Book Review Alexander G. Weheliye

Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, edited by Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 344 pages, paperback. Reviewed by Alexander G. Weheliye.

Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, edited by Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall, all of whom have previously published works on blackness in France and Western Europe, brings together a range of scholars, activists, and novelists (it also includes a foreword by member of French parliament and deputée de la Guyane—deputy of French Guiana—Christiane Taubira) from France, the United States, and the Caribbean. The anthology consists of three parts: Theorizing and Narrating Blackness and Belonging, the Politics of Blackness–Politicizing Blackness, and Black Paris–Black France, and it extends the conversation initiated by several other recently published texts about race in France, such as Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (2003); Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (2006); Charles Tshimanga, Ch. Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (2009). Moreover, the volume is based on the conference: “France Noire-Black France:

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The History, Poetics, and Politics of Blackness,” which was held in Paris on June 6–7, 2008, so it comes as no surprise that the political uprisings that took place in Paris and elsewhere in France in 2005 cast long political and conceptual shadows over most of the essays in the anthology. These events brought to the fore the underside of universalist tenets of French republicanism, which insist on abstract equality, refusing the discussion of racial difference in the face of widespread practices of racial profiling, exclusion, violence, and so on, and allowed for the emergence of a distinctly black identity. In addition to the uprisings, the year 2005 also saw the French parliament passing article 4 of the law on colonialism, which stipulated that high school teachers acknowledge the “positive” dimensions of French colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean. This is especially evident in the formation of Conseil Representatif des Associations Noires (CRAN) in the aftermath of the 2005 uprisings, an umbrella organization consisting of 150 black associations, which was instrumental in establishing the term “Noirs de France,” as is narrated in “The Invention of Blacks in France” by Patrick Lozès, who was until recently the president of CRAN. While Lozès gives a practical account of the post-2005 political developments that Alexander G. Weheliye is associate professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014) and Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005).

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brought to the fore an increasing necessity for organizing across different African descended populations, Rémy BazenguissaGanga analyzes the differences between continental Africans and Caribbeans from former French colonies on the question of black identity while Fred Constant summons public opinion polls to analyze the divergent approaches to blackness found among black French populations as it pertains to divisions along class and national lines. These essays offer scholarly explorations of contemporary black French identity and organizing. Bazenguissa-Ganga also shows, as do several other authors, how the articulation of African-American identity serves as a model for establishing current black French identity, which can be seen in the usage of the English-language term “black” rather than “noir” to describe formations of politicized blackness. These three essays, along with Michel Giraud’s excellent contribution about the vexed status of the memory of slavery among French Afro-Caribbeans, can be found in the second section of Black France/France Noire, which I found the most insightful, since the essays therein provide conceptual and empirical examinations of the complexity of the very idea of blackness in the French context, particularly with regard to the fractured (post)colonial history of France and its former colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Despite the anthology’s primary emphasis on the current configurations of blackness in France, several essays provide fruitful historical canvases for those discussions of contemporary concerns. Mamadou Diouf’s “The Lost Territories of the Republic: Historical Narratives and the Recomposition of French

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Citizenship,” for instance, traces the shifts in French citizenship vis-à-vis race to historicize the advent of the banlieue (French suburbs inhabited primarily by low-income and nonwhite groups and the locus of the 2005 uprisings) as a major site of struggle over the meaning of French blackness, while Jennifer Boittin’s “The Militant Black Men of Marseille and Paris, 1927–1937” focuses on several anti-imperial associations created by Afro-Caribbeans and Africans during the 1920s and ’30s in Paris and Marseille; and finally, Gary Wilder’s “Eurafrique as the Future Past of ‘Black France’: Sarkozy’s Temporal Confusion and Senghor’s Postwar Vision” counterposes Nicolas Sarkozy’s infamous 2008 Dakar speech—in which he repeated almost verbatim G. H. F. Hegel’s nineteenthcentury dictum that Africa was located outside of proper historical time: “the tragedy of Africa is that African man has never sufficiently entered into history”—with Leopold Senghor’s “Eurafrique” concept. A few of the contributions chart the longstanding US black presence in Paris. Bennetta Jules-Rosette’s and Marcus Bruce’s essays, though not centered on French subjects of African descent, highlight the plight of Africans in Paris, the first chronicling Josephine Baker’s Rainbow Children and the latter contextualizing the Exhibit of American Negroes at the 1900 Paris Exposition, especially Booker T. Washington’s role in the success of this pathbreaking exhibit, while novelist Jake Lamar offers a personal account of life as an African American in contemporary Paris. There are a few minor drawbacks of this very welcome and otherwise strong anthology. First, though the text does not mention

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whether the essays by the Francophone authors were translated, some of the writing reads as if it were the product of awkwardness in translation. Furthermore, although differences in class and nationality among black communities in France are present as important analytics throughout the volume, ideas about how gender and sexuality inflect blackness in France are virtually absent. While the editors acknowledge this lacuna in their introduction, this absence is surprising given that T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Trica Keaton have written insightful works about race and gender in the French context, and including analyses of gender and sexuality would have added necessary layers to the existing analytic frameworks. Allison Blakely’s coda to the volume, which promises to shed light on the vicissitudes of black identity in France by contextually interfacing it with the role of blackness

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in other European nations, relies on statistical data to establish Africanist presences in Europe. Although establishing these presences is necessary and admirable, the coda would have been stronger if it engaged the pieces in the anthology more directly and if it had delved deeper into the critical studies of race in Western Europe to give an overview of the state of scholarship on various black European populations. Since there has been a veritable explosion in research about race in Europe and black Europeans over the past few years, the coda represents a missed opportunity, since it could have synthesized the current state of this important field of study. Otherwise, Black France/ France Noire offers a valuable snapshot of the vexed status of blackness in present-day France and illuminating historical genealogies for its reemergence and significance.

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