In 1945, the first significant cohort of African, Caribbean, and Malagasy deputies were elected to the French National Assembly, where they participated in special parliamentary commissions tasked with colonial reform. This article traces the contours of postwar conversations about colonial policy, race, and racism that took shape in those commissions, as metropolitan and colonial deputies confronted these issues face-to-face, as ostensible equals, for the first time. Deputies of color tried to force frank discussions about racial inequality in their campaigns to reform political representation, working conditions, education, and compensation for Africans. Their metropolitan counterparts responded, however, by developing new code words and rhetorical strategies that deflected accusations of systemic racial inequality in postwar Greater France. The competing understandings and ways of talking about race and racism produced in this encounter helped consolidate a postwar speech regime of “colorblindness” that obscured the way racial logics were inscribed in the new institutions of the postwar Republic.
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Obscuring Race
Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism after World War II and the Making of Colorblind France, 1945–1950
Emily Marker
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–23 (23 total)
Soo Ah Kwon
Drawing on existing literature and student ethnographic projects, this article examines Asian American undergraduates' overwhelming focus on individual racial identity and practices of racial segregation in their ethnographic research about the University of Illinois. The author examines how such racial segregation is described and analysed as a matter of personal 'choice' and 'comfort' rather than as the result of racial inequality, racism and the marginalisation and racialisation of minority groups. This lack of structural racial analysis in the examination of Asian American students' experiences points to the depoliticisation and institutionalisation of race in higher education today. Race is understood and more readily analysed as a politically neutral concept that invokes celebration of racial diversity and 'culture' and not as a concept marked by power and inequities as it once may have been.
In Learning and Teaching
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 39–50 (12 total)
A White Race Blindness?
Abstract Universalism and the Unspeakable Making of Race
Sarah Mazouz
seminal work, historian Joan W. Scott sheds light on how abstract universalism was an ideological mystification in the case of gender equality. 4 In the case of race, far from being an ideology of inclusion, abstract universalism allows one to
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 116–135 (20 total)
Black and White on the Silver Screen
Views of Interracial Romance in French Films and Reviews since the 1980s
Jon Cowans
This article explores French attitudes about race during and after the years of the National Front's breakthrough by looking at French films and film reviews on the topic of interracial couples. In a country in which antiracists have been reluctant to legitimize the concept of race by talking about it, but in which the far Right has made gains by proclaiming its own views on race, French film-makers in the 1980s and after broached the topic in numerous films, but they often did so in ways that avoided controversy or serious reflection on current French racism. French critics of both French and American films featuring interracial couples also sidestepped the most explosive issues, revealing a disinclination to discuss a troubling and divisive concept, but also a persistent belief that racism remained an American problem and obsession.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 46–65 (20 total)
Freedom Papers Hidden in His Shoe
Navigating Emancipation across Imperial Boundaries
Sue Peabody
A microhistorical inquiry into the life of Furcy, a man held in slavery in the French Indian Ocean colony of Île Bourbon (today Réunion), sheds light on shifting French policies and practices regarding race and slavery from the Old Regime to the general emancipation of 1848. The mobility of two enslaved domestic servants, Furcy and his mother Madeleine, who traveled between Bengal, Île Bourbon, Mauritius, and continental France, challenged French and British understandings of who could be legitimately held as slaves. Furcy's tenacious battle to win recognition of his freedom in multiple jurisdictions is a forgotten precursor to many international disputes over the juridical principle of Free Soil in the age of Emancipation.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 11–32 (22 total)
From Black-Blanc-Beur to Black-Black-Black?
“L'Affaire des Quotas” and the Shattered “Image of 1998” in Twenty-First-Century France
Christopher S. Thompson
Since the mid-1990s, France's national soccer team has been given considerable significance in French debates about post-colonial immigration, national identity, republican citizenship, and the enduring legacies of French imperialism. This article explores the role played by representations of the team in those debates with a particular focus on the so-called “affaire des quotas” of 2010–2011. It argues that those representations reveal that the boundary between the purportedly inclusive civic nationalism of French republicanism according to which any person willing to embrace the duties and rights of democratic citizenship may theoretically become French, and the exclusionary ethnic nationalism of the xenophobic Front national is far less impermeable than is generally assumed in France. Indeed, race and ethnicity inform notions of French citizenship even among persons who reject the essentialist views of the Far Right.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 101–121 (21 total)
Race and the Micropolitics of Mobility
Mobile Autoethnography on a South African Bus Service
Bradley Rink
between race, gender, class, safety, and convenience that complicate the South African transportation landscape, as well as the normative discourses of mobility that privilege some practices while restricting others. 1 My bus travel takes place in a
Theorising Race
Imagining Possibilities
Kira Erwin and Gerhard Maré
This special issue emerges from a concern with academic practice around researching and theorising race, racialism and racism; particularly within the current theoretical climate in which race is, in the majority, accepted as a social construct. In public thinking and discourse, however, acceptance of the biological existence of races continues to dominate in many societies. Racial classification also continues in many state practices in South Africa such as the collection of racial demographics though the national census, and through countless private and public officials reporting towards government-stipulated race-based employment acts. These classification practices raise contradictions for the constitutional goal of non-racialism in South Africa. South Africa has also signed and ratified the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Professional Interest/Pages/CERD.aspx), which aims to eliminate racial discrimination in member states. The convention, to which member states are legally bound, raises a number of pressing issues that, to date, are not present in a wider national debate on the continued use of race in South African state policy. For example, there is little recognition by the state of the difficulties associated with identifying a targeted group based on race, nor clarity as to whether these groups are identified through markers based on phenotype, or socio-economic or cultural differences. Nor is there open discussion on the use of terms such as fair and unfair discrimination and how they relate to terms such as distinction and differentiation (see Bossuyt 2000), and the legal consequences of using such terms.
‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’
Alfred Métraux, American Social Science and UNESCO's Anti-Racist Campaign in 1950s Paris
Alice L. Conklin
accept a position at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as head of a new bureau on race relations, and he was wondering what books to buy to help him in his new job. Hardly an expert on race matters himself
In Durkheimian Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 107–132 (26 total)
Toxic Waste and Race in Twenty-First Century America
Neighborhood Poverty and Racial Composition in the Siting of Hazardous Waste Facilities
Michael Mascarenhas, Ryken Grattet, and Kathleen Mege
Environmental justice studies investigate the role of race, class, and other social attributes in the uneven distribution of environmental hazards. A major line of inquiry has been about the placement of toxic waste facilities and the demographic
In Environment and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 108–126 (19 total)