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Black Collective Solidarity and Conviviality in Paris

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Black Collective Solidarity and Conviviality in Paris darkmatter hub (beta) • Issue-15 (De-)Facing the dark face of Europe Decolonizing City Spaces and Images: Black Collective Solidarity and Conviviality in Paris Vanessa E. Thompson1 1Vanessa E. Thompson is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. She was previously a Fellow at the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching are focused on critical racism studies, Black studies, feminist theories, post- and decolonial feminist theories and methodologies, critical security studies, and transformative and abolitionist justice. In her current project, she analyses forms of policing Blackness in European contexts from a black feminist perspective and looks at abolitionist alternatives. Vanessa is also engaged in these elds as an activist. She co-founded the collective copwatchm and is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh. Her recent publications include: Thompson, Vanessa E., and Fatima El-Tayeb. “Racial Proling als Verbindung zwischen alltäglichem Rassismus, staatlicher Gewalt und kolonialrassistischen Traditionen. Ein Gespräch über Racial Proling und intersektionale Befreiungsprojekte in Europa.” In Racial Proling. Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand, edited by Mohamed Wa Baile, Serena O. Dankwa, Tarek Naguib, Patricia Purtschert and Sarah Schilliger. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019. Thompson, Vanessa E. “Turn white or disappear. On the Everyday of Racist Policing.” In We Protect you from yourselves. The Politics of Policing, edited by Democracia and Felix Trautmann, 79-93. Madrid: Brumaria, 2018. Published on: Nov 09, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Decolonizing City Spaces and Images: Black Collective Solidarity and darkmatter hub (beta) • Issue-15 (De-)Facing the dark face of Europe Conviviality in Paris The issue of anti-black racism and the black condition has been on the rise in the public sphere of the French Republic since the turn of the millennium. Whereas the black condition was formerly only discussed in the French public sphere to a liminal extent, issues of blackness, anti-black racism and discrimination have entered the public sphere in the last decade. This development is strongly informed by self-identified black movements and their responses to the French Republic’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of colonial continuities. Their struggles for the recognition and memorialization of the enslavement of black people, reparations for colonial crimes and enslavement, against police violence, against representational violence in the media, public and educational institutions as well as anti-black racism in the housing and job markets have contributed to the thematization of anti-blackness in France. The reproduction of anti-black imagery and representations in public urban spaces represents a central topic in these struggles, in France and in Europe writ large. The recent mobilizations against blackfacing at the "Nuit des Noirs", an event of the week-long carnival in the northern French port of Dunkirk in February 2018, lead by several black anti- racist organizations are a crucial example. While the leftist local mayor of the city has defended blackfacing as part of the liberal freedom "to laugh, to have fun together",1 various black initiatives and organizations emphasized that blackfacing as a racist practice perpetuates dehumanizing representations of black people. The controversy around the art exhibition "Exhibit B" by the South African artist Brett Bailey at the Gérard Philipe theater in Saint-Denis at the end of 2014 presents a similar case. The installation presents a dozen portraits of black people, performed by black actors, who were exhibited in human zoos as an important part of the colonial and post-colonial entertainment industry throughout the 19th and 20th century in Europe. Whereas Bailey claimed that his installation criticized racism through the exposure of colonial spectacles of dehumanization, various anti-racist collectives and groups in France and throughout Europe claimed conversely that the exhibition perpetuated the commodification of black bodies and reproduced racist representations of black people as silent objects, while rendering the role of racist and colonial perpetrators and systems of exploitation and dehumanization invisible.2 While critiques of the reproduction of anti-black imagery and representations in public and semi- public spheres are of great importance for anti-racist struggles, the reproduction of anti-black imagery is seldomly discussed in relation to spatial configurations. This article aims to fill this void by building on empirical accounts from ethnographic research with a predominantly black grassroots collective from the urban peripheries of Paris, the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie (BAN) (2011-2012). By discussing an intervention of the collective that took place from October 2011 to January 2012 in the center of Paris, and by engaging with post-colonial, race critical and black theories on space, I demonstrate how space and race are related in the context of struggles against racial imagery and representations. Moreover, I demonstrate that the spatial plays a crucial role within current black 2 Decolonizing City Spaces and Images: Black Collective Solidarity and darkmatter hub (beta) • Issue-15 (De-)Facing the dark face of Europe Conviviality in Paris struggles in Paris as well as allows for new conceptualizations of black solidarity that are shaped by collective action and urban conviviality instead of notions of a (unitary or shared) collective identity. After having discussed the recent (re-)emergence of black movements in the French public sphere, I introduce the BAN as well as the methodology that has framed my research with black social movements in Paris. The paper then discusses one intervention of the collective with a focus on its spatial dimension, the claims of the group and how the rationales of French Republicanism not only bypass and conceal but further reproduce forms of gendered racism. I finally discuss the black urban activist practices of the collective’s members at the time, which I bring into conversation with black radical approaches on urban conviviality and theories of collective action as a form of radical black politics. My argument is that in their interlocking dimensions, these forms of radical black politics open important grounds for the struggles for all black lives. Articulations of (Anti-) Blackness in France Since the late 1990s, significant debates on the issues of race and racism have entered the French public. Discussions on anti-discrimination, the relationship between the police and racialized urban working class youth (increasingly since the urban unrests in 2005, but also before), as well as the mobilizations of anti-racist minoritized groups, especially black groups, have enacted this discursive shift. Over the past two decades mainland France, the home of approximately 3 to 5 million black people and thus the largest black population in Europe,3 has seen the rise of various black groups organizing around issues such as the memory of enslavement,4 the aftermath of colonization, and related forms of anti-black racism and its interlocking forms. 5 The growing visibility of collectives and associations that self-identify as black6 has spurred public as well as academic interest in the rise of a "black question" and blackness.7 Yet, dominant discourses that disqualify references to race and to blackness and the exclusion of the black population and their shaping of France’s political and cultural history remain.8 When considering the recent re-emergence of the issue of blackness in France, it is important to take former mobilizations of race and ethnicity into account9 as well as to consider this re-emergence as a continuation (though always shifting) as black struggles have a long history with regard to French enslavement, colonialism and Empire. Even before the so-called "black turn", various political usages of the identification "black" have long existed. Moreover, neither all social individuals nor groups who are racialized as black operate with notions of blackness (some for instance refer to national categories like "Martinicans" or "Guadeloupeans" or mobilize ethnic categories).10 The different employments of and politics around categories clearly came into view during the 150th anniversary of the abolition of enslavement in April 1998. It was then when the French government for the first time in history officially commemorated the abolition of enslavement.11 President Jaques Chirac held an opening 3 Decolonizing City Spaces and Images: Black Collective Solidarity and darkmatter hub (beta) • Issue-15 (De-)Facing the dark face of Europe Conviviality in Paris speech at the Elysée Palace in Paris, and the Prime Minister Lionel Jospin introduced the national motto "All of us were born in 1848" ("Tous nés en 1848"), which strongly points to the denial of systemic dehumanization, while various ministers presented plaques in order to commemorate abolitionist figures.12 The national commemoration was the result of decades of organizing and lobbying of especially Antillean organizations, though African organizations were also involved. These organizations were outraged about the national motto and organized a silent march on May 23, 1998. Approximately 40,000 individuals of African
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