Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment Christy Pichichero

Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment Christy Pichichero Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 49, 2020, pp. 137-143 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2020.0012 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/773124 [ Access provided at 27 Jan 2021 21:23 GMT from George Mason University & (Viva) ] Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment CHRISTY PICHICHERO or specialists of the eighteenth century, teaching the history of race is a Fnecessary dimension of our practice. We are experts of the age when the modern conception of race coalesced through (and in service of) enterprises of global economic and military power that were fueled by enslavement, colonization, exploitation, and genocide of peoples designated as other. Antiracist protests of 2020 have brought urgency to examining this history in our classrooms. Yet as I have written elsewhere, there remains extraordinary resistance to and controversy surrounding the concept of race and its study, especially in the French context.1 For scholar-pedagogues who take up the challenge of teaching race in the eighteenth century, it is essential to work together to share resources for building curricula, methods, courage, and creativity that will foster deep inquiry and learning for students and professors alike. It is in this spirit that I will discuss—though not prescribe—some of my own experiments in teaching race in the eighteenth-century French empire through the lenses of diversity, decolonization, multiculturalism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). While certain scholars object to the use of CRT, deeming it an inapplicable or unwelcome American import into the study of French texts and cultural phenomena, I strongly disagree with this rigid appraisal. CRT not only attends to the historical period in question, but can illuminate structural forms of discrimination that are evident in artistic, social, economic, and political life in the frst French empire. It is 137 138 / P I C H I C H E R O Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment / 139 my hope that sharing these approaches will serve as a point of departure that encourages others to tap into these resources as well as their own innovative minds to open up novel and productive avenues for teaching race in the eighteenth-century in the twenty-frst century classroom. The notions and praxes of diversity and decolonization have become central frameworks for teaching race. The former embraces compositional and epistemic multiplicity by incorporating works from authors of different identities, geographies, and genres. In this regard, there is a wealth of sources in French and in translation with which to engage. Scholarship abounds on women authors, and collections of documents and articles regarding gender, homosexuality, Jewish history, and race in early modern France offer excellent sources for undergraduate and introductory graduate study.2 While we have not yet discovered an individual like Olaudah Equiano in the French imperial setting, a vast array of documents from Saint-Domingue—for example, political pamphlets written by free colored planter Julien Raymond in favor of free-colored rights and, of course, Toussaint Louverture’s writings—lead to many productive discussions about race, politics, gender, and sexuality, in addition to colony-metropole dynamics in terms of laws, information, power, and economics. Assembling interdisciplinary reading lists that include and interrogate the power structures behind archival sources, many of which are available online, is critical for bringing minoritized voices and experiences into courses on the French Enlightenment. As these and related sources convey, the era of the frst French empire and, specifcally, the eighteenth century was not solely a period of nascent white supremacy and specious universalism based upon blind, tacit, or purposeful white (Christian, heterosexual, socially elite) male privilege. It was also a period in which issues of social difference and justice began to take shape and profound questions about society started to emerge. Can we all live together? Should we all live together? If so, how? In order to explore the implications of this diversity and burgeoning social awareness, I have turned to the idea of multiculturalism and developed a course on the multicultural French Enlightenment. Unsurprisingly, one must eschew a commodifying, superfcial, or passive view of multiculturalism. Instead, I deploy the term as indicating an active process of seeking to understand and respond to perceived differences.3 Writers of the French Enlightenment and Atlantic Revolutions grappled with a number of geographies and social categories, including gender, social class, religion, race, and, to some extent, sexuality (as a set of practices, as opposed to an identity). If institutions of the Bourbon monarchy had little room or motivation regarding social change, the French and Haitian Revolutions offered opportunities to rethink political, legal, economic, and social systems.4 Forms of structural discrimination were Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment / 139 invented, sustained, transformed, or destroyed during this period, making it excellent material for teaching about systemic discrimination and racism. It is here that CRT and pedagogies of decolonization come into play. As we have discussed, diversity brings into focus competing narratives that decenter those that have long made up the Western canon of literature and thought. Decolonization takes this process a step further by identifying the frameworks of oppression that shaped the thoughts and experiences of denizens of the eighteenth century. Locating and analyzing this structural level of the invisible and unsaid can be challenging and thus dissuading, which is why CRT is a particularly useful tool. CRT, a movement initiated in the 1970s by legal scholars and activists, seeks to study and transform structures of race and power. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in a recent volume, CRT addresses many of the same issues as civil rights and ethnic studies scholarship but “places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.”5 Also, instead of emphasizing incremental progress, CRT interrogates the structural and intellectual origins of socio-political systems, challenging “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”6 Incorporating CRT into our teaching of eighteenth-century literature and history can help students to recognize and examine the often hidden forms of structural discrimination in societies of the past and today. CRT’s critique of liberalism, essentialism, privilege, colorblindness, assimilation, and micro-aggressions, in combination with its analyses of racial formation, differential racialization, and intersectionality, are excellent means for dismantling French Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideals to reveal structural discrimination. I have experimented with two approaches to integrating CRT into courses about the eighteenth century. The frst is to read important works in the CRT tradition and apply them to the French Enlightenment and Atlantic Revolutionary context. Many professors of early modern literature and culture fnd CRT challenging to utilize in their classrooms since its discourse often takes shape around technical legal questions pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and then moves toward theories of race and racism in different domains (law enforcement, incarceration, etc.). Yet I have found that combining carefully chosen pairings of CRT and eighteenth-century works with teaching in geographical, chronological, and cultural differences has led to many fruitful and exciting discussions. For example, Neil Gotanda’s “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind’” is a critical analysis of the American Constitution as fostering white racial domination.7 He discusses the history of scientifc racism, which allows 140 / P I C H I C H E R O Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment / 141 for a direct connection between eighteenth-century theories of race and their institutionalization in the American Constitution. Cheryl I. Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” is an accessible illumination of whiteness and privilege and race and property with a historical analysis that includes the early modern period.8 Gotanda’s and Harris’s pieces are useful for analyzing the French “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen,” Olympe de Gouges’s response “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne,” and debates about the rights of free colored individuals, as well as the abolition of slavery. My second strategy is to approach CRT backward, that is to say, to begin with the cultural, psychological, and social theory that animates CRT and then work towards its structural representation in the eighteenth century and in modern times. Delgado’s and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction is useful in this approach.9 Students in my seminar on the multicultural French Enlightenment read a section on race and inwardness that examines intersectionality, essentialism, nationalism vs. assimilation, and racial intermixing. We use these terms to talk about a number of texts:

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