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France, Race, and the Struggle for Political Freedom, November 13, 2005
This review is from: The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Paperback)
As I write, vehicles all across France are ablaze. Since October 27, 2005, thousands of cars in suburbs and neighborhoods in various corridors of the country have been burned by predominantly young French citizens descended from North Africa and West Africa. These disgruntled youth represent a class of 'de jure' French citizens who do not consider themselves 'de facto' citizens of the French polity. Like the tragic images from Hurricane Katrina in the United States, the images from France depict a nation sharply divided along racial lines. In America, the notion of a racial state is hardly something new. The case of France, in contrast, brings to the fore the often submerged reality that the French polity purports to be "color-blind" although it in fact has deep-rooted problems of race and racism with their own complex historical and political genealogies. Observers in the post-9/11 world may attempt to initially reduce the cause of citizens enacting anti-statist civil unrest to the presence of Arab Muslims and black Africans in the nation. However, that deduction would not only be nearsighted. It would also overlook the longstanding disjunction between the dominant white French society and the daily lives of others such as Arabs, Muslims, blacks, browns, and immigrants inhabiting the high-rise ghetto projects ("cités") and laboring in a polity that many times questions whether these persons really belong there. The issue of race in France is not a novel problem. Cataloguing the root causes of unjust humanitarian practices against these second-class citizens and openly debating them, however, does present a larger quandary rarely acknowledged in the public sphere among even the most well-intentioned French liberals.
I first acquired Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall's brilliant edited work, THE COLOR OF LIBERTY: HISTORIES OF RACE IN FRANCE (2003), when I was in the midst of an ongoing project that involves theorizing notions of political freedom emanating out of France and the French Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. After the recent riots in France, I once again picked up this text in order to think through the ways in which race and racism in France have manifested themselves uniquely while at the same time bearing in mind their integral role in sustaining what Charles Mills calls the global "racial contract" underlying the modern world system. The book serves as a mandatory read for any scholar or lay person seeking an extensive introduction into the evolving concept of race in the French past, present, and future.
The text begins with an intriguing Foreword by Fred Constant, which is followed by an Introduction by Peabody and Stovall. Peabody's "`THERE ARE NO SLAVES IN FRANCE'" and Stovall's PARIS NOIR each contributed to contemporary debates in the last decade about different aspects of French racial culture, the former in terms of race during the ancien régime and the latter regarding the African-American presence in the making of modern French life. The Introduction allows the editors to build upon their mutual expertise and outline the importance of the concept of "race" in French history. For Peabody and Stovall, the "French case thus provides an excellent reference for all those interested in developing a transnational, global perspective on the history of race." The contributors to their volume provide a fascinating array of viewpoints in response to the editors' thematic agenda. These viewpoints occur in four distinct sections: (1) "Race: The Evolution of an Idea"; (2) "Representations of the Other"; (3) "Colonial and Global Perspectives"; and (4) "Race and the Postcolonial City."
Among the list of rising and established authors contributing to the collection include John Garrigus, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Laurent Dubois, Patricia Lorcin, Leora Auslander, Thomas Holt, Dennis McEnnerney, Gary Wilder, and Alice Conklin. Though there is not enough space for me to summarize all the authors' arguments, I wish to note that each essay addresses in their own manner the French idea of color-blindness and the positions of those who wish to push aside discussions of race in France under the myopic rubric of non-race conscious universal cosmopolitan principles. The riots in contemporary France, like the upheavals in the eighteenth-century Francophone world, point to the reality that avoiding discourse on race in France might ultimately lead to civil unrest and potentially revolution. Confronting race and racism does not mean reifying a static conception of racial identities. It simply means taking seriously the claim that race matters. In closing, if you are truly committed to political freedom and to combating the adverse effects of race and racism, then I strongly urge you the reader to purchase THE COLOR OF LIBERTY.
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