Twentieth-century France invented for itself an "exception" that successfully preserved the French culture industry. Postcolonial France is experiencing another "French exception" that renders a "virtuous racism" commonplace and legitimates the discrimination that expresses this racism by identifying the undesirable "new French" as scapegoat figures. Four gender-specific stereotypes strengthen the belief that there is a form of sexism exclusive to the segregated neighborhoods of the suburbs that are inhabited primarily by French people of immigrant and colonial descent. Associated with the central figure of the garçon arabe are the beurette, the veiled Muslim French woman, and the secular Muslim. The article argues that the model of abstract, universalist France has become one of a fundamentalist republicanism that plays diverse expressions of otherness and singular identities off of one another in order to preserve a soft regime of oppression.
The Other French Exception
Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2006
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–41
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 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.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–23
Not an Immigrant Country?
Non-Western Racism and the Duties of Global Citizenship
Adam K. Webb
The rise of non-Western societies, especially in Asia, to greater global influence demands greater scrutiny of how they engage the rest of the world. To date, every society with high levels of immigration is in Europe or a product of the European empires. The erosion of ethnically and racially inflected understandings of citizenship has also gone much further in the modern West than in East Asia or the Gulf States. Notably, however, liberal political theorists who make the case for a cosmopolitan opening of borders remain silent on such non-Western patterns of racial exclusion. Non-Western societies often claim that, because they are 'not an immigrant country', they should not be held to the same standards of openness and non-discrimination. International law, a product of the postcolonial moment, also has a blind spot on these issues. This article challenges such double standards. It suggests that the implicit normative argument for greater Western openness – collective guilt over the colonial experience and resulting racial stratification – leads in unexpected directions, implicating Asian societies in ways that they do not yet recognise.
“China gives and China takes”
African traders and the nondocumenting states
Shanshan Lan
the various non-documenting strategies practiced by different levels of state agents ( Haugen 2012 ; Li et al. 2012 ). I identify economic interests, everyday racism, and ideological concerns as three major factors in shaping the nonrecording tactics
Erin Ash
regard to issues of race. First, the savior film’s focus encourages perceptions of white benevolence, providing justification for the denial of the continued existence of racism that, as Michael Lacy argues, “features white innocence, while maintaining
Liesa Rühlmann and Sarah McMonagle
This article highlights issues of Othering and linguicism and identifies the challenges of undoing taboos of race and racism in popular and academic discourses in Germany. We discuss the prospect of introducing critical race theory to expose these issues that we see as especially urgent, as Germany remains host to very large numbers of international migrants. A monolingual and monocultural idea of Germany does not befit this country of immigration in the twenty-first century.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 93–100
“We Must Talk about Cologne”
Race, Gender, and Reconfigurations of “Europe”
Beverly Weber
recognition of racism and the avoidance of racist language at the same time. Examples include a march of over 1,000 women against sexual violence who joined an anti-Pegida demonstration in Cologne in early January, as well as a group who started an open letter
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 68–86
Albert H. Friedlander
An American Appreciation
Amy-Jill Levine
orthopraxy, including the topic of the state of Israel, tended to divide Jewish students; his explicitly Jewish concern, informed by the Shoah, for addressing racism in the United States in the 1960s; his approach to Jewish–Christian relations with attention
Jayson Harsin
Based on news video archives, this article employs critical frame and content analysis to analyze representations of the 2005 French banlieue riots on France's most-watched television station, TF1. Cultural racism theory is then used to analyze the results to demonstrate the discursive nature of the TF1 frames and the contexts of institutional racism they left out but which historians, ethnographers, and theorists of cultural racism suggest are crucial to understanding racial conflict in contemporary France. The most frequent frames blamed non-integrating cultures and illegal immigration. That is, race was coded in cultural traits of a problematic sub-group without mentioning it specifically.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 47–73
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