtle ways of undermining colonial domination.2
This chapter charts a new situation where the old antagonisms persist but when new voices and discourses also emerge. In the late 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century, we witness a major engagement with what has variously been called “postcolonial theory,” “postcolonial critique,” and “postcolonial studies.” Numerous conferences and special issues of journals such as Esprit, Labyrinthe, Rue Descartes, and Mouvements treat “the colonial fracture,” “the sequels of colonialism,” and “the wars of colonial memory.” Many of the recent publications thematize the historical delay itself through a quasi-ritualistic acknowledgment of the French hesitation in joining the postcolonial trend. To take just one of many examples, Dino Costantini’s The Civilizing Mission: The Role of Colonial History in the Construction of French Political Identity begins by acknowledging a gap between France and the Anglophone countries. In the latter, “the fact that colonial history forms a constitutive part of a common Western identity has been recognized for decades,” while France has only recently begun to “interrogate the theoretical and practical consequences of the centuries of colonial engagements and the way they have fashioned France’s political identity up to the present.”3
A number of poignant ironies hover around the initial reluctance of French intellectuals to embrace postcolonial studies. The first and most obvious is that postcolonial studies itself has been very much shaped by Francophone anticolonial discourse. Many key problematics within postcolonial critique trace back to Francophone intellectuals such as Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Memmi, and Anouar Abdel-Malek. The chapter titled “The Pitfalls of Nationalism” in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, for example, anticipated the postnationalist aspect of post-colonial theory, while Abdel-Malek’s critique of Oriental studies in the 1960s foreshadowed Said’s classic Orientalism. The second irony is that “French Theory,” as Robert Young pointed out in White Mythologies, was shaped by the colonial situation and by the fact that many of the leading theoreticians (Derrida, Althusser, Lyotard, Cixous) were linked to North Africa. The third irony is that French poststructuralism has had widely acknowledged impact on leading post-colonial thinkers—one thinks of Foucault’s influence on Said, Derrida’s on Spivak, Lacan’s on Bhabha—and on the postcolonial field in general, manifested in myriad references not only to Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan but also to Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Cixous, Lyotard, and Certeau. (This poststructuralist aspect of postcolonial theory is all the more striking given the fact that the leading poststructuralist thinkers themselves rarely engaged in any systematic way with anticolonialist texts.) It thus seems surprising that the “French Theory” aspect of postcolonial studies has had so little resonance in France.4 In another sense, however, it is not surprising at all, since “French Theory” was often seen in France as a transatlantic invention.5 Despite the French theoretical sources of the various “post-” movements, they generated little enthusiasm in France, partly because they came to be seen as themselves Anglo-American. Yet in another perspective, poststructuralism itself absorbed while reconfiguring some of the themes of anticolonial discourse, for example, its undermining of Europe’s claim to being the “exclusive culture of reference.”
A fourth irony about the aversion to postcolonial theory revolves around the fact that France in the 1960s and early 1970s had been the epicenter of “Third Worldism,” precisely the tradition that postcolonialism was both embedding and superseding. With the postwar dismembering of the French empire, colonialism and decolonization were necessarily at the core of many polemics, even if only by implication. Indeed, much of the French contribution to the seismic shift stems from these early battles, as Third Worldist writers such as the Martinicans Césaire and Fanon, alongside African writers such as Amílcar Cabral, Cheikh Diop, and Mongo Beti and radical African American expatriates such as Richard Wright or Arab/Maghrebian/Francophone writers such as Albert Memmi, Gisèle Halimi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Mohammed Harbi, and Assia Djebar found Hexagonal allies in figures such as Edgar Morin, Maxime Rodinson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Alleg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, François Maspero, Yves Bénot, and Francis Jeanson.
A fifth irony about the antagonism to postcolonial theory involves the slighting of a specifically French intertext, first the French tradition of thematic analyses of the colonial novel and of literary exoticism (for example Martine Astier-Loufti’s Littérature et Colonialisme and Martine Mathieu’s Le Roman Colonial) and second the highly politicized literary theories of Lukács, Goldmann, Althusser, Macheray, and Barthes and the work of journals such as Tel Quel (post-’68), Cahiers du Cinéma, and Cinétique. In the 1960s and early 1970s, French intellectuals were in the vanguard of “ideological” and “symptomatic” readings of literary, mediatic, and cultural “texts,” a style of reading anticipatory of postcolonial-style analyses exploring the “fissures” and “structuring absences” both of the texts themselves (slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park) and of the exegeses of such texts (the blindness to colonialism in New Critical analyses of Heart of Darkness).
A sixth irony about the antagonism to postcolonialism is that contemporary France, as a product of colonial karma, is itself a postcolonial nation in demographic, political, and cultural terms. This postcolonial legacy becomes evident in an endless chain of events with racial, colonial, or anti-Semitic overtones, events thoroughly mulled over by the press and the media: the national euphoria over the black-blanc-beur World Cup soccer victory in 1998 (contrasting with the scapegoating of the players of color after the 2010 defeat), the “scandal” of the children of Maghrebian immigrants booing the Marseillaise at soccer games, the diverse outbreaks of anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim violence (such as desecrations of Jewish or Muslim cemeteries), the accusations against Le Pen about torturing Algerians during the so-called Battle of Algiers, and the scandalous memoirs by key military figures such as Massu and Aussaresses. The tensions also manifested themselves in the ideological litigiousness of lawsuits accusing prominent pro-Palestinian intellectuals, whether French Jewish (Edgar Morin) or Israeli French (Eyal Sivan) of anti-Semitism and Holocaust negationism. On the other side, lawsuits were addressed to historians such as Olivier-Pétré Grenouilleau accused of slavery negationism. (The word negationisme represents a metonymic slide from the Shoah to slavery, symptomatic of the fraying of the black-Jewish postwar alliance and what some French intellectuals deride as “the competition of victims.”)
Playing an active role in these debates, French president Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated that colonialist/racist discourse was alive and well in his speech in Dakar on July 26, 2007. Sarkozy deployed the kind of rhetoric denounced over half a century earlier by Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism:
The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not sufficiently entered history. The African peasant who has lived with the seasons for millennia, whose life ideal is to be in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal recurrence of a time set to an endless rhythm of repetition of the same gestures and the same words. Within this imaginary where everything constantly begins again, there is no place for the human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe where nature controls everything, man escapes the anxiety of history which torments modern man, but man stays immobile in the middle of an unchanging order where everything seems decreed in advance. The African has not sufficiently entered History…. The African peasant lives the rhythm of the seasons.6
Sarkozy’s speech simply recycled a Eurocentric view of Africa as allochronically mired in a dead past, a perspective reminiscent of Hegel’s interpretation of Africa as refractory to the dynamizing charm of the European geist. For writers formed in that tradition, “ahistorical” peoples lacked key human and social attributes: namely, writing, reason, and a state. Sarkozy described Africa, to the Africans themselves, as pretechnological, desperately in need of “science and modern technique,” yet culturally rich in its capacity to “reawaken the simple and ephemeral pleasures … and the need to believe rather than to understand, the need to feel rather than reason.” The only hope was for Africans to give free expression to their “European part” calling for “freedom, emancipation, and justice.” The real addressee of Sarkozy’s speech, however, was the French public, and the goal was to bury once and for all what France’s conservative humanist intellectuals saw as a masochistic “cult of repentance” concerning colonialism. In an exercise of national self-exoneration, Sarkozy declared that colonialism “was not responsible for all the present-day problems of Africa, … not responsible for the bloody wars between Africans, … not responsible for the genocides, … not responsible for the dictators.” Sarkozy reminded his Dakar audience that Africans themselves had often fought against and hated one another—as if such hatred were unimaginable in Europe—that no one should ask children to apologize for the faults of their parents, that while the colonizers had taken from Africa, they had also given to Africa. In this sense, Sarkozy transformed the “white man’s sob” into a self-aggrandizing official metanarrative.
Implicitly, Sarkozy was denying what had been established by many critical scholars, to wit, that France had been enriched by colonialism and slavery. Francophone Africa—or what critics such as Jean-François Verschave punningly called “Françafrique” or “France-a-fric” (roughly, French money/Africa)—had been deeply corrupted by French support for African kleptocrats, whereby the corporate and political elite of France, together with African dictators, exploited Africa for their own purposes. At least two collections, L’Afrique Répond à Sarkozy and Petit Précis de Remise à Niveau sur L’Histoire Africaine à l’Usage du Président Sarkozy, feature African responses to Sarkozy’s libel against Africa.)7 On another occasion, Sarkozy addressed his own “love it or leave it” ultimatum to African immigrants in France itself: “We cannot change our laws and customs because a tiny minority doesn’t like them. If certain people don’t like France, they should feel free to take their leave.”8
For Alain Badiou, Sarkozy’s “new Pétainism” conjoins the fear of racialized minorities with the fear of a resurgent left (for Pétain, the Popular Front; for Sarkozy, May 1968).9 Sarkozy’s call for a discussion of “national identity,” meanwhile, has placed minorities on the defensive by subtly reinforcing a normatively white French view of that identity. Like the U.S. right wing, the French right stokes fears of internal and external enemies: for Sarkozy, the banlieue “scum” at home and Islamicists abroad; and for the U.S. right, blacks, Latinos, and Muslims at home and “Islamic fascism” abroad. Just as American rightist politicians are proposing to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment in order to penalize undocumented Mexican workers (and indirectly American citizens of Mexican background), Sarkozy proposed stripping immigrants convicted of serious crimes of their citizenship. Just to clarify the anti-Muslim and anti-African drift, Sarkozy’s interior minister added polygamy and female circumcision to the list of offenses bringing the loss of citizenship. Sarkozy also threatened to send one of Europe’s paradigmatic “internal others”—the Roma—back to Romania and Bulgaria, for which he was duly chastised by the European Union.
The reconceptualization of France as an oxymoronic “colonial republic” has challenged some of the key precepts of republicanism. As Seloua Luste Boulbina puts it, decolonization was experienced by some French as a “morcellement” (fragmentation), resulting in perverse effects: “It is as if the French postcolonial state was being raised on a field of ruins so that in order to exist it became necessary to rehabilitate the Republic (which ignores difference and “communities”), along with ‘laïcité’ (which rejects the veil), and national identity (which covers over cultural diversity).”10 Recent French history, in this sense, has featured a veritable culture war between those who stress the negative legacies of colonialism and those who bemoan the “cult of repentance” concerning those very same legacies. The phrase “cult of repentance” served to downplay colonialism’s crimes, while shifting attention to the whites who choose to repent or not to repent as the main actors, with the “rest” as spectators on an intrawhite quarrel. Thus, Daniel Lefeuvre, in To Put an End to Colonial Repentance (2008), mocks what he sees as an obsession with interpreting contemporary phenomena as aftereffects of colonialism: “The racism of police or administration? Colonial Legacy! The failure of schools? Colonial Legacy! The difficult insertion of Islam in national space? Colonial Legacy.” Lambasting Marc Ferro’s 2003 book Le Livre Noir du Colonialisme, Lefeuvre calls for a “white book of colonization” dedicated to the “glory of the French colonial enterprise, including works by indigenous authors themselves.” To repent for colonialism, for Lefeuvre, is sheer “charlatanism and blindness.”11 In the same vein, Alain Finkielkraut, giving voice to his own colonial nostalgia, laments that French schools “no longer teach that the goal of the colonial enterprise was to educate and bring civilization to the savages.”12
In these paradigm wars, the argument has not been about whether colonialism was violent but only about whether colonialism was essentially and irrevocably violent or only circumstantially and sometimes beneficially violent. The enemies of the “cult of repentance” rekindle the embers of the imperial-romanticist dream of the “colonial epic” and the “adventures of colonial pioneers.” Academics like Lefeuvre and politicians like Sarkozy, in this sense, form part of an ideological coalition trying to reanimate the mission civilisatrice for the postindependence period. Presidential candidate Sarkozy even gave voice to his own neo-orientalist imaginary in a May 2007 Toulon speech lauding the dream that “sent the knights of Europe on the routes of the Orient, the dream of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt, of Napoleon III in Algeria, of Lyautey in Morocco, … a dream not of conquest but of civilization.”13 The consensus conservative line seems to be that despite some “abuses,” colonialism was well intentioned and generally beneficial. These arguments produce political effects by undercutting any claims by formerly colonized peoples, or by the French people of color descended from them, that anything is owed them.
In the United States, similar cultural wars have opposed advocates of radical pedagogy against rightist superpatriots. The difference between the French and the U.S. culture wars derives, in part, from the differences between the practices of a grounded colonizing nation-state in Europe and those of a colonial-settler state in the Americas. In colonial-settler states, as the name implies, colonialism is at the very kernel of the social formation, yet that centrality is obscured by exceptionalist narratives such as “nation of immigrants” and the “Conquest of the West” or, in Brazil, “the March to the West” and “the fable of the three races.” Colonialism is omnipresent yet rendered invisible, renarrated as a legitimate expansion into an empty space. In France, meanwhile, colonialism, even though it shaped the metropole economically, culturally, and politically, was seen as taking place “over there.”
Our research has led us to a vast corpus of “intercolonial” texts that directly or indirectly assert the superiority of some colonialisms over others (British over French, American over both, and so forth). Many texts contrast the racially phobic and segregationist “Anglo-Saxon” colonialisms with the more open, assimilationist, and tolerant “Latin” colonialisms. This binarism haunts even books that engage postcolonial theory with sympathy. To cite just one example, Jacqueline Bardolph’s Études Postcoloniales et Littérature calls for a study of “different colonial imaginaries, for a study of the way in which French history, marked by Catholicism and the spirit of the Enlightenment, might offer a less hierarchical vision of non-European peoples than the British imperial vision.”14 Thus, ancient Anglo-French tensions become reinvoiced in a new intercolonial rivalry, this time within postcolonial studies, about the relative humanity of variant forms of colonialism.
Such nationalist-exceptionalist narratives are absorbed through schools, history books, museums, colonial expositions, and the media. The official history, according to the classical protocols of “je sais, mais quand même” denegation, becomes a form of national apologetics. Nationalism, in this sense, entails obligatory amnesia. As Nietzsche put it, “Memory says ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually memory yields.”15 The various powers deeply entangled in slavery, for example, developed comparative discourses of relative innocence. This specular competition of preening national egos has historically generated claims that our conquest was more gentle, our slavery more humane, and our imperialism more cultivated. More productive, to our mind, would be a comparative study of the role of narcissism within intercolonial discourse. It would examine the various “vernaculars” of the larger language families of imperialism, such as U.S. militaristic exceptionalism (“We promote democracy and crave not one inch of Iraqi, Afghan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Korean … land”), British free-trade imperialism (“We only care about trade, which benefits everyone”), the French mission civilisatrice (“Vive la culture française”), Luso-Tropicalism (“We have Moorish blood and adore mulatas”).
At the same time, certain asymmetries characterize theoretical exchanges in the various sites. The first asymmetry is between the power of the Anglophone academy, with its logistical capacity to project and disseminate ideas (reinforced by the hegemony of English), compared with the relative lack of projection (despite the celebrity of France’s maîtres à penser) of the French academy. On the other hand, some asymmetries work in the opposite direction. First, the intellectual Anglophobia of many French intellectuals is not generally matched by Francophobia on the part of Anglo-American left intellectuals, who are just as likely to be Francophile. Anne Berger, professor of French and Francophone literature at Cornell and thus a “passeur” or “truchement” figure well placed to compare the two academic formations, points to a contrast between the two academies: “Unlike France, which hopes to export its knowledge and ideas and receive lessons from no one, America [sic] is an avid importer of ideas.”16 Rada Iveković makes a similar point about French intellectuals who might believe that they are resisting the “importation of ideas” but in so doing miss the “positive, enriching side of such importations.” The polemic about postcolonial studies, Iveković elaborates, “begins in a somewhat vain and anxious way, since it revolves around Republican national pride and a desire for independence, whereby an unfortunate tendency leads to new ideas being received with simplistic ‘fors’ or ‘againsts’ which flatten out all structural complexity and historical depth.”17
The problem on the Anglo-American side, we would add, is at times an insular, self-satisfied, monolingual provinciality, in tandem with a certain fashion-oriented superficiality that prefers ornamental citations of consecrated maîtres à penser to a deeper engagement with the substantive scholarship emanating from France and the French-speaking world. The point, then, is not that French intellectuals should simply join the postcolonial bandwagon but rather that all intellectuals should widen the circles of the debates, including by criticizing the provincialities of the local forms that the debate has taken. The question is not one of who is importing and who is exporting but rather of developing a more complex account of the circulation of ideas across boundaries, a point to which we shall return in the final chapter.
A colonial thread runs through many recent French polemics around such issues as the veil and religious insignia in French schools; laws prohibiting denials of the Armenian genocide and the Shoah; the commemoration of slavery and abolition and the Taubira law declaring slavery a “crime against humanity”; the colonial heritage of French museums; Sarkozy’s proposal for a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Codevelopment; the film Indigènes, concerning pensions for the North African soldiers who liberated France at the end of World War II; the official recognition in 2005 by Chirac of the 1947 massacres in Madagascar; the “rediscovery” of the October 17, 1961, police massacre of hundreds of Algerians in Paris; the accusations, three decades later, of French complicity in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; and the debates in Parliament about the “beneficial effects of colonialism.” Occasionally, prestigious veterans of the anticolonial struggles have participated in these debates, as when Césaire refused to meet with Sarkozy, then minister of education, stating that “as the author of Discourse on Colonialism, I remain faithful to my credo as a resolute anticolonialist [who] cannot appear to be in agreement with either the spirit or the letter of the February 23, 2005, law [concerning the “positive effects of colonialism”].”18
Much of the postcolonial effervescence came to the fore in the year that might be called the winter of postcolonial discontent: 2005. The year began with the furor over the proposed parliamentary law calling for national recognition for the French repatriated from Algeria (i.e., the former colons or pieds-noirs) and the “positive accomplishments” of French colonization. (The proposed law was subsequently rescinded.) It ended with the banlieue rebellions of November, partially triggered by provocative comments by government officials, which turned into a paroxysm of anger against police violence, discrimination, racial profiling, and unemployment. More than ten thousand cars were burned, and over two hundred public buildings were torched all around France. The coalitionary optimism of the 1983 “Marche des Beurs,” it appeared, had in two decades given way to the inchoate rage of the banlieue oppressed.
This was also the year of the formation of Indigènes de la République, the radical group whose very name fuses the memory of the colonial “indigenous code” with the Republic, thus asserting the persistence of the colonial in the presumably postcolonial era. In 2005, the organization issued a public appeal lamenting the situation of the new “natives”:
Discriminated against in hiring, housing, health, in school, and in leisure activities, the people of the ex-colonies or of the current ones, or whose presence in France is a result of post-colonial immigration, are the primary victims of social exclusion and privation. Independently of their actual origins, the populations of the “quartiers” are “indigenized,” that is, relegated to the margins of society…. Identity checks, provocations, and persecutions of all sorts are multiplied; police brutality, sometimes extreme, is only rarely sanctioned by a system of justice that functions at two speeds.19
The text goes on to assert that “France remains a colonial state,” whether in the form of territorial départements (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, La Réunion) or of overseas territories (Nouvelle-Calédonie, Tahiti), where the level of economic development is far below that of the metropole. “In France,” the text states, “the children of these colonies are consigned to the status of immigrants—second-class French citizens without all their rights.” The appeal boldly states that “the treatment of populations who are products of colonization prolongs colonial policy.” At the same time, it underscores the economic dimension of oppression: “The figure of the ‘indigène’ … has become interwoven with other logics of social oppression, discrimination, or exploitation. Thus, today, in the context of neoliberalism, immigrant workers are made to play the role of deregulators of the labor market in order to facilitate the extension of the logics of precarious living and flexible production to the entire wage-earning population.” The text ends by calling for (1) a radical questioning of the Enlightenment “chauvinism of the universal” and (2) radical measures to end discrimination in access to jobs, housing, culture, and citizenship, eliminating those “institutions which relegate formerly colonized populations to a subhuman status.”
The Indigènes de la République describe present-day France, in sum, as a quasi-colonial state. The racial profiling and harassment of West Indians, sub-Saharan Africans, and North Africans, for les indigènes, merely transposed into the Hexagon the old racist attitudes and discriminatory practices that typified French colonialism. On January 16, 2005, the group disseminated an “Appeal for a Conference on Postcolonial Anti-colonialism.” It also organized a rally on May 8—anniversary of the brutal French repression of an Algerian demonstration in Sétif in 1945—against the amnesia about past French massacres and a police brutality rarely punished by a “multiple-speed” judicial system. Among the other points made in the appeal,
France is and remains a colonial state…. In its former colonies, it continues a policy of domination…. The treatment of the populations descended from colonialism prolongs, without being reducible to, colonial policy…. The figure of the “native” continues to haunt political, administrative, and judicial actions … imbricated with other logics of oppression, discrimination, and social exploitation…. We, descendants of slaves and of African deportees, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants, we, French and non-French living in France, … we are the “natives” of the Republic.
The Indigènes de la République met with a hostile reception from much of the political spectrum, not only from the centrist Nouvel Observateur, which called their manifesto “a confused cocktail of poujado-leftism, shallow alter-mondialism, and post-Fanonian radicalism,”20 but also from some on the left who found the movement “communitarian” and even “racist.”21 This partial convergence of right and left suggested that colonial attitudes rooted in a Eurocentric universalism persisted in the postcolonial era.
Also published in 2005 was the edited volume The Colonial Fracture: French Society through the Prism of the Colonial Legacy. As the editors write in the introduction,
It is today difficult to ignore “postcoloniality,” given the extraordinarily strong tensions that go with it: the extension of the comparison between the colonial situation and the situations of social, economic, cultural, educational, and religious marginalization in urban neighborhoods; … the demands concerning historical memory of the “children of colonization”; … the rise of a “sense of insecurity” regarding postcolonial immigration and the failure, on the part of republican elites, to understand “extranormal” identities (seen as communautaristes); the denunciations in the media of a so-called “antiwhite racism” at the same time as we witness a growing rigidity of the “French model of integration”; the rejection of France and policies of francophonie in Francophone Africa…. All these signs make the colonial fracture a multifaceted reality that can no longer be ignored.22
Absorbed in the struggle to change the way French history is presented in school textbooks and in the media, the volume features essays on the role of the dominant republican model in (1) suppressing critical thought about race (Achille Mbembe), (2) marginalizing postcolonial migrants and their descendants through the myth of “integration” (Ahmed Boubeker), and (3) stereotyping Arabs and Muslims (Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste).
The reactions to the work of French postcolonial scholars reveal both similarities and differences vis-à-vis the Anglo-American situation. Referring to some 250 commentaries and critical references in the press, in the media, and on the Internet, Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard examine the responses to their influential La Fracture Coloniale. A first axis of critique consisted in denying any clear connection between colonialism and the contemporary situation. (The authors answer that the situation is both linked and distinct.) A second, more Marxist critique censured the privileging of race over class, and culture over economy. (For the authors, all are essential, intertwined, and complexly interarticulated.) A third critique accused the authors of subverting republican values, while a fourth lamented the “reopening of historical wounds.” Such skittish reactions to postcolonial scholarship in both France and in the Anglophone world are symptomatic of a common “structure of feeling” (Williams) that resists any deeper engagement with the impact of colonialism on national history.
The fact is that contemporary France exhibits both continuities and discontinuities with the colonial past. As evidence for continuity, one might cite the facts that (1) the demographic majority in the overcrowded projects (banlieue) are literally a byproduct of the French colonization of parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb; (2) the reinstatement of martial law on November 8, 2005, was based on a 1955 state-of-emergency decree originally used for repression in French Algeria; (3) repatriated pieds-noirs from Algeria form a major presence in the anti-immigrant National Front; and (4) many repatriated colonial civil servants from Algeria were placed in positions of control over postcolonial immigrants.23 The residents of these areas, for urban sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie, “experience themselves as ‘colonized people’ in the sense that Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, or V. S. Naipaul give to this term: they are defined by external and dominant perceptions [le regard] and categories … like colonized people, the inhabitants of the ‘sensitive zones’ have the impression that they have no political existence, that they are not considered citizens.”24 Other analysts find the continuity thesis overstated: after all, the indigenous code itself is extinct, and even the Indigènes de la République are citizens. Taking a carefully calibrated position, Pap Ndiaye suggests that it would be “outrageously simplistic” to claim that contemporary racial discriminations are due to the old colonial slave order, while it would also be “quite dishonest” to claim that contemporary injustices have nothing to do with that order. The postcolonial project, for Ndiaye, invites us to reflect precisely on the “maintenance of structures of domination after decolonization.” The reflection on this “non-indifferent difference [difference non indifferente] between past and present situations is precisely what is at stake in contemporary social sciences.”25
The past decade has generated a substantial body of postcolonial work in France, founded, according to Marie-Claude Smouts, on three propositions long accepted in the “Anglophone” academic world: (1) that the colonial fact forms an integral part of the history of the French present; (2) that colonialism has thoroughly transformed not only the former colonized societies but also the colonizing society itself; and (3) that France, in order to shape a more inclusive republic, has to recognize the legacy of its colonial past.26
Before examining the current postcolonial work, it is worth reflecting on the reasons for the defensiveness vis-à-vis postcolonial studies. What explains the specifically French hesitations about the postcolonial project? To reiterate our earlier questions about the reception of multicultural identity politics, in what ways do national interests, cultural institutions, and global socioeconomic alignments dictate the itineraries of “traveling theories” such as postcolonialism? What structure of feeling, what resistances and interferences, lie behind this initial antagonism? Here we first examine the reasons for the antagonism and then look at the remarkable recent flowering of writing on topics that directly bear on the postcolonial.
By way of preamble, it is important to draw some distinctions concerning the public reception of postcolonialism in the various zones. Despite the resistance to academic postcolonial theory, the political debates about colonialism became much more part of the public sphere in France than was the case in the United States and the United Kingdom. It would therefore be wrong to see the issue in a stagist and linear way, as if it were merely a question of French intellectuals getting up to speed with the Anglo-American academe. “The temporalities and historicities of different languages,” as Rada Iveković puts it, “do not always coincide.”27 Some of the French hesitation about postcolonial studies derived, as we have seen, from a longstanding intellectual strength, that is, France’s status as a privileged terrain for anticolonial, anti-neocolonial, and anti-imperialist writing by both French and Francophone writers within and beyond the Hexagon, going back to Césaire, Senghor, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Alioune Diop, Hamidou Kane, Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Abdelmalek Sayad, Alice Cherki, Yves Bénot, Francis Jeanson, and so many others. This anticolonial and anti-imperial work later morphed, it could be argued, not so much into the postcolonial academic field but rather into the activism associated with the antiglobalization and alter-globalization movements.28 The World Social Forum, for example, began as a collaboration between progressive Brazilians and the anti-imperialist leftists of Le Monde Diplomatique. Thus, while there has been less postcolonial academic production in France, there has also perhaps been more political activism related to the latter-day sequels of colonialism and imperialism.29
At the same time, there was a marked difference in the role of the various disciplines. While postcolonial work in France was largely confined to specific disciplines, postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world has long been trans-disciplinary. As a result of this difference in academic genealogies, what in the Anglophone world would have been called “postcolonial” in France might be simply called “history” or “anthropology” or “economics” or “literature.” “Postcolonial literature,” similarly, might be called in France “literature of development” or “emergent” literature.30 Such work was often critical of colonialism in theory and practice, even if it did not sufficiently unpack such infantilizing terms as “emerging” and “developing.” What was lacking in the French academy, perhaps, was the metatheoretical and transdisciplinary thrust of postcolonial studies, even though that thrust was partially inspired by French critical theory.
In the search for a more multidimensional analysis, some commentators have racialized and “postcolonialized,” as it were, the categories of Foucault and Bourdieu. Rather than speak simply of “racism,” sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas foregrounds the normative biopolitics that shape citizenship and subcitizenship in postcolonial France, regulating the bodies and behavior of the children of immigrants of color. While the dominant discourse assumes a general freedom of self-invention for all people, the marginalized are made to feel incarcerated in their own bodies, held back by the invisible barrier that separates off those who lack “civilizational legitimacy.”31 In dense Foucauldian prose, Guénif-Souilamas critiques “biopolitics in the service of the reigning order”:
Our epoch, so solicitous of the freedom of everyone to invent themselves, has reserved for the most dominated a very particular kind of self-invention, a new form of captivity, a new privation of freedom which assaults those French people who are incarcerated in their own bodies. Thus, the barrier erected between those who enjoy civilizational legitimacy and those who do not is no longer exterior…. This uncrossable border marries bodies themselves, enveloping them in a transparent film which resists all the corrosions of contact, … isolating those who are so circumscribed…. For those who have experienced or witnessed these virtual incarcerations prodded by racial profiling of bodies … it becomes clear that one can be imprisoned while apparently being free.32
Picking up on concepts developed by Bourdieu and by Norbert Elias, Guénif-Souilamas argues that customs and habitus play a crucial role in the economy of “distinction” and the maintaining of class barriers. “Presocial, literally natural, in other words, in our vernacular, profoundly cultural, racial traits are constructed to serve the purpose assigned to them: debase in order to separate, designate the evil in order to protect oneself from it.”33
Guénif-Souilamas speaks of the “consubstantial link between colonialism and assimilationism [obscured by] integrationist rhetoric.”34 The most obvious link is the symbiotic connection between a racialized “civilizing process” that once took place abroad and that now takes place within French institutions. The body itself plays an allegorical role as the new “protagonists of alterity” incarnate the disquieting figure of the undomesticated “other.” Just as the African American body has played an allegorical role as an ambulatory reminder of the repressed memory of white crimes against blacks, in France too “the very presence [of the protagonists of alterity] is a reminder of that which they are the involuntary recipients.”35 Even feminism is wielded against a generic Arab/Muslim other. For Islamophobes, only one (Islamic) faith is stigmatized as inherently sexist. Guénif-Souilamas mocks the “patriarchal feminism” of the white male French critics of Islam, who pose as chivalric defenders of Muslim women against Muslim men—inevitably reminding us of Spivak’s evocative formula “white men rescuing brown women from brown men.”36 As in the United States, white feminists sometimes join in the condemnations, as when Elisabeth Badinter, in a kind of secular fundamentalism, pathologizes a religious tradition by calling veiled Muslim women “very, very sick.” A religiously connoted choice of dress becomes the trigger for an undialogical analysis tinged with projections that completely deny the subjectivity of the wearer of the veil, which for Badinter, “symbolizes the categorical refusal to come into contact with the other, … a triple pleasure over the other: the pleasure of nonreciprocity, the pleasure of exhibitionism, and a voyeuristic pleasure.”37
The field of the postcolonial in France was also “occupied” by another discursive formation, to wit, la Francophonie. Less a critical theory than an officially mandated postindependence reformatting of the mission civilisatrice, la Francophonie can be seen as a Gaullist cultural, diplomatic, and commercial project partially aimed at “Anglo-Saxon” rivals for influence in the Third World. This situation generated an ambiguous status, at once privileged and marginalized, for Francophone writers. Pascale Casanova pinpoints the awkward situation of Francophone writers: “Paris had never been interested in the writers from its colonial territories; in fact, it has for a long time scorned and mistreated them as provincials, too close for their differences to be recognized or celebrated yet too far to simply be perceived.”38 The Caribbean writers, for example, come to be seen as too Caribbean to be French and too French to be Caribbean. Much of the postcolonial “air” was thus sucked up, at least in literature departments, by la Francophonie and Francophone literature.39 Yet the very concept of Francophonie is being more and more challenged both by the critics and by the writers themselves, who prefer such terms as “world literature in French.”
A number of French-speaking scholars who transit easily between the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean—notably Françoise Vergès, Anne Donadey, Françoise Lionnet, Winifred Woodhull, Brent Hayes Edwards, Tyler Stovall, Dominic Thomas, and Georges Van Den Abbeele, among others—speak of (and themselves instantiate) new hybrid transdisciplinary formations that subsume French and Francophone concerns into larger configurations such as “Francophone postcolonial studies.” In the anthology French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den Abbeele note the general lack of interest of the Hexagon in these currents. “The study of French literature and culture that has arisen outside of France and indeed throughout the French-speaking world,” they note, “has emerged in spite of metropolitan French indifference and hostility.” The “exhilarating expansion of the corpus of French studies,” they continue, “finds few approving echoes in the metropolis, and this despite the sudden development of something like a global Francophone consciousness with an almost dizzying array of lateral contacts all around the periphery as Anglo-American scholars circumvent Paris to interact with their Caribbean, Canadian, African, and Pacific counterparts.”40 The increasing level of interchange between Francophone locations, the authors conclude, in what is perhaps an overstatement, “bypasses Paris entirely.”41 The notions of tout-monde and “creolization” drawn from Glissant’s relational theories, now standard protocols of reading in the West Indies, black Africa, and the Maghreb, they point out, have been largely ignored in France itself.
France’s “own” postcolonials, as a result, have been turning away from French tutelage and institutions in favor of other alternatives. Many French-speaking African and Caribbean intellectuals, including some who formerly lived in France, have immigrated to the United States. Despite the fact that Africans (and Afro-Caribbeans) in the United States are not exempt from the racism suffered by African Americans generally, prestigious French-speaking intellectuals and writers from the Caribbean and from Africa have taken up positions in American universities: Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Maryse Condé (emeritus) at Columbia; Édouard Glissant at CUNY; Mamadou Diouf at the University of Michigan; Assia Djebar, Manthia Diawara, and Awam Amkpa at New York University; Jean-Godefroy Bidima at Tulane; Mbye Cham at Howard; and Valentin Mudimbe at Duke—without necessarily cutting off their links to France, Africa, and the Caribbean. During the 1998–1999 school year, for example, 165 African scholars came to the United States from Francophone countries.42 Jean-Philippe Dedieu speaks of African appreciation for relatively open networks of scientific knowledge and professional recognition, in contrast with France, where “the circle of professional knowledges never widens.” The African scholar in the United States, one historian reports, is showered with invitations for participation, creating a “familiarity and a continuity … never found on the French side.”43 American philosophy departments, meanwhile, are hiring in the field of African philosophy, even as academic job listings in French studies are increasingly specifying “Francophone and postcolonial literature.”44 African postcolonial thinkers in the United States also benefit, ironically, from the Francophilia of some branches of the U.S. academy. Francophonic scholarship in the United States, for Dedieu, has two advantages: (1) that it is African and (2) that it is French and philosophically oriented, thus benefiting from the aura of poststructuralism in the United States.
The causes of the French hesitation about postcolonial studies are at once linguistic (resentment against the hegemony of English), demographic (the relative lack of professors of color in French universities), and institutional (the lack of openings for such studies). Alec G. Hargreaves attributes French ambivalence toward postcolonial studies to (1) France’s traumatic separation from its colonies, notably in Vietnam and in Algeria, leading to a desire for erasure; (2) the anti-Americanism of French intellectuals who resent the spread of (Anglo-)American influence both in France itself and in a larger world where French intellectuals once reigned supreme; (3) the unidisciplinary conservatism of French research institutions, in contrast with an Anglo-American academy in which literary scholars—in aspiration if not always in fact—became pluridisciplinary and transnational. While the terrain for such work was prepared in the Anglo-American world by various forms of interdisciplinary studies, in France transdisciplinary fields such as postcolonial studies fell into the limbo of the “unclassifiable.”45 This limbo status was caused less by a lack of transdisciplinary desire or vocation on the part of scholars themselves than by the centralized nature of the French state, since any transdisciplinary experiments would require the approval of the Ministry of Universities, which controls the creation of tenured faculty positions. Here the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), with its encouragement of cross-disciplinary affinity groups, forms a partial exception to the rule.46 The elitist and hierarchical character of French higher education allows little space for initiatives by graduate students to form associations, to publish essays and books, and so forth. All of these are mixed blessings, of course, and it would be absurd to idealize a U.S. academy plagued by billionaire trustees, outrageously high tuition, the intrusion of market values, an academic star system, and the publish-or-perish syndrome.
The ambivalence about projects such as postcolonial studies is also tied to the vexed question of how France sees its role in the world in the afterwash of empire, as at once the victim of U.S. imperialism and as the formerly colonialist but now benevolent patron of many of the countries not completely absorbed into the Anglo-American sphere of influence. De Gaulle presided over the end of the French empire and then almost immediately fabricated the image of France as the defender of the Third World against “les Anglo-Saxons.” Although France could no longer pretend to be a superpower, it could speak for “the rest” as the sponsor of an alternative universality posed against the false universalism of the “hyperpower.” Defensive and inferiorized in relation to the (now declining) hyper-power, France could be a spokesperson for the excluded by articulating the general resistance, for example, to the U.S.-led Iraq War. France, in this sense, has also come to play a special role in world cultural production. Already in 1984, Jean Guiart, from the Musée de l’Homme, had spoken of the new “mission” of French ethnology: “to valorize the cultural riches of each non-European people.”47 One finds this welcome valorization of non-European cultures in many manifestations of French cultural policies, whether in the area of the “World Republic of Letters,” with the key French role, stressed by Pascale Casanova, as Gatekeeper or World Bank for Literature, or in World Music, of which France is a major producer, or in World Cinema, where France has helped finance emerging cinemas in Francophone Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, combating Hollywood hegemony while also walking a fine line between a generous pluralism and a subtle paternalism.
Other institutional factors impede the development of transdisciplinary fields such as “postcolonial studies” in France. Anne Berger criticizes certain features of the U.S. academy—the cult of success, celebrity intellectuals, the political impotence of many academics for whom “academic freedom” is merely academic—while also praising a flexible system that empowers students and teachers to create new objects of research. Contrasting the proliferation of spaces of encounter in the United States with the isolating “morcellement” typical of the French academy, she lauds the transdisciplinary research groupings or “studies” programs, defined by ethnicity, area, or subject. Such discursive formations, she argues, both shape new objects of study and inaugurate new reflections on ways of looking at those objects so as to encourage multiple and overlapping affiliations. Thus, a humanities professor can simultaneously participate in feminist studies, Francophone studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, transnational feminist studies, diaspora studies, and so forth. (Some grids, such as feminism, are potentially relevant to all fields.)48
Looking back at postwar intellectual history, what is perhaps most disappointing is the failure of the leading maîtres à penser to theorize race and coloniality, despite their usually progressive politics. Sartre wrote incendiary prefaces and opposed the Algerian War and American imperialism, but his literary and philosophical writings rarely addressed French imperial domination. The participants in “Socialisme ou Barbarie” defended the right of colonized people to self-determination, but they were largely ignored in France. Foucault briefly developed theories of the “racial state” but soon moved on to other issues. Here Étienne Balibar, who has for decades been theorizing “neoracism,” “racism without race,” and “universalism as racism” and who has seen racism as at the core of contemporary European politics, forms a major exception.49 But apart from Balibar, the Foucault of the “racial state,” and to a certain extent Derrida, Lyotard, Guattari, and Deleuze, most of the maîtres, left unexamined the racial/imperial architectonics of France itself.
Building on a Foucauldian metaphor, Ann Stoller speaks provocatively of “colonial aphasia,” an impaired condition that interrupts connections through “disabled histories” and severed links in pathways of association.50 Little of France’s “high-powered theoretical energy across the disciplines (so incisive about political culture, totalitarianisms, state structures and class),” she writes, “was aimed at the racialized foundations of the French state.”51 A theory of “difference” animated theoretical movements from semiotics to poststructuralism, yet the idea of racialized and gendered difference was dismissed as “differentialist.” Both Bourdieu and Derrida, Stoller writes, “divorced their sharp critiques of scholastic knowledge from the racial milieus of French empire that they knew intimately and on the ground.”52 Bourdieu, she points out, waited some thirty years before articulating the dilemma created by the separation between theoretical work and ethnographic practice. Bourdieu’s theoretical constructs, according to Paul Silverstein and Jane Goodman, “entered the mainstream of social thought independently of the North Africa and French political and social contexts in which they were initially developed.”53 Phyllis Taoua sums up the situation as follows: “An accurate assessment of decolonization cannot have French theory of the 1960s as its ethical center of gravity, since that corpus of texts is antithetical to the basic necessities of what that struggle for freedom required…. Never in the history of France had theoretical inquiry resorted to such mystifying abstraction, even as its focus was allegedly the ‘politics of difference.’”54
One of the most massive critiques of postcolonial studies in France is African-ist Jean-François Bayart’s “Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition?”55 Words like “postcolonial” and “postcoloniality,” Bayart notes, have become part of the intellectual debates in France, to the point that social scientists are no longer “sheltered”—the choice of adjective is symptomatic—from the polemics triggered by their usage. Bayart endorses many of the critiques of postcolonial theory already made in the Anglophone world by such Marxists as Arif Dirlik, for whom postcolonial theory began with the arrival of Third World intellectuals in the First World academy. Bayart also echoes what he himself calls Anthony Appiah’s self-admittedly “mean” dismissal of postcolonial intellectuals as a “c omprador intelligentsia” mediating cultural exchanges between world capitalism and its periphery. In Bayart’s summary, this mediating group, now surrounded by white disciples, sees the “colonial situation” as shaping contemporary social relations both in the former colonies and in the metropolitan countries.
The “river” of postcolonial theory, for Bayart, has many currents, some pulling like the Bosphorus in opposite directions. While Gayatri Spivak stresses the epistemic violence of Western thought, others such as Depesh Chakravarty, Bayart points out, see Western thought as a gift to the world. What is new, according to Bayart, is that a proliferating postcolonial studies has generated as a corollary the image of a provincial, conservative France reluctant to confront its colonial past or, even worse, as tainted by a racist imaginary. The concern that motivates the essay, then, is a patriotic one—the image of France. Postcolonial studies, Bayart complains, essentializes France, obscuring its demographic, political, and ideological heterogeneity. Are French intellectuals being criticized, he asks, for refusing to speak a “new global pidgin” and avoiding the “civic rituals of affliction that now pass for political engagement”? Perhaps, he speculates, French researchers are right to reject a fashionable postcolonial trend “whose heuristic virtues have not yet been demonstrated.”56
Bayart’s essay, homogenizing postcolonial studies much as he claims that postcolonial studies homogenizes France, is dedicated to proving that writers in French (he mentions Césaire, Senghor, Memmi, and Sartre) were the founding fathers of postcolonialism. “Like Monsieur Jourdain, who spoke prose without knowing it, these French writers practiced postcolonial studies without knowing it.”57 In other words, postcolonialism is superfluous in France because the work has already been done. In what amounts to a Francocentric account of the genesis of the field, Bayart ardently scavenges intellectual history for any and all French-speaking writers who have performed scholarship in any way loosely analogous to what is elsewhere considered postcolonial. Francophone anticolonialists such as Césaire and Fanon become simply “French,” even though Fanon, in the later period, insisted that he “had never been French” and that language and culture are “not enough to make you belong to a people.”58 Bayart’s Francocentrism sometimes borders on the absurd, as when he claims that postcolonial studies was inspired to link the critique of colonialism to the critique of other forms of domination, notably in the area of gender, by borrowing from Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Foucault. Where one might have expected names like Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, one finds instead, in a phallocentric narrative, the names of the latecomer male maîtres, with no recognition of the many feminist writers who analyzed gender in greater depth long before them.
Bayart seeks out a seminal French connection for almost every non-French thinker: Raymond Aron and Pierre Hassner influenced Hannah Arendt; Sartre was anti-Orientalist before Edward Said; Fernand Braudel influenced Immanuel Wallerstein; George Balandier examined “postcolonial situations” already in the early 1950s; and so forth. While informative, the discussion reminds one of jejune nationalist arguments about who invented the airplane. Bayart does provide a thorough inventory of all the colonial-related work by a wide array of French historians (Jean Suret-Canale, Charles André Julien, Charles Robert Ageron), political sociologists (Jean-Frédéric Schaub), creative writers (Jean Genet, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux), Francophone novelists (Mongo Beti, Ahmadou Kourouma, Ousmane Sembène, Yambo Ouologuem, Sony Labou Tansi, Alain Mabanckou, Tierno Monénembo), and Maghrebian intellectuals (Mohammed Harbi, Mostefa Lacheraf, Abdallah Laroui, and Mohamed Tozy).
At the same time, Bayart is not uncritical of French institutions. The “mistreatment” of postcolonial studies in France, for Bayart, derives not from an “ideological allergy” but from institutional malaise, including the “misery” of the French university and of CNRS (the National Center of Scientific Research) that has hindered the recruitment of young African scholars subsequently welcomed by U.S. universities; an absurd visa policy that restricts intellectual exchanges with the Global South; the weakening of Présence Africaine; the absence of journals comparable to the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement; the archaic character of book distribution; the high cost of translation; and the institutional inertia of la Francophonie, which has distracted scholars from a deeper questioning of colonialism and its aftereffects.
Rather than a behind-the-curve France, Bayart sees only a different configuration of the academic field, one that French intellectuals should accept rather than risk becoming “new avatar[s] of academic Atlanticism.”59 Bayart discerns (or projects) a number of rather unsavory motivations for the postcolonial vogue: a strategy of niche self-promotion on the part of scholars covetous of their share of the academic “market”; a French coquettishness that mingles snobbism, Americanophilia, and Hexagonal masochism; the desire to resuscitate the figure of the Sartrean engaged intellectual; the migratory conformism of French academics paying homage to their Anglophone host institutions; the marketing strategies of French publishers profiting from an academic fashion; and a France-bashing typical of the neoliberal age.
Bayart accuses the French adepts of postcolonial studies of remaining within a national narrative even while inverting it by demystifying the French Revolution, the République, and the mission civilisatrice. In the end, he does not say that postcolonialism is wrong, only that it is unnecessary, since it is all déjà vu and déjà lu, all been done before and better by writers working in French. At the same time, he rejects postcolonial studies’ embrace of the “identitarian proclivities” of the most extreme forms of the “cultural turn.” For Bayart, postcolonialism ontologizes colonialism, according to a “tropical Calvinism” that “sees the colonies and slavery as predestined.”60 (Bayart’s religious categorization embeds a sublimated version of the Anglo/Protestant/Latin Catholic dichotomy.) Finally, postcolonialism ethnicizes the social question of the banlieues through the “catastrophic” concept of identity, failing to see the internal differentiations and spatiotemporal variations within the colonizing process.
One leitmotif in some French critiques is the invocation of the ideal superego of sober scientificity, contrasted with the frivolous “grand academic carnival” of postcolonial studies. Bayart, like historians such as Frederick Cooper in the United States, whom he frequently cites, calls for more historical precision on the part of postcolonial scholars. While postcolonial studies, for Bayart, postulates a mechanical, univocal, overdetermined and Manichean reproduction of colonialism, colonialism is actually historically diverse, contingent, and ambivalent. “We can no longer maintain,” he writes, “a static and binary vision of a reified tête-àtête between colonizer and colonized.” As an antidote to what he sees as the ahistoricity of postcolonial theory Bayart calls for the kind of comparative historical sociology exemplified by such figures as Fernand Braudel, Jean Aubin, Denys Lombard, and Serge Gruzinski. In the background of this argument against postcolonial studies lies the debris of the History-versus-Theory debate that took place during the heights of poststructuralism; the tension is not so much about political perspective as about different disciplinary methods of “reading” the past.
Some of Bayart’s points are valid, even if most had already been made within the broader postcolonial field. We can appreciate his indispensable inventory of the French and Francophone contribution to scholarship, while regretting the resentful “we French did it first and better” tone and “vive la France” drift of the essay. Eagerly enlisting any and all critics of postcolonialism, even those of extremely diverse political stripes, Bayart mingles the Marxist-style critiques of an Arif Dirlik with the standard French “identitarian” charge. His metaphor of postcolonialism as a “global pidgin” carries an unfortunate colonialist aroma. His sarcastic account of “masochistic” exercises in “civic rituals of affliction,” meanwhile, clearly echoes the French rightist lamentations about the “cult of repentance.” Calling postcolonialism “politically dangerous” and a form of “cultural engineering,”61 Bayart demonstrates a limited knowledge of the postcolonial field—he conflates Octave Mannoni with his archnemesis Fanon, for example—while manifesting an acute impatience with the more radical work. In the end, he illustrates the pitfalls of national narcissism in the realm of scholarly exchange. The point is not to claim a single origin for postcolonial studies but rather to insist on the multidirectional circuitries of intellectual flows.
Despite such critiques, the past decades have seen a veritable explosion of post-colonial studies in France in the 21st century and especially after 2005. As Jim Cohen points out, the French debate over the postcolonial was not led by literary academics; rather, it was
a crystallization of several different but converging political controversies over the heritage of colonialism and its possible effects in contemporary society…. It was a response to ongoing political debates over the “republican model of integration” in its various implications, including the question of how to treat ethnoracial discrimination and how to treat religious diversity—in particular as embodied by Islam; over the notion of “race” which many sociologists have begun to consider in spite of strong republican presumptions against the legitimacy of the notion; and, last but not least, over controversies concerning the memory of colonialism, slavery and abolition and the role of public authorities in recognizing and conserving such memory.62
Here we can delineate some of the major genres of such work, while acknowledging that the genres never come pure or unalloyed. While only some of the work is performed under the rubric of the “postcolonial,” it is all directly or indirectly related to colonialism and its aftermath. Lacking the space here to thoroughly unpack the work, we will cite books whose very titles communicate the postcolonial thrust of the argument.
In terms of basic trends, first, a large body of current work focuses on the hidden history of French colonialism and the contradictions inherent in “republican colonialism”: Bernard Mouralis’s Republic and Colony: Between History and Memory (1999); Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe’s White Ferocity (2001); Yves Bénot’s Colonial Massacres (2001); Marc Ferro’s edited volume The Black Book of Colonialism (2003); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s Colonize/Exterminate: On War and the Colonial State (2005); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès’s The Colonial Republic: Essay on a Utopia (2003); and Jean Pierre Dozon’s Brothers and Subjects: France and Africa in Perspective (2003). The Dozon book, for example, explores the central paradox of French-style colonialism in fashioning colonials who were simultaneously “citizens” within republican discourse and “subjects” and “indigenes” within colonial discourse.
Second, another body of work treats colonial/imperial popular culture as consumed by the French populace within the Hexagon: Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire’s Human Zoos (2002); Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire’s Colonial Culture: France Conquered by Its Empire, 1871–1931 (2003) and Imperial Culture: The Colonies at the Heart of the Republic, 1931–1961 (2004); and Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire’s The Colonial Fracture: French Society Seen through the Prism of Its Colonial Heritage (2005). These books address the ways in which ordinary French people could enjoy the spectacles provided by “imperial culture” as manifested in colonial expositions and “Human Zoos”—portrayed in Abdellatif Kechiche’s film Black Venus—where colonials were displayed for the delectation of the European and American populace.
Third, other texts—Romain Bertrand’s Memories of Empire: The Controversy about the “Colonial Fact” (2006), Benjamin Stora’s The War of Memories: France faces its Colonial Past (2007), and the collective work An Unfortunate Decolonization: France from the Empire to the Banlieue Riots (2007)—critically explore the “war of memories” spiraling around colonialism.
Fourth, postcolonial texts treat the corollary theme of the history and memory of slavery: Françoise Vergès’s Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery (2006) and Édouard Glissant’s Memories of Slaveries (2007). The work on slavery presents an ambiguous relation to a postcolonial field that too often brackets slavery, as if it were not also at the very kernel of the colonial question. These texts seek to demonstrate a clear continuity between colonialism and slavery, including in the form of fervent abolitionists, such as Victor Schoelcher, who subsequently metamorphosed into equally fervent colonialists.
Fifth, some work probes the colonial dimension of French philosophical thought. Scholars such as Yves Bénot and later Louis Sala-Molins have examined the ways that the Enlightenment philosophers give voice to both colonialist and anticolonialist opinion. In Sala-Molins’s study of the Code Noir, he notes the tendency of the philosophes to speak of slavery largely as a metaphor for white oppression, while eliding the financial benefits slavery brought to Hexagonal France. Books such as Odile Tobner’s On French Racism: Four Centuries of Negrophobia and Alain Ruscio’s The White Man’s Credo, meanwhile, explore what might be called the sottisier colonialiste or the anatomy of colonial stupidities.
Sixth, there is work on postcolonial literary studies: Jean-Marc Moura’s Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory (1999) and Jacqueline Bardolph’s Post-colonial Studies and Literature (2002). Pascale Casanova’s massively informed The World Republic of Letters certainly engages postcolonial writers but generally avoids the idioms of postcolonial theory in favor of political and economic metaphors—the “stock market” of literary values, literary “currency exchanges” and “the Republic of Letters”—drawn from Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and literary distinction.
Past years have witnessed an increasing engagement with race-conscious discourses, which Alec Hargreaves attributes to (1) the growing awareness on the part of political elites and civil servants of the reality of discrimination against immigrant minorities, (2) the greater visibility of violent protests (direct or indirect) against discrimination, and (3) political opportunities for antidiscrimination legislation.63 The recent period has also seen the emergence of black studies à la Française in the form of Pap Ndiaye’s 2008 book-manifesto: The Black Condition: Essay on a French Minority. French blacks, Ndiaye notes, are visible as individuals but not as a social group or as an object of academic study. In contrast with the profusion of French academic studies of Native Americans and African Americans, he points out, there are almost none of blacks in France itself.64 The contemporary social, political, and mediatic presence of the “black question” had not been matched in the world of scholarship, with the result that race came to form a structuring absence in postwar French social theory.
Favoring a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes the social sciences with the humanities, Ndiaye finds the conjunctural notion of a black “minority” more productive than the essentialist notion of a “community,” a term seen as intrinsically antirepublican in France. The concept of “visible minority,” meanwhile, has the advantage of embracing very varied groups, in disparate situations, who nevertheless confront common challenges and problems triggered by their visible (and sometimes audible or nominal) difference. Basing himself on extensive research, Ndiaye points out that his black interviewees insist on their Frenchness partly because it is constantly being placed in doubt, sometimes through “well-meant” questions such as “Where are you really from?” Even compliments—“Your French is so fluent” addressed to an Antillais who grew up speaking French—can become a dagger dipped in the poison of an ethnic insiderism that reminds black French citizens of their outsiderness.
Ndiaye discerns a supple, conjunctural deployment of racial identity on the part of French blacks. While some proudly affirm their blackness, others describe themselves as métis (mixed race) or affirm a national identity, such as Senegalese. Each option, as Ndiaye metaphorizes it, constitutes “one card in the identitarian wallet.”65 Code-switching within a complexly hierarchized classificatory repertoire, French blacks often place Frenchness in the primary position but add in other elements and affiliations—to a country, to a region, to an ethnic group—in an identity “bricolage.” Although blacks in France live their blackness in ways that vary with class, gender, religion, language skills, national origin, and self-conception, they are still likely to be seen as “noir” by their white compatriots. Thus, there is a tension, to use the phenomenological language evoked by the titular concept of a black “condition,” between the chosen pour soi identity and the prescribed en soi identity constituted by le regard d’autrui.
The real goal, for Ndiaye, is not to go “beyond race” but rather to eliminate race as a social marker of inferiority. Fighting antiblack racism has a universal dimension in that it will benefit not only black people but all of humanity, including some who suffer racism’s consequences without even knowing it. Despite the obvious differences between the United States at the beginning of the 20th century and France at the beginning of the 21st, Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” for Ndiaye, retains contemporary relevance for French blacks:
It means that we want to be French and black, without that seeming strange or suspect, or merely tolerated as a temporary problem while assimilation completes its work. We want to be invisible in terms of our social life, such that the abuses and discriminations that affect us as blacks are reduced. But we also want to be visible in terms of our black cultural identities, in terms of our precious and unique contribution to French society and culture.66
Within a nuanced, antiessentialist, intersectional, and coalitionary approach, Ndiaye recommends forms of black solidarity that ideally operate in tandem with other minority activisms. The real basis for solidarity is not identity per se but rather a common social experience and a common struggle. “Skin color,” he argues, “designates an interest group, not a culture.”67
In the 21st century, “race” has emerged as an analytical category within French academic work. This work takes various generic forms such as, first, work on immigration and the racial question in France, for example, Michel Wieviorka’s Racist France (1992); Véronique de Rudder, Christian Poiret, and François Vourch’s Racist Inequality: Republican Universality Put to the Test (2000); Eric Savarese’s Colonial History and Immigration: An Invention of the Foreigner (2000); Dominique Vidal and Karim Bourtel’s The Arab Malaise: Children of Colonization (2005); Jean-Michel Blier and Solenn de Royer’s Racial Discrimination: How to End It (2001); and Nacira Guénif-Souilamas’s edited volume The Republic Exposed by Its Immigration (2006). Second, this critical work takes the form of witness (témoinage) texts concerning everyday racial discrimination, for example, Frédérique Mouzer and Charles Onana’s A French Racism (2007), Mongo Beti’s Africans, If You Could Speak (2005), François Durpaire’s White France, Black Anger (2006), and Jean-Baptiste Onana’s Be a Nigger and Shut Up (2007).
In the anthology From the Social Question to the Racial Question (2006), Didier Fassin and Éric Fassin and their collaborators take up Balibar’s challenge, in the Actuel Marx dossier, to “think racism after race,” in a situation where race does not exist, where it is known to be constructed, yet where racism remains a tangible, brutal reality. Attempting to delineate new articulations of race and class, the contributors appeal to a cross-cultural comparative method. While the multicultural and critical race projects in the United States tend to be oriented around the idea of an equal recognition of formerly stigmatized identities, the struggle in France, according to some contributors, has less to do with identities per se than with the recognition of the reality of discrimination. As the Fassins sum up the situation, “one speaks as in order not to be treated as—Black, Arab, Jewish—but also Woman and Homosexual: that is the minoritarian paradox inscribed in the very condition of being a minority which means that one cannot get the critique of minorization heard without engaging the already constituted terms of the majoritarian discourse.”68 In the end, the Fassins conclude, “it matters little if one’s discourse is universalist or particularist; what matters is that one reflect on the sense and performativity of one’s discourse; what it really signifies, and, in the last analysis, what it does.”69
In any case, probing questions about race and postcoloniality are now being asked in contemporary France, posed both along a spatial axis—concerning whether colonialism is internal or external to French history—and along a temporal axis, concerning whether colonialism still shapes contemporary French history. Subsequent to the mid-1990s demonizations of multiculturalism and to the initial antipathy to postcolonialism, the French academic scene has shifted substantially. As the editors of a special postcolonial issue of Mouvements put it, “So who is afraid of the postcolonial? There is no simple response to this question. There is no principal enemy to denounce, except for the colonial Unconscious that haunts French society and its social hierarchies, whose endurance it assures in a ‘discontinuous continuity.’ There is no republican plot to expose but only a specifically French difficulty in revisiting the fundamentals of republicanism and confronting them with the facts of its own historicity.”70