AAAS 68.10 Race, Gender and Class in "Postcolonial" France: Memories, Space, Time, and Intersectionality
French national narrative, as shown in media and taught in the schools, marginalizes the ways in which the slave trade, slavery and the colonial empire have shaped the social, political, economic and cultural making of France. This narrative is one that continues to ignore the African presence, now on French soil for centuries, as does it consider its Black and Muslim citizens as second-class. Moreover, to French society, racism became an opinion rather than an ideology and the colonial past a forgotten chapter with the collapse of the French colonial empire in 1962 at the end of the war in Algeria. Yet, reports and studies from governmental and non-governmental antiracism associations document and denounce the existence of racial discrimination and racism in everyday life, which echo past representations and practices. Indeed, social and cultural movements continue to question silences on the colonial past and how it facilitates anti-Black racism. In this course, we will explore how the coloniality of republican power – the ways in which processes of racialization continue to operate and to create spaces of greater vulnerability – are rooted in a historical context of slavery that continues to operate after 1962 as well as the counter-narratives and cartographies that have emerged in response.
Instructor
Keaton