Black Jacobins in Contemporary France: On Identities on Politics,Decolonial Critique,and the Other Blackness

Formerly, issues of race were written out of the public landscape of the French Republic. Now the “black condition” is openly debated. This shift is informed by self-identified black movements and their responses to French Republican avoidance of thematizing racialized social inequalities. It is simultaneously contested by groups that experience anti-black racism as it reduces their alternate use of race and ethnicity. Does blackness lead to the homogenization of black experiences or can it initiate solidarity? This article examines current debates on blackness in Paris by drawing upon ethnographic activist research with a black activist group. I analyze how the group maneuvers through a supposedly race-blind discourse, in which the act of identifying race risks being disqualified as communitarian. I argue that a conception of blackness is introduced that provides the potential to recognize the pluralities of blackness, re-shaping notions of blackness, and the abstract Republican model itself.     

Boundaries of Frenchness: cultural citizenship and France’s middle-class North African second-generation

Based on 45 interviews in the Paris metropolitan area, I focus on the middle-class segment of France’s North African second-generation and use the framework of cultural citizenship to explain why these individuals continue to experience symbolic exclusion despite their attainment of a middle-class status. Even though they are successful in terms of professional and educational accomplishments and are assimilated by traditional measures, they nonetheless feel excluded from mainstream French society. Because of this exclusion, they do not feel they are perceived as full citizens. I also discuss how this segment of France’s second-generation draws boundaries around being French and how they relate to these boundaries. Despite their citizenship and their ties to France, they are often perceived as foreigners and have their ‘Frenchness’ contested by their compatriots. I argue they are denied cultural citizenship, because of their North African ethnic origin, which would allow them to be accepted by others as part of France. Applying cultural citizenship as an analytical framework provides an understanding of the socio-cultural realities of being a minority and reveals how citizenship operates in everyday life.     

Framing Greater France Between The Wars

This essay analyzes the relationship between France as an imperial nation-state and the discourse of Greater France that intensified during the interwar period. I am interested in the way that the figure of Greater France sought to stage and reconcile – not justify, rationalize, or mystify – structural contradictions between republican and imperial systems of government. I argue that there is an intrinsic relationship between colonial discourse and its corresponding political form. By posing questions about the status we assign to colonial ideology through the analysis of a series of influential colonial texts, this essay pays special attention to the dissociation of nationality and citizenship that characterized a political form composed of a metropolitan parliamentary government articulated with a colonial administrative regime. I hope to reframe the familiar discussion of the proliferating representations of empire that circulated in metropolitan France after World War One. The figure of la plus grande France that developed then allows us to interrogate the French imperial nation-state at a doubly paradoxical historical conjuncture characterized by the consolidation of both the republic and the empire, on the one hand, and by unprecedented crises of the republic and colonial legitimacy, on the other. Interwar imperialism produced qualitative and evaluative distinctions between different French colonies but I will focus on the more general conceptions of the empire as such that circulated through the discourse of Greater France.     

The socialist blues? Citizenship,class and civil society

This article seeks to explore the relationship between the British labour movement, the Left and the Labour party. It does so through the intellectual prism of debates around citizenship and civil society. In this respect, I seek to recover a critical politics around questions of class from the New Left who were always critical of more mainstream ideas of citizenship. However, I also point to the limitations of those who have argued that meaningful forms of citizenship can no longer be connected to political parties and only occurs outside of state organizations. Political parties continue to need intellectual narratives to legitimate their role in society and to connect with the broader civil order. The Labour Party in this respect has seemingly broken with ‘New Labour’ and is searching for a new narrative. The rise of an intellectual grouping around ‘Blue Labour’ has made considerable headway recently and I seek to take a critical view of some of their ideas and ethical frameworks. Here I argue that changing class formations and a more pluralistic society potentially ask difficult questions of those who seek to revive the labour movement in troubled times.     

Laïcité and multiculturalism: the Stasi Report in context1

French republican universalism – expressed most strongly in the principle and practice of laïcité– and multiculturalism have constituted opposite poles on questions of citizenship and integration. The report of the Stasi Commission on laïcité on 11 December 2003 and the following legislation on the donning of religious symbols in French public schools have once again, spurred debates over the meanings and practices of laïcité. The report and the law have been interpreted in different ways. Some have presented them as a reaffirmation of a historically constituted laïcité under new circumstances, others as a divergence from the real problems of racism, unemployment and gender inequality. In this article, I offer an alternative reading by supplementing a critical reading of the report with an analysis of its historical and immediate institutional context. I evaluate the Stasi Report in its immediate context of institutional change, and in the historical context of selected developments concerning laïcité since the 1905 law separating churches and State. I argue that the Stasi Report marks a fundamental break with French republican universalism, and I show that this break occurred contemporaneously with key gestures of multiculturalism: the establishment of the French Muslim Council and the creation of Muslim high schools under contract with the French state. This double movement to narrow the boundaries of laïcité, and for the state to expand the boundaries of identity‐specific, Muslim public institutions and private schooling constitutes a reorganization of the public sphere in France which qualifies as a move towards multiculturalism.     

English in French Commercial Advertising: Simultaneity,bivalency, and language boundaries

In recent decades, sociolinguists have begun to challenge the traditional view that multilingualism is fundamentally composed of discrete systems known as ‘languages’. Supporting the assessment that languages are not bounded entities but sociocultural and ideological constructions, this article explores commercial advertisements in France, which are subject to language policies assuming that ‘French’ is easily separable from ‘foreign languages’. Employing the Bakhtinian‐influenced notion of bivalency developed by Woolard (1998), the article argues for a special consideration of mixed‐language advertising in France, rooted not only in linguistic form, but also in the specific contextual tension produced by the socio‐political statuses of French and English. The resulting creativity challenges the monolectal assumptions within French language management, indicating a clash of segregational language ideology with integrational language practices. The article further argues that this language mixing is bidirectional, as advertisements may both erase and emphasise the assumed boundaries between codes.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

从法国穆斯林移民的生存现状透视法国的移民模式

法国季节性人口迁移由来已久,且迁移的地域遍及欧洲。欧洲国家对人口迁徙情况进行清查和评估始于1805年法兰西第一帝国时期,当时实行以"血统主义"为原则的国籍制度,其用意在于保证拿破仑军队充足的兵源,这与后来共和政体实行的"属地主义"原则相对立。21世纪初,移民问题成为法国对内政策面临的一大挑战,它与公共安全、国民身份认同、就业市场、欧盟公共事务政策的制订以及在第二代移民中实现法国模式的"共和"与"非宗教化"的融合等重大问题息息相关。欧洲国家之间与欧洲国家之外的人口迁移引发以下问题:欧洲居民的原国籍问题、法国国籍问题、法国公民权的行使问题以及在重组后的家庭种族构成愈加复杂的条件下个人身份的构建问题等。     

Naturalising,Neutralising Women's Bodies: The “Headscarf Affair” and the Politics of Representation

The recent “headscarf affair” has created a divisive national crisis in several European countries. Like Turkey, France and Germany have introduced legislation prohibiting “conspicuous” religious symbols in government institutions. The article argues that interpretations of ‘Muslim’ female head covering as a sign of oppression ignore their resemblance to European symbols of ideal womanhood. The question of the ‘ethnicity’ of the symbol is thus elusive, and the assertion of categorical difference can be challenged on the level of citizenship law. Recent amendments to German citizenship law based on jus sanguinis have eased immigrants' adoption of citizenship, diminishing the contrast with the French jus soli. Thus, in Germany there has been a shift from the emphasis on the transmission of substance toward display of cultural competence through other forms of embodiment. In both Germany and France, in key social locations of state reproduction, national belonging and loyalty to the state must be demonstrated through linguistic competence and modes of bodily performance that mainly focus on women.     

Practices of citizenship: Inter-linking community,work and family in a national single parent organisation

Currently, public notions of community, work and family are enmeshing with concepts of citizenship to reconstruct various contexts and foundations for welfare reform in the UK. More specifically, paid work has become central to notions of ‘good’ citizenship, ‘good’ parenting and ‘strong’ communities within debates about welfare reform. This has the effect of re-defining parenting as a non-working activity. Consequently, single mothers who claim welfare benefits are in danger of being positioned as ‘partial’ citizens and their daily practices of citizenship which lie outside of those recognised by the state, rendered invisible. Conversely, in this paper, I will exemplify the ways in which the members of a national single parent organisation are constructing their own relationships between community, work and family and through this process are engaging in building citizenship practices (in local, national and international arenas). Conceptos de comunidad, trabajo y familia enlazan con conceptos de ciudadania para (re)construir varios contextos y fundamentos de reformas de asistencia social en el Reino Unido. Específicaments, en los debates de reformas de asistencia social, el trabajo pagado se ha puesto al centro de nociones de ‘buena’ ciudadanía, ‘buena’ crianza de los hijos y comunidades ‘fuertes’. Ha ofrecido como resultado la redefinición de la crianza de los hijos como actividad no laboral. Por consiguiente, las madres solteras que reclaman prestaciones sociales corren el peligro de verse posicionadas como ciudadanas ‘parciales’, y de hacerse invisible sus prácticas diarias de ciudadanía, que quedan fuera de las reconocidas por el estado. A la inversa, en este artículo, enfocado en los socios de una organización nacional de padres solteros, ejemplificaré como recontruyen sus propias relaciones entre comunidad, trabajo y familia, y como, por medio de este proceso, se ocupan de contruir prácticas de ciudadanía (a nivel local, nacional e internacional).     

Black Movements Need Black Theorizing: Exposing Implicit Whiteness in Political Process Theory

The history of racism in the United States has produced a paradox in social movement literature: blackness shaped the character and substance of black antiracist mobilization, but whiteness shapes most analysis of their efforts. Despite frequently using the black Civil Rights Movement for theory development and testing, leading theorists have yet to identify a specific theory of race undergirding their analysis or explaining how racism impacts the trajectory of antiracist social movements. Instead, theorists rely on common white-privileging notions of race that hinder analyses of black movements. I critically analyze political process theory (PPT) from a racial perspective, showing that the dominant critiques of PPT stem from PPT creators’ failure to critically theorize race while analyzing the Civil Rights Movement. Theorists implicitly adopted white-centered perspectives that ultimately undermined PPT’s development. I conclude with a call to simultaneously theorize collective action and the system of inequality with which a movement is engaged.     

Remembering the May Events

In May of 1968 ten million French workers transformed a student protest into a revolutionary movement by joining it in the streets. In the short space of a month France was overthrown and restored, but not without suffering a shock which resounds to this day. Like many an unsuccessful revolution before it, the May Events triumphed in the political culture of the society that defeated it in the streets. In the perspective of ten years, it now appears that May '68 inaugurated a new era in French political life, which still continues. The May Events lay at the intersection of two histories: not only did the new left of the sixties peak in France in 1968, but France gave the first signal of the political instability that has overtaken much of Southern Europe in the seventies. In 1968 no one imagined that the Events would be relayed by an electoral movement such as Eurocommunism. Then the talk was all of the “senility” and “sclerosis” of the official opposition parties. In fact the May Events overthrew not the Gaullist state, but the narrow ideological horizons of the old left it challenged in challenging capitalism in new ways. The Events transformed the popular image of socialism in France, contributing to the collapse of moribund Stalinist and social democratic traditions, and to the rise of an aggressive Eurocommunist movement. Some of the most important ideas of May continue to live through this movement. The paradoxical survival of themes and hopes from the sixties in the mainstream politics of France in the seventies testifies to the need for a new interpretation of both the May Events and their Eurocommunist successor. In the pages that follow I will reconsider the May Events in the light of four of these themes, which have a continuing relevance. They are: the struggle against technocracy; a new and more libertarian image of socialism; the rejection of authority relations in the workplace; the ideological crisis of the middle strata. In challenging both the French establishment and its official opposition around these themes, the May Events radically altered the cultural presuppositions of the French political system, with consequences that are still unfolding. The remembering of May 1968 is therefore also a moment in the dialectics of the present.     

"FRANCE NEEDS CHILDREN":

This article examines debates and discussions surrounding French pronatalist policies enacted in the 1980s. Drawing on data collected from a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including daily newspapers, parliamentary debates, and French feminist publications, I explore the following questions: First, does pronatalism spring from conservative nationalist ideologies that conflict with feminist projects? Second, how have French feminists reacted to the pronatalist agenda? Finally, could women's equity serve as an impetus for instituting policies that would encourage births? My analysis suggests that nationalism in France takes many forms, and a wide spectrum of political actors from both the political left and right have supported pronatalist initiatives in the name of “the nation.”     

Postmodern theory and politics: Perspectives on citizenship and social justice

In this paper we consider some contributions made by postmodern perspectives to theoretical and political questions of citizenship and social justice. Postmodern theory is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing questions of material inequality and economic and political exploitation. In the paper we distinguish between ‘ludic’ or ‘spectral’ postmodernisms and ‘oppositional’ or ‘resistance’ postmodernisms. We suggest that the latter provide theoretical resources for analysing the cultural construction of inequalities and struggles around social inclusion and exclusion. The paper is divided into three sections: in the first, three dominant narratives of modernization are addressed and their implications for concepts of citizenship and social inclusion noted; in the second, some postmodern challenges to these narratives are explored in order to disclose some of the key problems with modern paradigms of citizenship and social justice; in the third section we outline two postmodern approaches to the analysis of social struggles and their contributions to debates about citizenship.     

The translocation of culture: ‘community cohesion’ and the force of multiculturalism in history1

In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations of ‘community cohesion’ by politicians and policy makers, decrying the failure of communal leadership following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against their critique of self‐segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated ‘communities’. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual, in social exchange and in performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process.     

Racialisation and the afterlife of colonial divide and rule: a response to Avtar Brah

In this response to Avtar Brah’s review of Race Otherwise (2017) I briefly clarify the relationship between the concepts ‘racism’, ‘race’ and ‘racialisation’. I expand my framing of the book as less about racism and more about specific processes of racialisation. To this end I draw on material from and beyond the book to illustrate the value of the concept ‘racialisation’ for understanding the afterlife of colonial divide and rule in South Africa and other former British colonies in Africa. I show the ways in which re-articulations of the ‘signification-action complex’ at the heart of processes of racialisation in post-1994 South Africa produce a politics of evasion as well as tensions between struggles for recognition on the one hand and on the other, struggles for justice and freedom. With these re-articulations come varying convergences - of claims of culture, belonging and victimhood, genomic science, jurisprudence and global discourse on indigenous rights – that reify notions of ‘race’ and ‘tribe’.     

Generational differences amongst new age travellers

Previous studies of ‘New Age’ travellers have paid no attention to generational differences within the travellers’ scene. This paper looks at these differences to reflect upon the new social movement (NSM) literature. It is argued that NSM theory only analyses those movements with ‘post-material’ concerns about culture, identity and symbolic challenges. It thus ignores less privileged movements which are concerned with apparently ‘traditional’ issues, such as survival, political opposition and citizenship rights. A number of such movements have emerged during the past few years in the wake of economic and social restructuring under post-Fordist conditions and the dismantling of a Keynesian-style welfare state that is associated with these processes. While the older generation of travellers was tied to the NSM movements and chose to move onto the road, the younger travellers have been forced to do so for lack of any reasonable alternative, having faced unemployment and homelessness in a post-Fordist/Keynesian era. They are, therefore, part of the contemporary movement scene to which ‘old’ issues are seemingly still applicable. The article concludes by showing how both the older and the younger travellers are now struggling to survive in the face of legislation which effectively criminalises their way of life.     

Young Women in the Australian Women’s Movement

This article explores and documents the role of young women in the contemporary Australian women’s movement. Through case studies of two very different groups of young women, working in submerged networks in the community and on university campuses, it aims to suggest the diversity of contemporary young feminist praxis. Further, it argues that the work that these young women are doing in discursively creating and maintaining a feminist political space is crucial to the future of the movement. Based in constructivist ‘new’ social movement theory this article suggests a way forward from the so-called ‘generational debates’ of the 1990s and argues that, through their own unique processes of collective identity, young women who are active in the Australian women’s movement are dealing with the conflicts that are essential to the movement’s survival.     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Transnational spaces of exclusion in Glasgow: multi-story,photography and spatial practices

Mobilising what Jean-Marie Floch calls the semiotic square, this article explores the transition from ‘this thing’ (the car itself) to ‘that thing’ (the car in the advertisement) and what the concomitant transitivity between a global brand and a national culture can entail through a close textual analysis of British television and poster publicity for the Renault Clio, and in particular for the Clio III. Organised around the ludic rheme, ‘Twice the Va Va Voom’ and the critical valorisation, ‘French Car, British Designers’, the advertising campaign, launched in 2005, elaborates a double-code that sets up the idea of ‘country-of-origin’ as a contest, pitting Britain, in the guise of Ben, against France, in the guise of Sophie. Accordingly, I want to deal with the tension between sameness and difference in Anglo-French relations that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the publicity connotes in the context of the ‘entente cordiale’. I take into account its deployment of cultural stereotypes, addressing sex and gender identities, white nationalism and white foreignness, and the racial blind spots of the advertisement in comparison to the preceding ‘Va Va Voom’ campaign, which starred the black footballer Thierry Henry. At the same time, as we observe Ben and Sophie driving their respective Clios around London and Paris in the television advertisement, and the conjunction of London and Paris signified in the poster, the city is objectified as a kind of meeting point or passage for the negotiation of new social relations and networks that enunciate the transition from political to commercial globalism in the Single European Market.