The Politics of Resistance of the Post-Colonial African

The Relation between Race and the State: The Politics of Resistance of the Post-colonial African

Diaspora in France.

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree Master of Arts in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Omar Dieng, M.A

Graduate Program in African American and African Studies

The Ohio State University

2018

Thesis Committee:

Cheikh Thiam, Adviser

Kwaku Korang

Monicka Brodnicka

Omar Dieng

2018

Abstract

The black population in France is still not accepted as a racial identity because of the concern of preserving the myth of colorblindness. While they are not officially viewed as a racial identity, black people go through an overt racial discrimination because of the color of their skin. This racial discrimination is recurrent in the political spectrum, through the derogatory and divisive rhetoric of political leaders, as well as in public life, but it is often explained as a social rather than a racial problem. This racial discrimination is accompanied by a systematic silencing of black people, which makes it difficult for them to tackle the racial issue from a racial perspective. Any attempt at claiming one’s rights from a racial standpoint is thought to be incongruous with “values” of the French nation. The silencing of the discourse on race through the notion of colorblindness and the perpetration of racial practices make the life of people of

African descent difficult as to how they should go about defending themselves within the French nation-state. In this respect, after giving a theoretical analysis of the Western states—based on my conception that they are founded from anti-black principles, I focus on people of African descent in France to see how they negotiate their space, how they grapple with their identity, and more importantly what strategies of resistance they adopt in reaction to racism and racial discrimination. In that sense, my main point is that the African-centered expression of belonging of people of African descent is a neo-discourse of modernity because it implies the reconciliation of Blackness and Frenchness. This helps me clarify that the African-centered expression of belonging implies that multiculturalism cannot only be achieved from an integrationist or anti- negritudist perspective, but through the assertion of blackness for visibility.

Dedication

To my beloved parents, brothers, and sisters for their daily support and prayers. To all my friends in Senegal and in the United States for their consistent mental support.

iii

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes first to Allah, the Almighty, for giving me the mental strength and the physical capacity to complete this part of my academic journey. I also thank my academic adviser, Cheikh Thiam, not only for his insightful feedback on my works, but also for his mental support in this completely different environment. Many thanks to Dr. Brodnicka for her useful advice and informative corrections of my work, and to Dr Korang whose theoretical background has helped me clarify a lot of fundamental questions throughout these couple of years. I also owe thanks to the Graduate Chair, Dr. Van Beurden, who has made my transition to the African

American and African Studies program a very smooth process.

I would like to also give special thanks to my brother Ousmane Dieng and his wife, Mareme, who both live in Montreal. As a nearby family, they are a source of relief for my homesickness.

So many thanks to my loyal friend Yaadam Jobe for her daily help in smoothly adjusting in the

United States since the beginning, and to Babacar Diouf, my childhood friend, for always reminding me that I can make it. I am finally thankful and grateful to all my Buckeye friends.

Vita

2009-2012……………..……………………B.A, Dual Degree in American and British Studies and In African and Postcolonial Studies, Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal

2012-2014………………..………………..M.A in African and Postcolonial Studies, Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal

2015 – 2016…………………….……………1st Year in French and Francophone Studies M.A

Program, Miami University, Columbus, OH

2016 to Present ……..…………………………….. Graduate Associate, M.A in African American

and African Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Publication

Dieng, Omar. Review of Hope Draped in Black, Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, by Joseph R. Winters, Spectrum (6.1), Fall 2017, pp. 135-137.

Fields of Study

African American and African Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………..iii

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………….....iv

Vita…………………………………………………………………………………………….….v

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………....1

Chapter 1: The Modern State and Race………………………………………………………..8

Chapter 2: Blackness and the Politics of Resistance in the Postcolonial African

Diaspora………………………………………………………………………………..………..28

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………46

Works Cited………………………….………………………………………………………….49

Introduction

Major precolonial counter-modern discourses have indeed struggled against the threat to black subjectivity and humanity but their relevance to the current condition, experience, and politics of blackness in the postcolonial African diaspora is problematic. Put differently, although the pre- independence literary productions and movements such as Negritude contributed in the effort to

“restore” black subjectivity worldwide, they were mostly inscribed in a political context of anti- colonialism. I attempt, however, to look at the lived experience of people of African descent in the postcolonial European nation-states and their politics of resistance to better grasp their current diasporic reality.

This racial discrimination is recurrent in the political spectrum, through the derogatory and divisive rhetoric of political leaders, as well as in public life but it is often explained as a social rather than a racial problem. This racial discrimination is accompanied by a systematic silencing of black people, which makes it difficult for them to tackle the racial issue from a racial perspective. Any attempt at claiming one’s rights from a racial standpoint is thought to be incongruous with “values” of the French nation. Put simply, the state does not welcome any attempt of tackling black people’s suffering from a racial perspective. The silencing of the discourse on race through the notion of colorblindness and the perpetration of racial practices make the life of people of African descent difficult as to how they should go about defending 1

themselves within the French nation-state. In this respect, after giving a theoretical analysis of the Western states—based on my conception that they are founded from anti-black principles, I focus on people of African descent in France to see how they negotiate their space, how they grapple with their identity, and more importantly what strategies of resistance they adopt in reaction to racism and racial discrimination.

The current racist rhetoric of Western states towards its minorities is not a new phenomenon. It is the actualization of the racist construction of the modern nation-state. The effects of the racist construction of modern nation-states such as exclusion and discrimination are often addressed as racism. According to Charles Mills, however, the world has been created in priori through what he terms as Racial Contract, which is, as he claims:

The preliminary conceptual partitioning and corresponding transformation of

human populations into “white” and “nonwhite” people, the purpose of which “is

always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the

non-whites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and

the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them (11).

Racial practices are not mere individual actions, they are rooted in a historical and ideological structure secured by the state apparatus. Mills makes it clear that “from the inception, race, is in no way an “after thought” or “deviation” from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but rather a central shaping constituent of those ideals” (14).

By the same token, Michelle Omi and Howard Winant argue that “the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so called “phenotype”), selection of these

particular human features for purpose of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process” (123). Racial formation is constitutively and ideologically exclusive. Its exclusionary aspect operates through what Omi and Winant call “racial projects”, which are large-scale public actions, state activities, and interpretations of racial conditions…” (128).

Racial project is the means by which the discriminatory purpose of the racial formation is completed; it is the manifestation of race through day to day practices. These racist practices are inscribed in the racial social structure. They make it clear that:

Discrimination, far from manifesting itself only (or even principally) through

individual actions or conscious policies, was structural of US society, the product

of centuries of systematic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially

defined minorities (133).

This process of racial formation through the construction of the other for purpose of permanent exclusion by social practices can also be representative of the French Nation. The French nation is racially constructed and provides the grounds for racist practices. I elaborate on this point in the second chapter of this paper.

Non-whiteness is ontologically tied to servitude and subalternity in the Western construction of the modern world. That constructed subaltern is that which can account for the sense of superiority of the dominant. This is what Denise Ferreira da Silva, also, demonstrates in her book Toward a Global Idea of Race. She argues that without that which is constructed as inferior, savage, subhuman, the dominant--that is the European--, could not be imagined as the

“modern man”. In other words, the “other” is not a result from the racist construction of the modern state, it is its condition of existence. 3

After the demonstration of the racist-based nation-state through the distinction of human species, the top of which is the European man (the rational Being), it is important to see how black scholars constructed a counternarrative discourse to assert themselves. The European modern narrative depiction of the black subject as the other was not left unchallenged. There are many ways in which, through history, Black scholars reacted to the dehumanizing portrayal of the Black. Enrique Dussel refers to this reaction to European modernity as “transmodernity”.

Transmodernity is the multicultural construction of the non-European world emerging from the different reactions to European modernity. This multicultural formation can be seen, as described by Dussel, in Paris where a great number of Black people from America, the West Indies and

Africa met to construct a counternarrative discourse of Western Modernity. Pius Adesanmi focuses on the Francophone African novel to show how it constructed a Black trans-modern voice under the aegis of the politico-cultural movement of Negritude (3150). In the same respect,

Cedric Tolliver’s text, “Making Culture Capital: Présence Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in

Post-world war II Paris”, demonstrates how Black intellectuals focused on culture to assert their subjectivity in the metropole through their texts. His analysis follows the creation of the journal

Présence Africaine by Alioune Diop in 1947 and how it allowed black intellectuals to focus on culture as a prerequisite to assert black visibility and fight against assimilation.

It is important, however, to mention that the relationship that these black scholars had with France is not the same as the one current black populations have with France. Therefore, though important, focusing on these Black scholars’ counter-modern discourses centered on anticolonial politics and the desire to assert their denied subjectivity and humanness does not allow us to account for the current lived experience and the politics of resistance of the

postcolonial African/Black diaspora in Europe, particularly in France which is the case study for my project.

I suggest that we look at the issue of blackness and Africanness in the present state of affairs. Just as the racist narrative of European modernity was part of the justification of the colonization of African people, so too was the counternarrative discourse of Black scholars inscribed in an anti-colonial struggle. Thus, I am skeptical about the assumption that this historical black counternarrative discourse can still be necessarily representative or applied to the current politics of blackness in Europe in this postcolonial context. Because of the shift from the colonial to the postcolonial context, the politics of blackness necessary changes, so is the relationship with the former colonial states. Within that relationship lie the issues of belonging, identity and racial discrimination on which I wish to elaborate in the following pages. I abstain, however, from automatically portraying Negritude, for instance, as an irrelevant and essentialist strategy of belonging in postcolonial African diaspora in France as I believe that it still has a relevance as far as political and cultural resistance (black visibility) are concerned.

In that respect, with the second and third generation immigrants the meaning of

Africanness/Blackness and Frenchness has become more complex. There is generational difference related to how Africanness and Frenchness are conceived. Within the anti-colonial context, identifying with Frenchness was widely considered antagonistic to Africanness. The ways in which people of African descent express their identity and claim their rights as French citizens in today’s France will be given a close attention in this paper.

Chapter One, “The Modern state and Race,” offers a theoretical analysis of the foundation of the modern nation-state with a close focus on its discourse of separation, 5

exclusion, and systematic violence on the black subject. Here, I discuss the state in relation to modernity and raciality. I attempt to demonstrate how the dichotomous discourse of European modernity marginalized the African/black subject and how it shapes the world we live in today. I follow the claim of scholars such as Da Silva’s that the undying character of racism is due to its constitutive part in the construction of the European modern nation-state along with the invention of Man: the rational being. In fact, the enlightenment and post-enlightenment dichotomous conception of the world has placed the African and the Black in a paradigmatic existential suffering which is secured and systematized by the western nation-states. My approach to this Western nation states’ constitutive racism is not a pessimistic one as I try to demonstrate the ways in which it could be challenged by focusing on the liberating actions of the oppressed.

Demonstrating the dehumanization of non-European spaces and subjects will allow me to think of the current problem that the African diaspora in France is experiencing as inevitable. In this respect, the impact of the racist conception of the state is explained in chapter Two,

“Blackness and the Politics of Resistance in the Postcolonial African Diaspora,” with a focus on people of African descent in France. I analyze the state’s exclusionary policy of integration and citizenship and its resistance to multiculturalism. After analyzing the conservative and monolithic conception of the meaning of Frenchness by French people of European ancestry, which is rooted in nativism and secured by the system of assimilation, I focus on people of

African descent’s strategy of belonging and resistance in the postcolonial African diaspora. My main point is that the African-centered expression of belonging of people of African descent is a neo-discourse of modernity because it implies the reconciliation of Blackness and Frenchness.

This helps me clarify that the African-centered expression of belonging implies that multiculturalism cannot only be achieved from an integrationist or anti-negritudist perspective, but through the assertion of blackness for visibility. I try to avoid centering the race debate exclusively on the racial state’s effect on its minority subjects by giving a strong consideration of the actions taken by the latter to produce a counter-argument in both literature, social, and political movements. Again, to account for this current identity construction and resistance of people of African descent, I try to distance myself from the colonial black diasporic counter- modern narrative and look closely at the second and third generation migration literature which

Jacques Chevrier calls Migritude. I attempt to investigate the ways in which people of African descent living in France negotiate their presence and develop a politics of resistance and inclusion that challenges France’s racial state while avoiding to fall in the trap of an invention of a homogenized black France or an essentialist sense of Africanity.

Chapter 1

The Modern State and Race

Growing up in Senegal, I had little knowledge of the effects of racism or anti-blackness.

What I did know about race in the Western world, I learned from reading old history books that were available to me. Because those old books discussed major past events such as slavery, colonization, the Holocaust, and Jim Crow, I tended to always categorize race as an issue of the past. It was after I moved to the Western world, to the United States especially, that I realized that the narratives that I read about slavery and Jim Crow, though legally abolished, persisted in our current life through different ways. My first weeks in the United States were marked by a feeling of fear resulting from recurrent police brutality or shootings on Black bodies.

Surprisingly enough, I was shocked to discover that in most cases, police officers would easily be acquitted after causing the death of a black person. While I impatiently waited for their conviction for the murders they committed, I was consistently disappointed to see that no reasonable legal punishment was imposed on them. Such reality among others made me realize that there is a structural system which facilitates and normalizes the violence and the discrimination against black people. In other words, I said to myself that if the killing and the systematic racial subordination of black people in the Western world is so repetitive, it is because the black subject does not receive any protection as a human being from the state. The precarious life of the black subject in the Western world motivated me to look more carefully into racism and think about it from the state perspective in order to see why it persists even though it is widely criticized as abnormal. In that sense, this chapter seeks to analyze the institutionalization 8

of “the white man’s” (the European Man) domination on the “other” (the Black) through the construction of the modern nation state strengthened by the rhetoric of modernity and raciality which marks the existential suffering of the Black as a normalized phenomenon.

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While the modern concept of race is widely tied to the discourse of enlightenment and post-enlightenment, the hierarchization of human species predated the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s racial categorization. Perhaps, the particularity of this enlightenment discourse resides in the parallel emergence with the construction of the modern nation-state which I wish to portray as a strategic tool of identification and exclusion of the Black subject. By way of showing the inherent racial ideology of Western epistemology, I want to briefly introduce Pierre

H. Boulle’s rereading of Francois Bernier as a rarely studied pre-enlightenment theorist of noble race. Focusing on Bernier’s text, the “Nouvelle Division de la Terre », Bouille shows how he categorized and defined other races as anomalous in relation to the European whom he took for granted as the standard human being. His racial distinction was based on the invention of a hierarchical ladder, the top of which is occupied by the white Europeans with their “other” who is more or less vilified depending on how distant he/she is to whiteness.

This racist-motivated differentiation refers to what Deleuze presents as “an enjoyment of difference” in providing explanation for Nietzsche’s racist principles of value-judgement. In his

Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche legitimates the master’s self-proclamation as the powerful and the good while criticizing the slave for his visceral feeling of resentment. As he deliberately puts it, ‘’ The nobles felt themselves to be men of higher rank’’(GM I: 5). He thinks of this self- assertion as something that is not linked to the other (the slave). To better explain Nietzsche’s 9

conception of master morality, Deleuze holds that the master’s self-assertion has nothing to do with the other, it is just rooted in an enjoyment of difference:

In Nietzsche the essential relation of one force to another is never conceived of as

a negative element in the essence. In relation with the other the force which

makes itself obeyed does not deny the other or that which is not, it affirms its own

difference and enjoys this difference (8-9).

I believe, however, that this enjoyment of difference cannot be relational, it is a feeling of pleasure which derives from the oppression, the denial, and the dehumanization of the other. In other words, this enjoyment of difference cannot be detached from the suffering of the other in that it is a measurement against the other. One enjoys their difference when they represent a dominant or hegemonic position. Nietzsche’s “yes” (self-affirmation of the dominant) is not opposed to the dialectical “no”. I would argue that the “yes,” which is an enjoyment of difference, is also a “no” because it negates that which is not the same. Therefore, the resentment of the slave is, of course, a “no” to a “yes” which essentially negates him or her, and this “no saying” of the slave or the black represents his/her life as an endless moment of contestation within the Western state/world.

While, through Nietzsche, power manifests itself through the master’s enjoyment of difference, according to Foucault, this power is relational, unpossessed, and unfixed. In addition to its relationality, power is not always something oppressive. As he argues, “one cannot impute to me the idea that power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom” (123). Contrary to Foucault’s description of the relation of power as” a game of two or multiple free subjects in which power dynamic is interchangeable, reversible, and 10

unstable” (123), I believe that people do not think of themselves as embodying powerful characteristics individually but rather, they always claim power based on social, national, and biological affiliation. I even wonder whether we can talk about power when it is unstable. In other words, since subjects do not practice power in a fixed way, they do not and cannot possess power at all. For the “institutional success of racial exclusion”, as Theo Goldberg argues, there needs to be a “suitable authority,” which “distinguishes the beneficiaries of the entitlement from those to be restricted in their enjoyment or denied their rights, goods, and services” (304). That is why power is more structural and stable than relational.

Foucault goes on to argue that he does not “see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him” (129). That knowing subject, however, is predictably and structurally conceived to be a non-black. In Nietzsche’s case, one would ask how does one become noble? Both Nietzsche and Foucault appear to be evasive of the question of race, of power as a conflictual, oppressive, and antagonistic element. Power, conceived from Foucault’s perspective, envisages a harmonious and better future. Placing the practice of power within the institution of the nation-state, however, would help account for the marginalization of those whose origin, color, and history is different from the “normal” or the mainstream ones. I decide to focus on the nation-state because it is the institution which systematically sustains racial exclusion or discrimination that is thought of to be legally abolished or left behind.

The nation-state emerged within the dichotomous Western epistemology and philosophy.

Power as an enjoyment of difference (Nietzsche) and as a stable and non-relational element (in

objection to Foucault’s argument) can only be thought of in relation to the constructed, negated, and dehumanized Other. Da Silva reveals that the dominant depends on the existence of the

Other in order to materialize his “superiority”. Without that which is constructed as inferior, savage, and subhuman, the dominant (the European), could not be imagined as the “modern man”. In other words, the “other” is not a result of the construction of the modern state, as

Nietzsche would posit, it is its condition of existence. As she argues:

The transparent I be/comes(comes into being as a self-determined thing) against

that which needs to be written as not the same as itself, that is, an affectable

“other,” the bearer of a difference that cannot be resolved (sublated or reduced)in

time (…) the national subject, the liberal “I” actualized in the U.S. social

(juridical, economic, and moral) configuration, was manufactured at the same

time and with the same political-symbolic strategies, the tools of raciality, that

produced its subaltern “other” (17).

The disappearance of the other would result in the destruction of the “Transparent I”, which would occasion the end of this world. This also, refers to Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry”: The necessity of the creation of that which is supposed to be like the dominant, the white or colonizer, but would never be. In the construction of the European Man, the rational being, mimicry was expected to shape the existential life of the Black. It is that constant mimicry which positions the European as the standard of human beings. Da Silva’s analysis can help understand that racial practices are just effect of this systematic and structural racial construction of the modern world.

One can say that the “knowledge arsenal” that constructed the black as a threat is still rampant. The “ghost” of raciality imposes the black body to carefully carry itself in the public space because it was not constructed as part of human subjects. As Fanon puts it “in the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body” (90). The invention of the “rational man” constructed the black man as a savage and this phenomenon is still being reenacted in multiple ways. That is why even when the black person embodies all the cultural characteristics constructed as normal (the constructed attributes of whiteness), their blackness reflects the image of the Other.

………

The Western states’ vehiculation and universalization of the idea of modernity obfuscates and overlooks the oppressive side of it. Western traditional philosophy and epistemology is entirely rooted in separation and differentiation that denies the existence and the humanity of others (Mbembe 2). Some people are supposed to be naturally endowed with this reason while others can only achieve it through a process of civilization. It is this system of reasoning that reduced black people to beasts and savages. The way the Europeans conceive the world is supposed to be universally valid and at the same time invalidates other possibilities of being. The “genealogy of modern liberalism”, as Lisa Lowe coins it, was the new guiding principles of colonization. This genealogy of modern liberalism is the system of racial categorization of those who are fit and those who are unfit for liberty in the liberal society (7). It is under these new principles of division that Europeans spread their empires in a stated purpose of civilization. Europeans dehumanized and demoralized black people, under their own principles of humanity and liberty, and consequently made it their “burden” to civilize them.

To disrupt the universal scope of modernity and its attachment to Europeans and whiteness, Timothy Mitchell suggests that “we talk neither of a singular modernity that defines all other histories in its terms, nor of the easy pluralism of alternative modernities” (xii). He rather argues that we should grant modernity its project of singularity and universalism because this universalism, according to him, cannot be successfully complete. This incompleteness inevitably occurs due to the fact that the elements that are considered incompatible with the modern or the Western “infiltrate and contaminate modernity.” These following lines can better illustrate Mitchell’s argument:

Development and forces external to any possible definition of the essence of

capitalist modernity continually redirect, divert, mutate, and multiply the

modernity they help constitute, depriving it of any essential principle, unique

dynamic, or singular history... The modern occurs only by performing the

distinction between the modern and the non-modern, the West and the non-west,

each performance opening the possibility of what is figured as non-modern

contaminating the modern, displacing it, or disrupting its authority (12/26).

How can, however, the already otherized and externalized forces or elements of modernity, which operate essentially as subalterns within this modernity, work for its disruption? It is even in the interest of the “modern subjects” (the Whites) to claim that they are being contaminated. It is that constant claim that leads to the oppression and exclusion of the Black. Furthermore, the idea of contamination cannot disrupt the authority of the modern, it just helps reiterate and reenact, through time, what it means to be modern, hence the constant repression of the

“contaminant”, a process which is the essence of modernity institutionalized through the state apparatus.

Modernity’s oppressive and exclusionary nature can only be revealed and disrupted through methods such as Achile Mbembe’s. Mbembe’s concept of arbitrariness in his text, On

The Postcolony, demonstrates how colonialists (in today’s context I would say the United

Nations and Human Rights Organization as they impose their notion universalism on other parts of the world) made use of language to denigrate the indigenous traditional way of life under the pretext of civilization. Arbitrariness, from a Western perspective, is how African traditional societies resorted to myth and fable (Mbembe 4). In this view, African indigenous people did not have the capacity of reasoning because they were in a state of nature. Thus, for a justification of their presence in Africa, the colonialists had to reduce Africans to nothingness. Later on,

Mbembe notes how in reality arbitrariness resides implicitly in inflicting torture and killing without being accountable to anyone which is the monopoly of Western states (13). This terminological twist is significant because it precludes the automatic connection of such negative terms (arbitrariness, savagery etc.) as synonymous with Africanness.

Mbembe has demonstrated how the early and late modern state “instrumentalized human existence” in order to “lawfully” exercise power over the constructed other (14). The division of human species according to biologic attributes proved the racial thinking of Western epistemology. Today’s world follows this dichotomous epistemology through cultural forms and practices that are disparagingly tied to black people and used as a subterfuge for oppression. The sovereignty of modernity, according to Mbembe, is measured on the capacity to eliminate that which is considered a threat, the other or the Black (18). This is the theory of necropolitics that

Mbembe makes use of by demonstrating the violent existential characteristics of modernity through slavery, apartheid and colonization. The evil of colonization and its aftermath was committed under the aegis of that notion of sovereignty (a self-proclaimed power to subdue, ostracize and put to death), and its persistence (the contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death) is well grasped by Mbembe through the term necropolitics.

The different meaning that Mbembe gives to arbitrariness (a term tied to

Africanness/Blackness by the rhetoric of modernity) is compelling in that it shows the contradiction of giving oneself the “burden” to civilize a society or a race and simultaneously using a barbaric method of subjugation. This implicit and intentional contradiction is indeed the rationale of the project of imperialization, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the current global antiblackness as it is strategically shown in Anibal Quijano’s juxtaposition of “modernity and/coloniality” (qtd Mignolo 451). The latter is the condition of possibility for the former, but the rhetoric of modernity works to obfuscate the dependence of Western sovereignty on coloniality. As Mignolo cleverly puts it, “The rhetoric of modernity works through the imposition of “salvation,” whether as Christianity, civilization, modernization and development after world war II…” (463). The relationship between the western states and that of Africans is rooted in this historical hierarchical dynamic that is muted under such positive signifiers as democracy, justice, development. The claimed or stated positivity of modernity went in tandem with its negative impact on its constructed and constitutive other. As Mignolo reported and strengthened Dussel’s argument, “modernity is not an exclusively European phenomenon but constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity” (457).

The narratives that demonstrate the contradiction of the Western civilization are still not as powerful as the ones that keep putting whiteness at the center of human civilization.

Nonetheless, we can best account for this contradiction through the critical eyes of Aime Cesaire.

In trying to elucidate the real meaning of colonization for instance, Cesaire warns us against the trick that it plays on the mind of the colonized. He argues that “the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them” (32). For Cesaire, put simply, colonization is equal to “thingification” (42), so one should not be convinced to believe the discourse that grants it some positive aspects on the colonized people. Along the same line Bhabha makes it clear that

“the objective of colonial discourse is to construct the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origins in order to justify conquest and to establish system of administration and instruction” (102). This corrosive benevolence is also being reenacted on black people in the West. For instance, In the western states context, black people are tied to such negative practices as rape, theft, violence, prone to diseases as a way to police their lives.

Cesaire’s text does not only insightfully clear the confusion that people make between colonialism and humanism, but also between what is democracy and anti-blackness in the current context.

As Sylvia Wynter argues, along the same line as da Silva, the racial classification under which the modern society bases to discriminate against black people has been structurally implemented in the construction of the nation-state (47). She points out the two phases in the

Europeans’ self-proclamation of the Human and its attributes. The first is separation from

Christian theological conception of the world resulting in the invention of man, and the second

being the imperial role based on the biological distinction (bioeconomic subject) of human subjects. It is this historical racial classification, under which the nation was built, that allows white supremacists to perpetrate their racist actions. In the United States, the police officer who recently uttered that “we only kill black people” rehearses the structural racial thinking under which the country was founded. The “lawfully-made” structure that represented the black body as a beast reappears incessantly in today’s world through different forms of oppression. The reality is that despite the “progression” in the race relation problem, it still seems to be normal to violate black body.

This violation often operates under the mechanism of discipline. It is this rhetoric of discipline which obfuscates the atrocities of the state on black people. The rhetoric of discipline is mostly noticeable when the state decrees what Giorgio Agamben calls the “state of exception.”

State of exception is, according to Agamben, the creation of state emergency (civil war, in a period of instability) as a way to implement totalitarian, undemocratic decision that would in the longer run take the nature of law (2). Although the state of exception is often justified by the need of the state to preserve society from any internal and external threat, it’s main target happens to be the Black. When the state of exception is made used of by western state for internal matters, it is usually about how to control the life of the Black through terms such as

“war on crime,” “law and order” etc. While Agamben has portrayed the effect of the state of exception in a more general sense, Simone Browne has characterized it as an anti-black phenomenon. Through the notion of “surveillance”, which I consider as a paradigmatic branch of state of exception, Browne demonstrates the centrality of blackness to modern surveillance technologies. The life of black people has historically been tied to control dating back to the

middle passage with the slave ship until now. As she puts it “Surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is the fact of antiblackness” (10). In the current context, state surveillance refers to the constant police targeting of black people. It is this target that Browne refers to as racialized surveillance which basically is a regulatory technology of social control which is meant to discriminate against the racialized other. One example can be “mugging” which is a type of crime that directly alludes to black people. Mugging is a racialized crime under which the state bases to inflict violence on the black body. While mugging is an effect of a structural impoverishment of black people, it is characterized by the state (i, e, the British and U.S states) as a primary cause of social instability for a justification of state violence (Hall et. al 23).

Al these elements of control characterize the biopolitical state, as Foucault puts it, which operates not through the “jurisdiction over death,” but through the “management of life”. I have to mention that Foucault’s description of the state as a powerfully oppressive institution could be noticed in some of his lectures at College de France. As Stoler makes it clear,

With the demise of sovereign power and the rise of disciplinary regimes, the

political technology of biopower begins to take shape. Invested in the

management of life not the jurisdiction over death, this technology will convert a

discourse of races into a discourse of race, investing the state as protector of

social purifications (81).

This social purification which is the work of the police, as a state apparatus, always results in the death of black subjects which is often portrayed as accidental. Therefore, whether we have moved away from the sovereign power is problematic, Browne would say, because the police

shooting on the black body in the United States for instance, appears as a sort of right over life and death which is the essence of sovereign rule.

With the advent of the modern nation-state which is structurally grounded according to

Goldberg “on racial difference, racial exclusion and exploitation” (16), homogeneity was promoted to the detriment of heterogeneity. He argues that the “management of heterogeneity” in such states as the U.S and England etc. is another form of perpetration of homogeneity. It is the process of keeping at bay the already identified as other from the mainstream “ethnoracial sameness”. For Goldberg, because the hybrid or the heterogenous is a threat to purity, the state proceeds with managing it. This management operates within the discourse of heterogeneity and difference which appeases the heterogenous and makes them feel as part of the homogenous.

This intentional contradiction can be better grasped though these following lines:

Liberal states like Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US that claim to

furnish the structures for heterogeneity to flourish in this sense actually promotes

contradictory aim, purposes that pull in competing directions. Hence the

anachronistic language one hears of “managing diversity,” of “ordering

difference,” of “unifying in difference” (16).

Jean-Loup Amselle thinks along the same line by lumping both the left and right wing political system as racist. He believes that both left republican and the national front, that constitutes the

French political spectrum, are somehow racist. The right functions as racism of purity and the left exercises what he calls racism of metissage (6) The latter functions as a sort of affirmative action toward people of color by identifying them as those who are ontologically helpless and

therefore need support from the government. This benevolent or paternalistic racism of the state is analogous to Goldberg’s notion of management of heterogeneity.

Proponents of multiculturalism can also develop a racist thinking in a sense that even though they accept difference, they still tie some negative attributes to that which is different.

“Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting “affirmative action,” run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are “target groups”, which they have helped to identify and hence produce” (Amselle 7). This represents the systematic paradox of assimilation. Multiculturalism, from the state’s perspective, acknowledges the right to difference but there is a persistent tendency to portray the different as a problem that needs to be managed. I provide the limits of this French multiculturalism in the following chapter.

………

Having shown the impact of the modern Western nation-state and its rhetoric of modernity on blackness worldwide, I now turn to the re-actualization of the nativist conception of the Western nation-states and its impact on Blacks. The same way African states are constructed as the other of the western states, so are the minority black populations who are constantly marginalized in the western nation-state. As Charles Mills puts it, in explaining the ontological black suffering, “those [Blacks] associated with the jungle will take the jungle with them even when they are brought to a more civilized region” (48). This stigmatization is what all black people --whether brought to the west through slavery or immigration-- fight against within the Western nation-state.

Benedict Anderson argues that the foundation of a nation is necessarily based on the common mastery of language. Thus, language is a unifier in that it can be common to people of different origin, and through it, a nation emerges. In this sense, nation is inclusive, hence

Anderson’s refusal to tie it to a racism in formation. For instance, in response to Tom Nairn who believes that racism emerges from nationalism (148), Anderson argues that the two are not related, that “the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and blue or white blood and breeding among aristocracies (149). Put simply, while racism is rooted in class, nationalism is formed through language which is always open and indifferent to origin and race. He concludes that “what the eye is to the lover—that particular eye he or she is born with—language— whatever language history has made his or mother tongue- is to the patriot” (154). Anderson fails to mention that no matter how perfect, for instance, second and third generation Black immigrants speak the French or English language, their patriotism is always doubted because of their blackness which is always tied to foreignness. While it is true that language is inclusive, its mastery does not guarantee belonging and full enjoyment of equality within the nation in the case of black people because of the biological characteristics (whiteness) that is simultaneously tied, along with language, to the nation formation. Still in objection to Anderson, I would argue that racism is constitutive in western nationalism, and not originated in class. As Gilroy puts it,

“The suggestion that no one lives outside the national community is only plausible if the issue of racism is excluded” (54).

Just as Anderson dissociates racism from nationalism, so too does Ernest Renan elide it in his conception of what a nation is. According to Renan, “the fact of sharing, in the past, a

glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, a shared programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together” (19) constitutes the basis of nation formation. In this case people are unified as a nation despite their linguistics and racial differences. While Anderson bases nation formation on language, Renan believes that “suffering in common unifies more than joy does”. History, however, has demonstrated that suffering in common does not necessarily lead to the construction of a unified nation in spite of “differences of race and language”, as Renan says. The participation of Black people (either in the United

States or Europe) in the First and Second World Wars for the restoration of the western nation- states’ sovereignty against the threat of Nazi Germany did not make them belong in the aftermath of the victorious wars. As Dennis Mc Ennerney argues in the case of French West

Indians,

At the beginning of the war, to be French meant, in the eyes of non-white

Martinicans, commitment to equal, universal, and therefore non-racial citizenship.

By the end of the war, the realities of endemic racial discrimination and

stereotyping within free France, the restored republic, and the reworked colonial

union raised question about French identity (269).

Although this historical incidence, in which blacks and whites found themselves fighting for the same cause, could have been an occasion to value blackness, racism reemerged as it was constitutive in the eighteenth-century foundation of the nation-state to exclude the Black.

Therefore, because of, and not in spite of the difference of race and language, as Renan says, common suffering as the basis of nation building is not applicable to Black people simply

because their race is not compatible with the national identity of most western states which is tied to whiteness.

We can even go a little further in history to try to explain why Hannah Arendt’s description of “human condition” elides the black subject. Patrice Douglass criticizes the absence of the assertion of blackness in Arendt’s description of human condition (151) by arguing that the slave is the condition of possibility of the Greek political life which is characterized by freedom, action, and self-rule. As he puts it “without the mention of modern slavery, Arendt has not registered a need to consider the slave as a central figure within the production of the modern human condition” (150). This human condition which refers to Rousseau’s Social Contract, according to Douglass but also to Charles Mills, obfuscates the “darker side of modernity”, which is the violence on the black subject. Hence Mills’s use of the term Racial Contract (A contract between Whites) which unveils the subordination of Blacks within the rhetoric of relational humanity. The elision of blackness in the construction of human condition is being reenacted today through the exclusion of black history in western national narratives.

Again, if suffering was enough for a construction of a unified nation, people of African descent would not be constantly reminded of the color of their skin as a marker of non- belonging. As Gilroy notes in the case of Great Britain,

It is still felt today that black settlers and their British born children are denied

authentic national membership on the basis of their race and, at the same time,

prevented from aligning themselves within the British race on the grounds that

their national allegiance inevitably lies elsewhere (46).

While language and common suffering can make black people theoretically and “legally” eligible for membership in western nation-states, their blackness is considered incompatible with the national identity. In this respect, as Immanuel Wallerstein convincingly argues “boundaries depend on definitions, and that definitions are not universally shared, or even consistent over time” (94). The constant definition of national identity, in the political spectrum for instance, is rooted in the identification of the Blacks in order to systematically and permanently strengthen their exclusion. Nation formation always comes up with a definition and categorization motivated by exclusion. This definition, which associates whiteness to the nation, goes beyond common language and common suffering. It is based on antiblackness as the primary and ultimate criteria for exclusion.

Like Anderson, language is, from Balibar’s perspective, a fundamental element in the formation of national identity. In the construction of a nation-state or what Balibar calls “fictive ethnicity,” there are two elements in play: language and race. These two elements help constantly draw the borders of a nation (165). Since the main purpose of the “fictive ethnicity”, as Balibar refers to French nation, is to identify the other and exclude them; and since linguistic identity is open, race (skin color, cultural practice or origin) becomes the criteria for national boundary. In the linguistic community, people of African descent are excluded from the nation because they either cannot speak French or because they do not speak it like the native. However, the second generation of immigrants who meet the requirements of the linguistic community, in that they speak the French language as natives, escape this exclusion (Balibar 166-167). It is in that sense that the community of race emerges in order to racially redefine the fictive national borders.

Balibar argues:

The symbolic kernel of the idea of race (…) is the schema of genealogy, that is,

quite simply the idea that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation

to generation a substance both biological and spiritual and thereby inscribes

them in a temporal community known as kinship (167-168).

This is a preset secondary process of ethnicization, based on biological relation and heredity, which is designed to redefine the national identity. This analysis has showed how the Western

States’ national identity have come to be race-coded and ethno-racial so much so that whiteness is privileged over the black populations within the “nation”. The western states’ national identity is based on this fictive racial community that tends to universalize its constructed cultural values and reject particularities. While Balibar is more interested in representing race as a cultural phenomenon, I think of it as rooted in antiblackness.

The constitutive nature of racism in the Western nation-states heralded the inevitable ontological resistance of the people of African descent which I analyze in the next chapter. It is a resistance that is permanently based on achieving basic human conditions. In that sense, it becomes the ontological life of the Black in the West. Black people have to scream to be heard, to protest to be seen, and to struggle to live. The way the nation-state is constructed demonstrates the precariousness of blackness in the West.

I do not want to limit my research, however, to describing how the system has constrained or continues to constrain the lives of black people. That is why, not only do I wish to reveal the systemic racist construction of the world, but also decide to highlight the possible liberating and African-centered agency of people of African descent in the Western world. My criticism of the Western structural racism is not the one that only and primarily expect the 26

Western states to cease to be racist and integrate the black other, but one that also shows the ways in which black people can impose the respect of their rights as humans and citizens.

Chapter 2

Blackness and the Politics of Resistance in the Postcolonial African Diaspora

While the early discourses of Black resistance and liberation in the diaspora were based on a “common” strategy of constructing an anti-imperialist discourse which advocated for a dissociation with Frenchness as it was normally tied to whiteness, in this twenty first century postcolonial context, we are witnessing a new neo-modern discourse through the assertion of

Blackness as political expression of being French as Black. In other words, if in the colonial era, the French national identity was obviously tied to whiteness or European ancestry-- a period during which Africans were expected to relinquish their cultural particularities to be eligible for

Frenchness-- in today’s postcolonial context, this nativist conception of Frenchness is constantly being challenged by the presence of people of African descent who claim their rights as citizens from their own conception of what it means to be French. I argue that just as the assertion of cultural specifity and the claim for separation from imperial European state was rooted in a counter-modern discourse, so too, is black people’s expression of belonging to France rooted in a neo-modern discourse. This expression of belonging is a neo-discourse of modernity in that it implies the reconciliation of Blackness and Frenchness. Such reconciliation questions the monolithic conception of Frenchness as tied to people of European ancestry and opens a possibility to a true and strong multiculturalism.

This chapter also analyzes how People of African descent in postcolonial France fight against racial discrimination. This racial discrimination is rooted in the French State’s refusal to

think of today’s France as a multicultural space. The resistance to this monolithic conception of

Frenchness implies not only the reconciliation of blackness and Africanness with Frenchness, but also the respect of the rights of black people in France as normal Black French citizens in a nation-state that refuses to accept and acknowledge its multiracial character. In this respect, in addition to the question of identity (Blackness and Frenchness), this paper discusses the ways in which people of African descent (should) claim their rights as citizens.

A Conservative Conception of Frenchness

There is a relation of causality between the racist or nativist conception of Frenchness and the resistance of people of African descent. Before discussing the ways in which people of

African descent react to their exclusion, I want to focus on how such exclusion manifests itself.

What does it mean to be French, from the perspective of state of the right and left wing political leaders? Frenchness, conceived conservatively, attempts to consistently resist multiculturalism through categorization and exclusion. Both Dominic Thomas and Fred Constant focused on the discriminatory rhetoric of the former right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the impact it had on the Black population in France. This discriminatory rhetoric, according to

Constant, becomes apparent through how Sarkozy re-conceptualized the meaning of

“Frenchness” in a sense that it excludes the non-white groups, especially black people (123-124).

He declares: “To be French is to be the proud heir of a single and shared history for which we have every reason to be proud’’ (qtd in Thomas 116). This definition could be thought of as a visceral and constant feeling of constructing a collective narrative which would remind the mainstream French of the myth of a common origin and history that is tied to the meaning of

Frenchness. This is an attempt to create an effect of unity as a guarantee of a nation, a unity the

criteria of which could never be met by some groups of people in the nation because they are not necessarily part of that “single shared history” that ostensibly defines Frenchness. Consequently,

Dominic Thomas, for example, showed how the influx of immigrants in France was viewed by the French as a threat to the nation – a threat which causes the targeting and the deliberate arrest of minority ethnic groups (113).

In his novel Black Bazaar, Alain Mabanckou criticizes the white French society for not accepting blacks as French by questioning their belonging whenever the country is economically affected. As Mabanckou’s unnamed white French characters say in their discussion about the economic situation of the country, “The state must play its part”, “Urgent times call for drastic measures”, “We need Marshall Plan hic and nunc”, “we need to tighten our belts”, “we need to look at the behavior of those on social benefits, get them to change their habits…” (21). Such scapegoat racism in which minority groups are targeted whenever there is a shortage of resources questions permanently their belonging to the French nation (Stoler 69). But this scapegoat racism does not occur deliberately. It is facilitated by the state which has pre-structured the mechanism of discrimination based on racial distinction and categorization. Nicholas Sarkozy’s attempt to create the ministry of immigration and national identity by targeting non-whites as a threat to the “French traditional values” is an example. This decision, however, created more divisions than it claimed to avoid because hegemonic homogenization or uniformity always threatens cultural particularities. Scapegoat racism cannot occur without a prior exclusionary definition of national identity. The definition of the national identity is rooted in the identification of the other in order to exclude them.

French national identity is not a natural unit, however. It is a result of a race-based construction which creates and excludes its other. This race-coded construction of the nation is re-actualized by nativism at both private and public levels. According to Kwame Nimako and

Stephen Small, “nativism is the everyday common sense reminder to Black Europe that they are the “other”, and that there is a formal Europe, namely, white Europe” (223). Because people of

African descent are not thought of to be in conformity with the values, cultural practices, and phenotypic characteristics tied to Frenchness their presence scares those who think that they embody the ideals of a French (European ancestry).

Such nativism attempts to nullify the legal status of citizenship. Nativism constantly questions black people’s citizenship in that it always ties Blackness to its geographic origin and antagonizes it with Frenchness, hence the implicit recurrent racist question “Where are you from?”. In other words, the culture tied to the African origin tends to be looked at as incompatible with European identity in general. This is what Nimako and Small refer to as the

“cultural form of nativism”, which, I think, is justified by assimilation.

Assimilation seeks to invite the Black to comply with that which is essentially conceived as being European or French particularly. As Adlai Murdoch argues, “French Nationalism calls in immigrants to assimilate, blames them for failing to do so, but some stereotypes make this assimilation impossible” (122-3). Paradoxically, the process of assimilation is a constant system of othering. And I believe that it is a paradox that is not accidental but intentional on the part of the French state. On the one hand, assimilation promises equal treatment which, on the other hand, is impossible in reality because of antiblackness. Assimilation envisions that one cannot be French unless they reject their cultural beliefs and embrace the values that are constructed by

the “fictive ethnicity”, as Balibar puts it. Even though embracing the cultural values constructed by the fictive ethnicity might give the sense of belonging, the non-whiteness makes that belonging precarious. Therefore, combining non-whiteness and the embodiment the social and cultural values constructed by the fictive ethnicity makes one occupy a position of liminality in relation to the nation-state.

In this respect, Frantz Fanon can serve as an example. Fanon, as a teenager, innocently took his being French for granted as he was fighting against Nazi Germany beside French troops, but he later discovered the anti-black racism of the French society which led him to adopt a liberationist voice later in his life. Although Fanon was defending the sovereignty of France with other white French people, that did not guarantee his sameness or equality with the white French because of his blackness. He later realizes that his desire to be equally treated with the white

French lies in confronting the system that put him systematically in the perpetual othering

(McEnnerney 262-71). Fanon’s case tells a lot about the intentional contradiction of the French mode of assimilation and integration. My point on the strategy of resistance, which I discuss in subsequent pages, shows that Fanon’s reaction against French assimilationism should be an inspiration for people of African descent in postcolonial France.

The protection of the national identity, which consists in targeting minority ethnic groups for the purpose of immigration regulation, or cultural conformity is a contradictory process in relation to the republican values. If a nation is built from a common struggle against an external threat, then the role that people of African descent played in the First and Second World wars, and in the cold war should not be ignored. And yet, whether they were born in France or took part in the war against Nazi Germany, the image of black people in France is still tied to the

status of “immigrant”. This racial exclusion, indeed, makes it difficult to think of Blacks as

French. In fact, the national identity is constantly defined in such a way that minority ethnic groups are viewed as “foreigners” and therefore a threat.

Strategies of Resistance

The reaction of African descended scholars to this strategic and constant racial exclusion can be explained in different ways. While some blame this exclusion on people of African descent who are believed to be unwilling to integrate by refusing to adopt the way or lifestyle of the “host” country (Mabanckou), others hold that expressing belonging to France can be shown in another way than having to subsume oneself to the mainstream French (the white French) (Constant).

The latter position suggests that it is only by claiming blackness can people of African descent be visible and recognized as French and not as a minority that needs to be permanently incorporated.

According to Mabanckou, the refusal of integration, which is manifested through an essentialist conception of and a constant feeling of return to Africa, contributes to the marginalization of people of African descent. In other words, he criticizes the fact of physically being in France and having one’s mind set in Africa as a “home”. Mabanckou refers to these subjects as « citoyens de l’alternative » who blocks the path for the achievement of “another

France”, as he declares, “Ces pays de substitution ne sont-ils pas autant de freins à l’émergence d’une autre France? En somme un bon nombre de noir de France sont en quelque sorte des citoyens de l’alternative » [These countries of substitution, do they not hamper the existence of another France ? In sum, many black people in France are somehow alternative citizens] (49).

Fatou Diome’s L’homme de Barbes in The Belly of the Atlantic is one example of a « citoyen de 33

l’alernative ». L’homme de Barbes accepts his foreignness as an immigrant and does not show concern about him not having a life in France as he is more concerned about returning home to his own family in order to share with them the least advantage he enjoys in the Hexagon. He is not uncomfortable about his being an outsider as he himself ties Frenchness to whiteness in referring to French people as “they” (“them”) instead of “we” (55-6).

While I agree with Mabanckou that the reference of Africa as a home while living in

France perpetrates non-belonging, there needs to be a clarification between Africans who come to France for specific purposes (education or work) and those for whom France represents a home. The former group refers to what Nimako and Small call “economic migrants”. The economic migrants go to Europe to study “work, legally or undocumented” (229) and are not so much concerned with their ontological existence as Black than are the French-born or the Black who are determined to make France their own home. While the former group is passive on issues of race knowing that they have a substitute space, the latter is more interested in seeing France embrace a multicultural principle of a nation.

Knowing that the economic migrants are not so much concerned with claiming a space as going back home, this paper focuses more on the second group who are people of African descent (who were born in France and) who claim France as their home. This particular focus is motivated by the fact that this paper seeks to look at the ways in which France could be looked at as a multicultural space. Of course, there are instances where the economic migrants find themselves fighting for what they think is their right as humans, but they are not concerned with their being categorized as foreigners, or with raising questions of identity in relation to

Frenchness, as I mentioned above. The African foyer residents in Paris and the sans-papiers of

the Saint-Bernard Church can serve as examples. While the first group claimed to keep their particular social practices intact, the second group expected to receive the benefits that come with citizenship (Gueye 229&231). What I try to show through these two groups is that they are

African immigrants who are solely concerned with the improvement of their social conditions.

Now, how can Black French or French Black (I am using these terms interchangeably for political reasons as my paper seeks to help rethink the ways in which both Blackness and

Frenchness can be normalized and not antagonized) negotiate their space in the diaspora? Again, while some believe that the integrationist strategy is the solution, others hold that showing belonging to France should start with a radical approach, which is the assertion of a Black community/identity for visibility in order to avoid being subsumed as a permanent other or minority.

As integrationists conceive, striving to regain a certain “authenticity” is not a better way to fit into today’s French nation. Mabanckou’s portrayal, in Black Bazaar for instance, has it that this essentialist tendency is unnecessary in that it discourages a cross cultural exchange in the postcolonial diaspora. One has to have a cosmopolitan attitude to be able to live with the other.

As his narrator says in Black Bazaar, “I’m polite and unlike Mr. Hippocratic, I’m very sociable,

I’m open to all sorts of debate and I’m conscious of the way our society of the spectacle is evolving. I am familiar with ways of the world” (121). This is an ethical attitude about how one should live with the other that Mabanckou is offering here. He also acknowledges the difficulty in trying to spring oneself out of this postcolonial reality in which every action of the African subject is defined in relation to the life standard of the former colonizer. Mabanckou’s writing shows an attempt to refuse to fit one’s action into any previous preset racial stereotypes or way

of thinking. For that, individualistic approach is the only way one can go beyond this black and white thinking constructed during colonization. Mabanckou does not only show that there should not be any social norm based on racial identification but also, his actions are not rooted in any sense of faithfulness to any racial thinking. While this attitude is understandable, it should not, however, be adopted at the expense of compromising one’s cultural particularity.

Alain Mabanckou’s analysis of the conditions of Black people in France gives the impression that it is partly the rigid and essentialist conception of Africanness which hampers the move towards “another France”. As he bluntly puts it, « Pour autant, si nous blâmons à juste titre les injustices à notre égard, nous devons aussi nous interroger sur notre attitude, qui nous conduit, dans certains cas, à nourrir des instincts grégaires incompatible avec l’esprit d’une nation [ If we condemn the injustice done to us, we should also question our own attitude, which in some cases, leads us to building gregarious instincts incompatible with the spirit of a nation. (44). While Mabanckou’s criticism of the re-actualization of the essentialist conception of

Africanness is valid in that such behavior does not help build a cohesive nation, he does not propose a way in which racial exclusion could be combated. Instead, he calls for the respect of the republican ideals: Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité by both black and white people as if there was a time in the past when these republican ideals were respected in relation to black people. What is the point of arguing for the respect of these republican values knowing that they were created at the time when Blackness was not considered within the human realm? In other words, these republican values: Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, on which the French nation is founded, were chanted at a time when black people were still oppressed as subhuman.

I believe therefore that the first move for the respect of people of African descent as

French is to assert black visibility. The assertion of Black visibility is important because France is a place where it is against the politics of color blindness to talk about race. The question of race as it pertains to black people is not taken seriously because Black as an identity group is illegitimate in France therefore invisible. Patrick Lozes makes it clear that the silencing of minority groups is historically inherent in the French Republic: “The denial of the existence of discrimination is rooted in French history” (103). Allison Blakely notes that Black identity is still striving to be visible because it is still considered illegitimate by the French Republic. She exposes us to some French scholars’ reaction to the assertion of a Black community: “Actual discussion of ethnic categories in France has been more taboo because of French pride in not having the notorious “Negro problem” of the United States” (289).

The first challenge should be focused on how to unveil the very rationale of this colorblindness, which, I believe, is the perpetration of Black oppression under the guise of the social category. As Fred Constant argues: “Instead of exploring how groups become racially identified over time and how racial conflicts shape French polity and society, mainstream approaches tend to deny race any explanatory powers, instead acknowledging problems of policy, of social engineering, of state management” (147). Black people cannot keep on operating within the nation as a minority that needs to be integrated. I agree with McEnnerney’s accurate reading of Fanon’s sense of resistance when he reports that “black people had to press white France to reveal the prejudices it concealed within, to expose the rifts between white and black French people.” He concludes that “only by this means would it be possible for French

blacks to find themselves, to develop their potential as independent moral beings, and to force white French people to recognize them as different—and French” (274-5).

Not only does Mabanckou’s integrationist mode orient the problem on Blacks (i. e., as if the burden of integration is on Blacks), but also it explains away the racist foundation of the

French nation-state and makes it seem like integration is key to multiculturalism. From

Mabanckou’s perspective, living as black and French requires relinquishing once cultural particularities. While it can be disapprovingly argued that some Africans claim an Africanness in an essentialist and fundamentalist way, what else could they do when that Africanness, no matter how it is expressed, is threatened because it is considered a threat to Frenchness? Mabanckou assumes that to avoid expressing one’s pride in Blackness would result in the construction of

“another France” whereas there are always already pre-set and imposed values considered universal in contrast with others which are depicted as “foreign” and inappropriate within the

French nation unless (and not necessarily) the holders of those values relinquish them. The question of nativism and the exclusionary nature of assimilation that I raised above can best explain the unsustainability of French mode of integration.

On this point, to show that true multiculturalism does not mean integrating to what is conceived as the mainstream, I want to refer to Mokobe Traore. Mokobe’s example shows the possibility of being French without having to move toward or merge into that which is considered mainstream French. Mokobe Traore is better known by Mokobe and was born in

Virtry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb of Paris in 1976. Mokobe is French rapper and originally

Malian. He was born from a transnational African couple; his mother is a Malian-Mauritanian and his father a Malian-Senegalese. This genealogy is significant in understanding his

attachment and fidelity to his roots even though he was born in France. The social environment he emerged from can be thought of as a real source of commitment to social issues. As he declares :

J’ai toujours aimé vivre en cité, parce qu’on vit les uns pour les autres. Le partage

et le mélange sont des choses qu’on ne peut pas trouver ailleurs. J’ai grandi dans

une famille nombreuse. On a appris à vivre avec peu de moyen tout en étant

heureux. [ I have always been enthusiastic living in dorms, because we live for one

another. Sharing and mixing cannot be found anywhere else. I was born in a big

family. We learned to content ourselves with the little we have while keeping

happiness] (bbc.com).

The success in the music industry did not do anything to distance Mokobe from his social background. His particularity lies in his awareness that it is an emergency to show bonds of solidarity with his community. Being born and grown up in this marginal space has impacted a lot Mokobe’s life and has been a great influence in his artistic writings. In fact, whoever lives in the suburbs of France cannot be blind to the phenomenon of racism; that is why Mokobe has dedicated the majority of his works to combatting racism. His struggle against racial discrimination is based on asserting, celebrating the thing for which he is excluded: his social background, his blackness or his African origin.

In this respect, in his hegemonic and rigid definition of Frenchness that I mentioned earlier in this paper, Nicolas Sarkozy refers to people like Mokobe as a threat to what he thinks is the national identity. Because they (People of African descent) are not in conformity with the values, cultural practices, and phenotypic characteristics tied to Frenchness, their presence scares 39

those who think that they embody the ideals of a French (European ancestry). Taking this in consideration, Mokobe’s lyrics (which I will expound in the following lines) convey a counter- hegemonic and a counter-modern discourse in that they challenge people to think of a plural

French identity and break the dichotomy between Frenchness and Africanness from an

Afrocentric perspective.

Mokobe’s popularity expanded after he released his solo album named Mon Afrique.

Before analyzing what, I think, is a neo-negritudist song entitled Mes Racines (My Roots), I would like to draw attention to his album cover to show how it symbolizes being French and having roots and values other than that of a European ancestry. On the album cover is written the artist name, MOkObe, with the African map on the first “O” letter and the French map on the other. His geographic upbringing and his accent make it obvious that he is a French citizen, a

Parisian, but he does not wish to forget his African and Malian roots. Still in his attempt at demonstrating his double belonging, one can see that the album’s cover bears both Malian and

French typical edifices, one on the left another on the right. This image showcases a portrayal of both Malian and French historical architecture. Indeed, these figures demonstrate that colonial history has shown one cannot dissociate Frenchness and Malianness.

Mes Racines (My roots) allows Mokobe to demonstrate that there is no unique way of being French--one does not need to reject their roots to be French. Mokobe’s assertion of his roots should not be understood as a sort “communautarisme” but as an attempt to

“compatibilize” Frenchness and his origin. Again, his being French does not only lie in the fact that he was born in France, but also it is connected to how he speaks the French language and his agreement to make France his place as he lives there. As seen in these verses, “Je serais toujours

lié à mes origines [I will always be tied to my origins]” (paroles-musique.com), Mokobe wishes to carry his African/Malian origins. If European ancestry is commonsensically tied to

Frenchness, history has made it possible that one can assert their being French from an

Afrocentric perspective. Why does Mokobe take it seriously to assert his blackness? “J’ai la couleur de la misère, je suis noir et fière frère [I have a color of misery, I am Black and proud]”

(paroles-musique.com). Mokobe is, in this sense, a neo-negritudist and he takes this stand for a political reason. While Blackness and the negative values attached to it used to be a denigrating system for the colonizer to perpetrate servitude, today it is used in order to give black people a sense exclusion from the French nation. Therefore, I don’t consider Mokobe’s assertion of blackness antagonistic to Frenchness, but an invitation to look at him as a French citizen that is black or vice versa. For Mokobe, it is all about both where one is from and where one is at. He carries in tandem his origin and his French citizenship.

The meaning of Frenchness is also complicated by the former international French soccer player, Lilyan Thuram. Thuram argues for the possibility and the reality that one can be black and French; that blackness is or should be compatible with Frenchness. As he puts it here, “Some

French people don't think other Frenchmen are French. If I stop playing football tomorrow and I go back to France, people won't see me as a Frenchman, they'll see me as an immigrant”

(http://uk.reuters.com/article/france-election-thuram-idUKL1436284820070414). He further says in reaction against proponents of integration, “What is being integrated? My mother is French, my father is French. Why do I have to be 'integrated'? Because I am black. You'd never ask if a white man was integrated” (uk.reuters.com). He is cognizant that Blackness is thought of as an antithesis to Frenchness but for him being French is beyond blackness and whiteness.

Unlike Mokobe, Thuram does not identify himself as primarily Black but French. This is not a way for him to run away from his Blackness, he does embrace it, but in so doing he unsettles the conception that ties Frenchness to whiteness. As he clearly puts it “Je ne suis pas noir, je suis Français: [I am not Black I am French]” (nytimes.com). First of all, let us use Grant

Farred’s terms, “this affirmation does not negate the negation” (1050). It is clear that Thuram is

Black, but he wants the identification, “I am French,” to be as commonsensical as color identification is. Again, his attempt is to normalize or to make compatible blackness and

Frenchness. The first (blackness) is the color of the skin, which according to Thuram is not appropriate to identify people. The second (Frenchness) is the attribute given to white people in

France which Thuram believes should be used to refer to all French citizens no matter what the color of their skin is. Mokobe is concerned with showing that one can express their Frenchness by keeping some of their cultural origins while Thuram focuses on how to make people accept multiculturalism.

The comparative analysis between Mokobe and Thuram on this issue of identity highlights the fact that People of African descent have different ways of expressing their identity in France. While some identify themselves as Black, others wish to be referred to as French. I argue that these two choices of identification are not antagonistic, but they are rooted in a strategic political discourse expressing belonging to France. I am especially concerned with showing the importance of taking an African-centered perspective to fight for multiculturalism, which can be seen in both Mokobe and Thuram’s perspectives. They both refuse integration as the basis for multiculturalism.

Mokobe’s approach is appropriate when it comes to fighting for visibility and claiming one’s rights. One crucial question is to ask whether people of African descent should claim their rights as a minority that needs to be incorporated or from the assertion of Blackness as a category. On this issue, I would promote one of Fred Constant’s “alternative framework” which states that “it is necessary to stop viewing black people as a “them” who are to be perpetually

“integrated” into France’s (white) society and culture” (148). I would add that this is primarily a work for Black people and secondarily that of the French state and not the other way around. In other words, people of African descent should, first, avoid viewing themselves as minorities that need to be incorporated. Instead of “asserting themselves in terms of a community representing the group’s views (“group rights”),” they should claim individual rights under the identification

“black,” as I think, it is less separatist, differential, and alienating (152). The challenge that people of African descent are faced with is not solely limited to the fight for the access to equal rights. Prior to that, fighting for the normalization of Frenchness and non-whiteness remains the most essential goal so that people of African descent can move away from the liminal position they occupy in the nation.

The history of protest movements of people of African descent which Abdoulaye Gueye has featured in his very informative article, “The Colony Strikes Back: African Protest

Movements in Postcolonial France,” seems to have taken these above-mentioned couple of challenges seriously. Not only do these protest movements organized by people of African descent claim what they think is their right, but also, through their actions, they help rethink the meaning of Frenchness as they advocated for the respect of blacks as French. One of those movements is Collectif Egalité which was founded in 1998 by a Cameroonian Calixthe Beyala, a

French-Cameroonian Dieudone Mbala, and Luc Saint-Eloy who was born in Djibouti from

Caribbean parents and raised in Guadeloupe. The main objective of this movement was to assert a black community and struggle for the visibility and representation of Blacks especially on TV

(231). This movement was significant because a more representation of People of African descent in the French media could help sustain their dignity as French citizen by making sure that they are positively portrayed. Another Black movement called Africagora, organized a year later, advocated for a better representation of Blacks in politics. While, through these mobilizations, Gueye argues that the colony is striking back, I would add that they are neo- modern discourses in that they are challenging the nativist conception of what it means to be

French.

To these 1990’s Black movements neo-discourse of Modernity, I will add a most recent one called CRAN (Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noirs: Representative Council of

French Blacks) created on November 26, 2005 whose current president is Louis-Georges Tin.

CRAN is a “political society” which represents the mobilization of all black people’s associations in France under a unique political agenda: The fight against racial discrimination

(Lozes 106). This is a strategy to make the category black exist in order to claim its rights.

CRAN can be understood as a council which is founded on a racial identification to make a case before the law for excluded and discriminated Black people. It could be considered a black identity movement in France the existence of which is political and dependent on solving public racial problems. As Lozes argues:

The objective of the CRAN is to make the values of France truly universal, in

other words, to ensure that they apply to black French people, more generally, to

all visible minorities. We do not want to “essentialize” the notion of “Black,” but

neither do we want this notion forgotten (109).

Lozes understands that to avoid being characterized as essentialist tends to discourage the assertion of Blackness. CRAN as a Black identity movement has a political existence; that of fighting against invisibility and discrimination. As Mudimbe-boyi says in her response to those who believe that Black identity formation is inappropriate in France, “The question is (…) to take into consideration the objective contexts of everyday life as factors and conditions that abet the possibility of a Black France” (26). Lozes’s approach of the racial discrimination is important in that he has presented people of African descent in an active process towards ending it despite its heterogenous nature. For Lozes, if one is black they are constantly susceptible to ordinary racism in France that’s why the Sub-saharan African immigrants, the French-born blacks, and the West-Indian must join their efforts to combat racism and invisibility.

Conclusion

Race is not an effect or a cause coming out of nowhere in this modern world. Today’s debate on racism only centers on its effects such as exclusion, for the alienation of the Black was lawfully implemented in the construction of the modern world. Antiblackness is fundamentally constitutive of the formation of the modern nation-state orchestrated by the European modern philosophy. Although racism is publicly criticized, its persistence is arguably due the fact that we are within the limits of the modern state. Within the state system, we cannot negotiate a world outside racism. The state is built on racist principles, to get rid of racism requires to rethink the very foundation of the nation-state and destroy it, as da Silva suggests. The political denunciation only centers on the effects of this racism. Racial difference became a constitutive human attribute based on the subdivision of human species: The universal and rational being (The

European or Man) and the external, the other (Non-whites). We perpetually live in this dichotomous conception of the world constructed during the Enlightenment and Post-

Enlightenment era. Western national narratives need to be rethought so the Black history can occupy what I think is its legitimate place in the West.

Multiculturalism cannot be achieved through the incorporation of the minorities who are compelled to constantly reach the pre-set monolithic standards of Frenchness. The debate on multiculturalism cannot be posed if the French structural racism is not revealed. The French integrationist mode perpetuates social liminality and invisibility of People of African descent. An

Afrocentric way of fighting against discrimination and for belonging in this postcolonial context, however, would reveal that there is not a unique way of being French. Through this Afrocentric 46

way of expressing Frenchness, I have attempted to demonstrate that France is a multicultural space even though the public memory is reluctant to think of it that way. The multiculturalism I am defending here is not, however, the one that subsumes the non-whites as permanent others or minorities that need to be managed and incorporated as I showed through Amselle and Goldberg.

It is, instead, the one that is upheld by people of African descent in an attempt to challenge the rigid and nativist definition of the French national identity. History has made it possible that the meaning of Frenchness cannot be rigidly tied to whiteness and European ancestry today.

As long as the differences and particularities are not all accepted in a universalistic way within the French society, the French universalism will not make sense. Its long history of exclusion can help understand why Sarkozy unconsciously contradicted himself by calling for

French globalization and at the same time setting a political project to protect French national identity by rejecting communitarianism and particularism (Thomas 119). This attitude is understandable because the “anthropological myth of origin” that Balibar demonstrated, cannot go in tandem with a notion of openness to others.

Even though there is an essentialist conception of blackness and a sense of authenticity in France, I think of it as more of an effect than a cause of racial exclusion. Also, I have argued that the assertion of Blackness should no longer be antagonized with Frenchness. This expression of belonging could be looked at as a way to render the public opinion and the French state cognizant of the plasticity of Frenchness. Also, even if a “black community” in France is illusory, as Mabanckou has profoundly argued, it should not matter when that illusion is used as a political strategy to combat racism as in the case of the CRAN. As Mudimbe-boyi argues: “A

“Black France” as a way of self-assertion would perhaps cease to be the day a new France

emerges that is at once global and inclusive and practices in everyday and public life the ideals and universalist principles of the Republic: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (27). Thus, the assertion of a black identity does not hamper the emergence of “another France”, but it represents its condition of possibility. With the persistence of anti-black racism, a cosmopolitan and an alienating integrationist attitude cannot guarantee a peaceful life for people of African descent in the diaspora. Engaging in a constant attempt at constructing a heterogenous black community, in an active process toward curbing racial exclusion and discrimination seems to be more practical.

This contestation seems to be the inescapable ontological life of the postcolonial African diaspora in France.

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