What does have to do with U.S. University Campuses?

Meaghan Emery

Associate Professor of French University of Vermont

ive years ago, terrorist attacks this idiosyncrasy than Charlie itself? When in on January 7, 8, and 9, 2015 accepting the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale had targeted the satirical weekly Freedom of Expression Courage Award in FCharlie Hebdo, uniformed police officers, and 2015, Charlie Hebdo editor Gérard Biard spoke the Jewish patrons of a kosher supermarket, against being a symbol of “values that belong killing seventeen people and injuring another to everyone.” Charlie’s foremost concern was five. There followed a popular and official recovering its mission of giving its readers outpouring of grief for those lost and support “a newspaper full of laughter and thought” for democratic principles and rights, including and “disarming [political and religious free speech and freedom of the press. Months obscurantism].”2 It is this ethic, this “esprit after the attack and subsequent Marche Charlie,” that captured our attention, if not Républicaine led by President Hollande our imagination, despite the horror of alongside other world leaders on January 11, January 7, 2015. Not everyone could revel in the almost religious aura that surrounded the this spirit, however, and indeed over 240 journal was broken by the first stirrings of a writers signed a letter of protest to PEN backlash, notably articulated in Emmanuel Executive Director Suzanne Nossel over the Todd’s book-length essay, Qui est Charlie?, decision to give the Courage Award to the which took issue with the #JeSuisCharlie magazine due to the instances in which it current hashtag as reactionary against a new enemy: had depicted the Prophet Mohammed on . Many began questioning the notion its cover. Although it may “exemplify the that any criticism of Charlie Hebdo was equal principles of free expression,” they argued, affairs to support for the kind of censorship that Charlie Hebdo had not exercised courage had led to the slaughter of cartoonists, “for the good of humanity.”3 writers, staff members, and police officers Today the entire affair may leave a bad on the day of the attack.1 taste in our mouths, but the fact that Charlie Paradoxically, the iconoclastic and fiercely existed—whether or not we read the anticlerical Charlie Hebdo had become, in magazine or even liked it—had somehow spite of itself, the official martyr of the reassured many of us, including myself. secular, republican state in its defense of the There was indeed something sacred about enlightened “truth.” Who better to underscore the paper—or rather something sacred had

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 153 5/28/20 3:17 PM been violated in the murder of nine unarmed such as the assault rifles used in the Paris columnists, editors, and cartoonists on that attacks—had long frustrated a strongly-held seventh day of January in 2015. Charlie’s total belief held by many (on the political left or emancipation from civilized society’s right). Yet, given our right to the free exercise hang-ups, our complexes, the sheer and of religion or beliefs (also enshrined in the wanton self-expression of its cartoonists, First Amendment) the contradictions in this had stood—briefly—as a universal banner raw moment of clarity were flagrant since uniting all “free” people counter cold and our system is also built on multiculturalism, calculated murder with military-style which derives from the value of pluralism. weapons perpetrated in the name of a religion This realization occurred on January 9, that the attackers claimed to be defending. when four other victims, all of them targeted As I look back on this moment, it is not for their religious affiliation, had fallen to the Charlie’s particular way of exercising the same extremist violence in a kosher grocery freedoms we hold as sacred that had store. Shortly afterward, the antisemitic captivated me. For the American in me, it had humorist Dieudonné had posted on his been the writers’ and cartoonists’ defiance— Facebook page, “Je me sens Charlie yes, their courage—before the numerous Coulibaly” (“I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”), threats and firebombs of which they had been a hybrid of Charlie and Coulibaly, the the targets since Charlie’s republication of perpetrator in these deaths. The French Danish cartoons of the Prophet in 2006. In state had then promptly charged him with 2015, the spectacular and horrible nature of inciting terrorism and given him a two- the attacks raised the specter, all too painfully month suspended sentence. This French familiar to Americans today, of random gun illustration of the internal contradictions of violence and mass shootings. Indeed, deeper our First Amendment rights and the value than my fear of the terrorism of jihadists or of pluralism made the incongruities clear. any uneasiness before the terrorists’ vengeful Foremost in the debate over Charlie Hebdo motive against Charlie’s blasphemy, what had are two principles that are often at odds in struck those deep chords of apprehension in Western-style democracies: the egalitarian my American psyche was terrorism period, imperative to be mindful of structural power and Charlie became a beacon that and our individual freedom to think and to outshone—not extremist ideology—but express ourselves, which puts us on a par deadly violence with firearms. with everyone else. The fundamental value As a result, the full and untethered exercise of the constitutionally protected right to of our universal democratic freedoms, and free expression is its safeguard of democracy specifically the right to speak and to draw, against tyranny. Indeed, any “progressive” drew me to the unfamiliar shores of the regulation of free speech that impinges on our Charlie universe. In an American context, individual freedom is a risky endeavor, since and more clearly than Paris’s Bataclan concert it releases the mechanisms of despotic rule. hall, which jihadist terrorists attacked on Regarding the violence perpetrated November 13, 2015, it could be said that through language, whether hate speech or Charlie symbolized the sacrosanct rights of simply vulgar and crude remarks that demean the First Amendment of our Constitution as or elicit laughter at another’s expense, writer superior to those of the Second. The and regular contributor to The New Yorker, inviolable right in this country to bear Adam Gopnik, offered an incisive response. firearms—and, since the 2013U .S. Supreme It appeared in a foreword to the translation Court decision, military-style weapons, of a posthumously published Open Letter,

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 154 5/28/20 3:17 PM penned by the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and far right), international relations with Israel, the then editor-in-chief (Stéphane and popular culture. However, the paper Charbonnier, who had submitted the employs people without regard to their faith manuscript to the publisher two days before and publishes articles defending minority his death). Gopnik defends individual freedom rights. As opposed to individuals, it is the of expression against the overreach of various -isms, the powers-that-be, and the regulation in a compelling assessment of the status quo that are the butt of their particular predicament caused by the Charlie Hebdo affair: form of crude and sometimes cruel ridicule— the offices, institutions, and dogmas that The social contract at the heart of liberalism is simple: in exchange for the freedom to be either govern society or threaten its protected as insulting as you want about other people’s freedoms. This is the spirit that I wish to take ideas, you have to give up the possibility up with regard to American colleges and of assaulting other people’s persons.4 universities. This is a writer’s take on the sacrosanct right Some argue that Charlie’s particular to speak and write freely. However, as brand of humor potentially loses sight of its researchers, writers, and the conveyors of mission when it attacks the marginalized. knowledge, each one of us in academe knows Traditionally, Gopnik wrote, the magazine the risks of this freedom as well as the traps has “punched up”; but when it “punches of self-censorship that exist within our down,” it appears to stray from its tradition. respective fields. Such is the case when Charlie Hebdo’s cover depicts images that have compounded Muslims’ feeling of marginalization. In this A Distinctly French Political Magazine age of la déculpabilisation des esprits, or “annihilation of shame,”5 which has opened Charlie Hebdo is a distinctly French the gates of free discourse but also, more political magazine. It grew from a satirical, problematically, unleashed bigoted or anti-establishment, sacrilegious tradition racialized hate speech, Charlie is suspect. that dates back to the nineteenth century, This is partly what grabbed our attention in when those fighting for the French Republic 2015. On the other hand, Charlie’s guiding took on the monarchy and the Church principle of freedom gives us license to through cartoons published in pamphlets and address the phenomenon of venerated the press. Since the law establishing freedom victimhood, which relegates minorities and of speech and freedom of the press in 1881, traditionalized victimized groups to an individuals have been protected from hate inviolate status, a basis on which one— speech but not religions and their doctrines. either victims or their supporters—gains a From 1960, the year its parent paper appeared, claim on the truth. Victimhood status comes through the January 7 attacks to the present, with rights in addition to the responsibility Charlie Hebdo has been a marginal and to speak truth to power, from which victims marginalized counter-cultural periodical. are excluded, by definition. For the true As a bastion for radical secularism, it continues believers, any critical inquiry into a to hurl scurrilous attacks at Catholicism (in “progressive” policy or “truth” that has been the form of the Pope or Jesus Christ). Religion proffered by victims is perceived as either and orthodoxy of all kinds are often targets inquisitorial or conspiratorial—in short, of its irreverent humor, directed at not only dangerous; a discriminating mind is suspect Catholicism but also Islam and Judaism, in of backward, discriminatory, or elitist addition to politicians (especially ’s impulses. What is useful in the example of

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 155 5/28/20 3:17 PM Charlie is that its politics cannot be pinned The American Academy’s Response down, and its subversiveness makes it suspect. Is it a liberal bulwark against The response in the US to the terrorist nefarious conservative forces at work? Is it attack against Charlie Hebdo is instructive to the vile mouthpiece of the extreme right? our understanding of the American academy, The fact that its politics or at least their in addition to controversies spurred by the impact are debatable explains its appearances on college campuses of iconoclastic potency, just as its rules of personalities and academics, from the engagement shed light on academe and on conservative to the provocative (including US campuses, where student newspapers Ann Coulter, Laura Kipnis, Heather and cartoonists have likewise come under MacDonald, Charles Murray, Milo intense scrutiny for their attacks on Yiannopoulos, or animal rights activists), powerful institutions.6 following Donald Trump’s election to the Like the burlesque, the instability and presidency. New York Times columnist resulting irrecuperability of Charlie’s David Brooks was among the first to draw a meaning upsets the power structure and all link between the French weekly and US power structures—this, at its core, is college campuses when he called upon Charlie’s impulse—and yet the courageous Americans to reconsider cases condemning stand its journalists and cartoonists take is professors for micro-aggressions on US remarkably unwavering. Which of us would campuses and condemn speech codes that led accept to continue our craft or science in to the withdrawal of invitations of the face of death threats? In its cat and objectionable speakers.8 He further challenged mouse game, Charlie stands for absolute Charlie supporters in academe to face their freedom to speak as both the cat and the hypocrisy after railing against Brandeis’s mouse. Pushing the limits of its awarding of an honorary degree in 2014 to constitutional protections, Charlie refuses Ethiopian born and women’s rights activist its own victimhood just as much as it rejects (she has published books venerated victimhood, which, in spite of the critical of Islam). His January 9, 2015 column’s latter’s basis in the protection of an title, “I am not Charlie Hebdo” became a individual’s dignity and equality, coincides counter-slogan that was repeated on with the erection of another heavy-handed university department websites (Dartmouth, institutional power structure. Although we for one); and a number of French programs in do not have laws prohibiting hate speech as institutions of higher learning published on they do in France, and Charlie combats the web detailed positions regarding the paper. antisemitism in accordance with French Harvard University, to its credit, initiated by law, in the United States the conflict the work of French faculty and librarians, between constitutionally protected rights, brought online a digital collection of Charlie aimed at preventing institutional overreach, Hebdo artifacts, “The Charlie Archive,” in and anti-discrimination policies has January 2017. It is publicly accessible and manifested itself on university and college open to outside submissions.9 campuses.7 However, unlike the burlesque Charlie Hebdo appeared in another campus in Charlie Hebdo, the free enterprise of controversy in April 2015, when a University university academics is caught in the of student objected to the presence intricacies of the power structure, or power of a visiting Charlie Hebdo writer, who had structures, within academe. been invited to speak on campus. From the

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 156 5/28/20 3:17 PM audience, the student declared that as a as at my state institution. Sometimes, Muslim she felt threatened by the paper’s however, it requires expensive, elaborate plans apparent disrespect for people like her. and armed police officers; and, particularly The writer, , who had since the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally received death threats from the Islamic State in Charlottesville, the question speakers and was heavily guarded, responded by and faculty and students must be asking referring to the courage of the victims. themselves, beyond cost, is “Am I willing to She replied, “Being Charlie Hebdo means to die for my right to free speech?”, or free die because of a drawing.” This exchange led to listening, as the case may be.11 This question a poignant debate in the student newspaper. crossed my mind when I attended a panel on A student editorial criticized the speaker for “Charlie Hebdo and Its Publics” at the 2016 failing to ensure “that others felt safe enough Modern Language Association convention to express dissenting opinions.” Ms. El in Austin. Attendance at the panel required Rhazoui’s “relative position of power,” the going past security guards, and not only was writer continued, had granted her a “free it surreal, but it also allowed me, in my pass to make condescending attacks on a privileged Ivory Tower position as a tenured member of the university.” The president university professor and researcher of and vice president of the French Club, the French literature, to reflect on the question. sponsor of the talk, responded in a letter to Inside the guarded room, international the editor, writing, “El Rhazoui is an scholars walked us through the process that immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights led to the 2005 publication of twelve cartoons activist who has known exile, and a of the Prophet Mohammed in the provincial journalist living in very real fear of death. Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, three of She was invited to speak precisely because which were republished in 2006 in Charlie her right to do so is, quite literally, under Hebdo. The project was originally intended threat.” According to New York Times to be an experiment. Editors wished to commentator Judith Shulevitz, this exchange gauge the reach of self-censorship among underscored the “cocooning” effect of safe forty-two members of the union of spaces on US campuses: “You’d be hard- newspaper illustrators. Not all of the pressed to avoid the conclusion that the illustrators responded and of those who student and her defender had burrowed so did, not all of them depicted the Prophet in deep inside their cocoons, were so their drawings. Their publication generated, overcome by their own fragility, that they as readers may recall, death threats, general couldn’t see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who outrage and riots in Muslim countries, and was in need of a safer space.”10 controversy among Muslims in the West. Members of the MLA panel showed and discussed the different messages of each; A Guarded Room at the MLA Convention and what ensued was a discussion of the different cultural perspectives that collided Security from the perceived abuses and in this project, now a time marker in violence of free speech, as these examples history. As Jytte Klausen reports in her 2009 point out, has become a student demand and book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, an administrative priority on American the fact that some of the cartoons (and one, campuses. More often than not, it takes the in particular by Kurt Westergaard) gave form of safe spaces and Bias Response Teams, demonstrable evidence to Muslims of the

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 157 5/28/20 3:17 PM Danes’ disrespect for Islam, it was not the may not have been entirely unfettered and conclusion the artist had intended. . . . He honest, in this hotel conference room in intended his drawing to show that radical Austin, there was nevertheless the possibility Muslims use the Prophet’s name to justify violence. He did not for a minute consider for discussion and the exchange of ideas and that Muslims would interpret his drawings resources, including graphic content that the other way around, as intended to show had previously been censored. Even Yale that the Prophet is the source of violence.12 University Press, which published Klausen’s book, did not include any of the twelve The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo agreed, cartoons, including those that did not which led them to republish some of the depict the Prophet. cartoons, including a new cover of the Prophet by artist (Jean Cabut), also one of the assassinated cartoonists. Cabu’s Self-Censorship in French Studies? drawing, however, respected Muslims’ sensibilities by not showing Mohammed’s On another panel at the conference, I likeness. It depicted an aggrieved Mohammed presented a paper entitled “Free Speech covering his face with his hands and made the Rights: France as a case in point.” I addressed distinction that Westergaard had intended: the pall that the fear of terrorism had cast on “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons” (“It’s hard speech in France and the danger of self- to be loved by f------idiots.”13). These censorship in my field of French studies and examples lead us to another aspect of the more generally in the American intelligentsia. ideological ambiguity of this brand of What had finally pushed me to address the cartooning. It can suggest that artists are latter topics was a reader’s report from a ignorant of the Other whom one’s drawing scholarly journal, not recommending the engages in a dialogue, or, in the case of Cabu, publication of one of my articles, a that they knowingly play with the Other— retrospective study of two Franco-Algerian whether or not it is perceived as respectful politicians who had worked in conservative is another matter. More dangerously, this governments, Azouz Begag (delegate Minister ambiguity can lead one to the conclusion for Equal Opportunities in Dominique de that the artist is engaging in all-out cultural Villepin’s government, 2005-2007) and warfare against those who are likewise the Fadela Amara (Secretary of State of Urban keepers of a dogma. All of these possibilities Policy in François Fillon’s second government, are worthy of intellectual inquiry. 2007-2010). With no explanation, one reader In academe there should be room for had asserted that the article was “dangerous,” reasoned dialogue and exchange in which and, although Begag is a sociologist, the other different parties listen and engage freely, directed me to other specialists. Whether or both honestly and respectfully. It is not not my article was ready for publication is entirely clear to me that this is what occurred not what most concerned me but rather the in this MLA conference room, where a security nature of the response I received. guard was literally protecting free speech to Afterward, I sought advice from a senior the extent that freedom is possible in a colleague in the field, who alerted me to the policed location. It was a sobering brush with article’s violation of political correctness reality where the guard stood as a reminder barriers. It was addressing the advances that that a difference of beliefs and opinion, even Muslim political appointees had made toward as a topic of inquiry, can leave one vulnerable normalizing French Muslims in politics and to a deadly encounter. While the dialogue the media in a post-9/11 period marked by

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 158 5/28/20 3:17 PM not only xenophobia but also controversy Islamophobia.15 In the France of this surrounding the anti-immigration and imagining, arranged marriages and polygamy specifically anti-Muslim policies of Interior are allowed, women deprived of their right Minister and later President Nicolas Sarkozy. to work, and the education system funded The examination of multicultural advances by Saudi magnates. Houellebecq pushed gained through the service of government back against his book’s detractors by officials linked to Sarkozy, in whom questioning their interpretation. Ben Abbes, caricaturists traditionally accentuate the he argued, is a political moderate, educated demonic, had been my error. in the country’s elite École Nationale However, I was seeking to understand d’Administration, the institution where their role in the subsequent election of France’s high officials receive training, as representatives of Muslim origin to French well as an ambitious and skilled tactician who Parliament for the first time in 2012.14 wins the election against the National Front Not one Muslim had been elected to France’s Party candidate, Marine Le Pen, by forming most powerful legislative chamber before, alliances with the Socialist Party and the which raised questions in my mind. For conservative Union pour un Mouvement instance, what had led them to turn away Populaire (UMP) Party. Once elected, Ben from the Socialist Party and take positions Abbes succeeds in lowering France’s in conservative, even controversial chronically high unemployment rate, which governments that took up a problematic reduces criminality, and expands the debate on national identity, passed legislation European Union to the Mediterranean basin banning religious insignia in public schools through peaceful accords, all the while (following years of reported dismissals of maintaining under his control radical Muslim school girls who refused to remove elements within his Muslim Fraternity Party. their head covering), and enacted immigration Houellebecq dismissed the contention that laws discouraging family reunification this story line would give impetus to the through the use of DNA tests? My “dangerous” National Front and its anti-immigrant, article was seeking to understand the ways in anti-European Union platform, by rejecting which a new political force was taking form the notion that a book could change the and the shape and arc of its contours. course of history. Remarkably, on the eve of his book’s launch, Houellebecq, France’s best-selling and Enter most internationally read contemporary author, was compelled to defend his A book that made a sensation, launched on professional freedom as a writer by arguing the same day of the Charlie Hebdo killings, that his novel’s Muslim hero—fully integrated and which quickly sold out, Soumission, a and electorally elevated to the highest office satire by Michel Houellebecq, has since given in France—would have no impact, positive me insight into the phenomenon that I had or negative, on the country’s future, only to been attempting to discern. It, too, however, learn hours afterward of the jihadist attacks was deemed “dangerous” and the author— and of the death of his good friend, the which academe has tepidly embraced— economist , who was on the condemned as “irresponsible.” French Charlie Hebdo writing staff and among the thinkers slammed its portrait of a France victims. In mourning, Houellebecq cancelled under the leadership of a Muslim president, scheduled promotional events and Mohammed Ben Abbes, with the charge of proclaimed solidarity with the paper, stating,

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 159 5/28/20 3:17 PM “.” Then this conservative, focuses on earlier works, but the description self-proclaimed agnostic atheist, the author applies to Soumission’s protagonist, a specialist of a story exploring religion’s draw, so of the 19th-century French novelist Joris Karl powerful that, in the world of his novel at Huysmans and middle-aged, melancholic, least, it eclipses France’s staunch proponents university professor named François. of the secular state and educational system, The portrait of the university professor is left a France he described as decidedly of interest to us here. When Ben Abbes’s right-leaning for a kind of spiritual retreat. election seems imminent, François’s Jewish The real danger in his book, as he had revealed girlfriend Myriam, one of his former students, to the public and his critics prior to the attack, departs with her family for Israel, leaving was captured in the pages preceding the him alone to face a bleak future of waning election of Ben Abbes, when Marine Le Pen’s sexual performance and pleasureless sex victory appeared all but certain and with prostitutes. François initially takes the unidentified masked gunmen were storming principled decision to take early retirement polling places to steal the ballot boxes and rather than follow new university policy and put an end to the vote. How had this message convert to Islam, which would allow him to been lost? In Houellebecq’s admonishment, continue working. He then rethinks his he pointed to a potentially grave consequence decision when invited back by the rector of the primacy of pluralism over freedom of Robert Rediger, who offers him the added expression, that is, intellectual laziness, the bonus of an arranged marriage. The salary charge Columbia University political scientist would afford François three wives, he adds. and historian Mark Lilla had leveled against This aspect of the new regime effectively Todd’s influential essay and critique of the resolves the need for sexual dominance as #JeSuisCharlie movement, Qui est Charlie?16 here articulated by Rediger in an attempt to The phenomenon is far from new, persuade François. however, and the charge of lazy thinking to be considered carefully. Included in Yale Men are animals, all right; but . . . . [what] ensures their dominant position in nature, French Studies’ 2010 issue, titled “Turns to . . . is truly their intelligence. So, I’ll tell you the Right?”—with a French road sign on the in all seriousness: there is nothing abnormal cover and the caption, “Virage dangereux à about professors being classified among droite. Signalisation de danger. Annonce d’un dominant males. . . . In their natural state, virage à droite à une distance de 150 m en of course, women, like men, are above all attracted by physical attributes; but you can, rase campagne et 50 m en agglomération” with an appropriate upbringing, succeed (“Dangerous right-turn. Warning sign. Notice in convincing them that that is not what is of a right-turn from 150m in open country most important. You can lead them to be and 50m in urban areas”)—one finds Douglas attracted to rich men—and, after all, getting Morrey’s enlightening analysis of the subject rich already requires more intelligence and of “sexual frustration” in Houellebecq’s cunning than the average. You can even, to a certain degree, impress on them the high oeuvre. Titled “Sex and the Single Male: erotic value of university professors…17 Houellebecq, Feminism, and Hegemonic Masculinity,” the article examines The public effacement of women at first Houellebecq’s thesis on the frustration of startles François, but then he is lulled as single men who find themselves marginalized though into a dream. Although François in the social hierarchy of the post-1968 envisions no promising future intellectual liberalized sexual marketplace. Morrey’s study pursuits in his new state of submission, in

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 160 5/28/20 3:17 PM this case to Allah, a quiet serenity washes biting portrait of the lazy French male over him at the prospect of a “devoted” and intellectual, specialist of Huysmans and “submissive” Muslim wife.18 patriarchal opportunist, seems to undercut Despite their sexual frustration, men, Morrey’s argument just as Charlie Hebdo’s even marginalized men, profit from the editor Biard’s and writer El Razoui’s responses systems portrayed in Houellebecq’s novels. to their critics exposed the vacuousness of the Often at the expense of women, they gain latter’s claims and charge of moral depravity. power, money, and prestige, Morrey argues. The aforementioned thoughts were the He in particular takes issue with subject of an abstract I submitted to the same Houellebecq’s narrators’ animus toward scholarly journal that had rejected my earlier feminism, which along with consumerism article and was preparing a special issue are among Houellebecq’s vexations. “On the focused on international responses to the contrary,” Morrey argues, Charlie Hebdo killings. I was eager to uncover in Charlie Hebdo how subversive discourse . . . it is feminism that allows us—that or populist political rhetoric becomes a pop allows Houellebecq—to identify [society’s objectification of men and women in a culture vehicle for the active defense of process that determines their exchange democratic principles and specifically free value and right of access to bodies] in the expression, and conversely how its targeting first place, and to denounce it with such of democracy’s would-be foes can lapse into indignation. It is free-market capitalism— hate speech. I spoke with one of the guest which feminism has always understood as editors, who conveyed to me the importance playing an integral role in the patriarchal order—that has extended this situation to of Todd’s essay Qui est Charlie? in her framing the whole of society such that men today are of the issue, attributing the outpouring of equally well-placed to feel its dehumanizing French republican pride and indignation not effects. In Houellebecq’s novels, beneath to the defense of democracy and free speech the resentment directed at women and but to reactionaryism, grown from a residual the sulks and scowls of sex-starved men, there rumbles a subterranean howl of traditionalist Catholicism, apprehensive rage inspired by our consumer society.19 toward Islam (despite there being thousands of Muslims, as well as Jews, Buddhists, and By underscoring the overlap between agnostic atheists in that diverse human Houellebecq’s analysis and feminist theory, outpouring of 3.5 million). Needless to say, Morrey strives to waken Houellebecq’s my abstract was not selected. As I had been readers—perhaps with the goal of alerting the earlier with the controversial politician author himself—to the danger of reacting Fadela Amara, I found myself up against the strongly against -isms, such as feminism, to formal problem of how to approach a thorny such a degree that they become susceptible issue à contre-courant—whereas questioning to another -ism, in this case patriarchalism. the status quo is central to our work as This is undoubtedly the pitfall against which researchers. critics caution the supporters, readers, and editors of Charlie Hebdo. The central question, French Feminism and French Academe therefore, is the following: to what degree do satire and the burlesque unwittingly French sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, reproduce power hierarchies through their a darling of American academe, particularly farcical play with belief systems and in French studies, had previously censured institutions? On the other hand, Houellebecq’s Amara as a “French feminist” in her work

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 161 5/28/20 3:17 PM Les Féministes et le Garçon arabe. She had Amara as the cause for “inflated egos,” charged Amara specifically with doing a which serve to maintain the “egalitarian disservice to Arab boys by adopting a French fiction” of French society in which feminist framework in her defense of language, dress, and sex act as gate passes (“subaltern”) Muslim women in to the land of human rights from which the neighborhoods Amara claimed were under “deviant” are excluded.23 the control of radical political Islam. Although directing her analytical acumen Guénif-Souilamas did not address the at dominant Western masculinity and violence afflicting women, including gang violence, Guénif-Souilamas avoids engaging rapes or immolation. She rebuked Amara for head-on with the phenomenon of jihadism blowing it up into “generalized victimization” in France. Rather, she dismisses cultural and failing to see rather “the aftereffects of and political figures, including the police, colonial domination, which was also a in a manner that verges on the burlesque. domination of native women’s bodies.”20 As a result, her broad condemnation of As Guénif-Souilamas argued in a subsequent racism in twenty-first-century secular French essay, “The Inflated Ego,” by playing the role society, much like Houellebecq’s treatment of victim, Amara was not only reinstating of feminism, reduces her subjects to mere patriarchal power but also feeding the puppets, depriving her of valuable negative stereotype of violent Arab men and interlocutors who might alert her to her recklessly sensationalizing a societal problem, blind spots or to areas where her expertise caused by the “inquisitorial,” “hegemonic, could prove valuable, which is regrettable. republican, universalist regime” in all its Notably, her sociological approach could be forms.21 applicable to Gilles Kepel’s compelling Although Amara, the daughter of Muslim analysis of France’s political and social crisis immigrants and a practicing Muslim, shares in the face of Islamic radicalization, Terreur Guénif-Souilamas’s goal of emancipating dans l’Hexagone (Gallimard, 2015). Kepel’s both the Muslim woman and the genealogy of the re-Islamicization of France’s homosexual Arab from patriarchal power third generation of immigrants since the structures, she fiercely defends French 1980s identifies the 2005 youth riots in the secularism as a means of liberation. As outskirts of France’s largest cities and the opposed to Guénif-Souilamas’s critique of tough police crackdown on communities with the West’s market-based egotistical a high proportion of ethnic minorities as the subjectivity, Amara demands the right to be events that “crystallized” a new political visible and to live freely in one’s body. consciousness among this demographic. Additionally, she does not share Guénif- Theirs is a nihilistic worldview, however, Souilamas’s biased view of the police as since these youths are not devout Muslims agents of violent escalation. Rather, Amara nor well-informed readers of the Koran. has expressed her firm support for a Guénif-Souilamas addresses male androgyny zero-tolerance police policy in high-crime in traditional Arab culture and encourages areas: “The Republican order is young men to rediscover it. However, it emancipating. . . I consider one’s right to seems to me that as a sociologist she could safety to be a fundamental right. It’s not add something directly pertinent to this because you’re poor that you don’t have a discussion rather than conclude her article right to security and serenity.”22 Guénif- on the “Inflated Ego” with a discussion of Souilamas, on the other hand, sees the humor and irony as a “clandestine” refuge Western-style individualism espoused by for the marginalized in France.

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 162 5/28/20 3:17 PM Conclusion: How To Bridge the Gap? overwhelmed and marginalized in this hypertechnological world of Overall, there is a reinvigorated interest incomprehensible algorithms dictating to in the genres of satire and the baroque, the whom and to what we are exposed, Carnaval spirit of Charlie Hebdo, as vehicles marketed, and sold, are seeking more than for free expression and subversion. Both visual stimuli or material comforts to fill the Charlie Hebdo and Soumission made the void that can only be satisfied with human disruptive power of these genres clear to me, thought, philosophy or religion. Honesty, or not only by their beating the economic at least authenticity, humor, holding the odds—what loan-strapped student in the powerful to account, all conducive to twenty-first century would go to college to dialogue, seem to be common become a cartoon journalist or novelist?— denominators to their needs. When we look but also with regard to power structures and at the news or turn to our screens, we victimization.24 Although their heretical confront a dangerous world, which can be irreverence risks blinding them to their own scary but also a call to make connections excesses, their assertion of freedom is that we might otherwise not make. In such compelling. Yet, Guénif-Souilamas’s basic circumstances, it seems essential that the point is valid: how can one give voice to message not get lost or be misconstrued—a voiceless victims or how can victims escape matter of personal responsibility, yes, but victimhood from structural oppression also a challenge when we do not master the without victimizing a category of people codes, know the rules, find an open ear, or identified with this power structure in return? see the humor of inside jokes. When on the When looking to the young people in the outside looking in or on the inside looking U.S., I see and hear the same debates here out, our frustration or misunderstanding over language, dress, sex, visibility, growing due to the gap, we have a choice. representation, and the option to unplug or, How we choose to bridge that gap is a test terrifyingly, drop out. I also recall of ourselves and of society. These are the Houellebecq’s observation that religion is lessons that these cartoonists who died for making a political comeback. People, feeling a drawing bring home to me.

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 163 5/28/20 3:17 PM Endnotes

1 See Saïd Benmouffok, “Ai-je le droit de critiquer ‘Charlie’?”, Libération, 28 May 2018, http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/05/28/ai-je-le-droit-de- critiquer-charlie_1654792. Accessed 12 June 2018.

2 See 2015 PEN Literary Gala: Alain Mabanckou, Dominique Sopo, Gérard Biard, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Pen America: The Freedom to Write, 12 May 2015, https://pen.org/2015-pen-literary-gala-alain-mabanckou-dominique- sopo-gerard-biard-and-jean-baptiste-thoret2/. Accessed 1 December 2019.

3 “PEN Receives Letter From Members About Charlie Hebdo Award,” PEN America: The Freedom to Write, 5 May 2015, https://pen.org/pen-receives- letter-from-members-about-charlie-hebdo-award/. Accessed 1 December 2019.

4 Adam Gopnik. Foreward. Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression. by Charb. Little, Brown and Company, 2016, p. xiii.

5 Bret Stevens, “Trump and the Annihilation of Shame: Charles van Doren’s Death Marks the End of an Era,” The New York Times, 12 April 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/opinion/charles-van-doren-trump.html. Accessed 1 December 2019.

6 See Samantha Schmidt. “Berkeley Student Newspaper Apologizes for Cartoon Depicting Alan Dershowitz Stomping a Palestinian.” The Washington Post, 27 October 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ morning-mix/wp/2017/10/27/berkeley-student-newspaper-apologizes-for- cartoon-depicting-alan-dershowitz-stomping-a-palestinian/?utm_ term=.04c6494a4274. Accessed 4 January 2019. See also David R. Wheeler. “The Plot Against Student Newspapers? At many colleges budding journalists and their advisers are still fighting for freedom of speech.”The Atlantic, 30 September 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/ archive/2015/09/the-plot-against-student-newspapers/408106/. Accessed 4 January 2019.

7 See works written by Erik Bleich, such as The Freedom to be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford UP, 2011) and Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (Cambridge UP, 2003).

8 David Brooks. “I am not Charlie Hebdo.” New York Times, 8 January 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-not- charlie-hebdo.html?_r=0. Accessed 7 January 2016.

9 See Harvard libraries for a link to the Charlie Archive: “The Charlie Archive Documents a Global Response.” . Accessed March 16, 2017.

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Athenaeum Review 5.22.2020.indd 164 5/28/20 3:17 PM 10 Judith Shulevitz, “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas.” New York Times (March 22, 2015) . Accessed March 15, 2017.

11 Some college campuses (e.g., Berkeley) have written into their campus speaker-event or access to campus facilities policy security costs determined in a “viewpoint-neutral” manner.

12 Jytte Klausen. The Cartoons That Shook the World. Yale UP, 2009, p. 22.

13 All translations from the original French are my own.

14 In the June 17, 2012 legislative elections and for the first time ever, five candidates elected to the French National Assembly were of Maghrebi origin: Kader Arif (Haute-Garonne), Malek Boutih (Essonne), Kheira Bouzine (Côte-d’Or), Chaynesse Khirouni (Meurte-et-Moselle) et Razzy Hammadi (Seine-Saint-Denis), all from the Socialist Party.

15 Michel Houellebecq. Interview by David Poujadas (journalist), Malek Chebel, Michela Marzano, and Alain Jakubowicz. France 2 Journal télévisé, 6 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E-lkVp8oHY. Accessed 25 January 2019. See also Houellebecq’s interview with Patrick Cohen, “Le 7/9.” France Inter, 7 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ttzXGKbSY. Accessed 25 January 2019.

16 Mark Lilla. “How the French Face Terrorism.” The New York Times Book Review, 24 March 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/24/ how-the-french-face-terror/. Accessed 25 January 2019.

17 Michel Houellebecq. Soumission. Flammarion, 2015, pp. 292, 294.

18 Ibid., 297.

19 Douglas Morrey. “Sex and the Single Male: Houellebecq, Feminism, and Hegemonic Masculinity.” Turns to the Right?, special issue of Yale French Studies, edited by Michael A. Johnson and Lawrence R. Schehr, no. 116/117, 2009, p. 152.

20 Guénif-Souilamas. Les Féministes et le Garçon arabe, Aube, 2004, p. 86.

21 Nacira Guénif-Souilamas. “The Inflated Ego and New Games of Belonging.” Turns to the Right?, special issue of Yale French Studies, edited by Michael A. Johnson and Lawrence R. Schehr, no. 116/117, 2009, p. 115.

22 See “Fadela Amara Naulleau & Zemmour Ruquier.” Interview by Laurent Ruquier. On n’est pas couché. Dailymotion, 2 May 2010, https://www. dailymotion.com/video/xd5oq3. Accessed 1 December 2019.

23 Guénif-Souilamas, op. cit., 117.

24 Houellebecq did not go to university, nor did a number of the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

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