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RACING THE REPUBLIC
ETHNICITY AND INEQUALITY IN FRANCE
IN AMERICAN AND WORLD PERSPECTIVE
An international and interdisciplinary conference
at the University of California, Berkeley
7 and 8 September 2007
Sponsored by Institute of Governmental StudiesCenter on Institutions and Governance, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UCB Diversity Initiative, the Consulate of France in San Francisco, the Institute for the Study of Social Change, the UCB Dept of History, the UCB Dept of Sociology, the UCBFrench Dept and the UCB Religion, Politics and Globalization Program.
Organized by
Loïc Wacquant (Sociology, UC-Berkeley), Tyler Stovall (History, UC-Berkeley), and Heddy Riss (Program Director, Center on Institutions and Governance, IGS UC-Berkeley)
Questions of ethnoracial division (linked to slavery, colonial rule, and/or immigration), citizenship, and politics loom large today not only in the United States but also in many other advanced nations. None is perhaps more urgently concerned with these issues today than France. And none provides a more fruitful comparative case with the United States, since the two republics share a germane commitment to the democratic ideal and a common claim to embody civic universality.
The pertinence of ethnoracial distinctions to political discourses and social reality in the two republics is no accident since the republican form of government tends to render racialized differences both politically sensitive and institutionally problematic. In line with our desire to question narrow national conceptions of groupness and to study ethnoracial vision and division in a historical and global perspective, thistwo-day conference will examine the complex and covert relationships between race (as denegated species of ethnicity) and the republic in France in American and world-historical perspective.
The conference brings together leading and rising scholars from the gamut of the social sciences and humanities who are engaged in the resurgentdebates on colonialism and postcolonialism, immigration and racialization, urban issues, public policy and citizenship in France, to compare and contrast those with parallel debates in the United States.The conference spans the gamut of centuries from the bloom of empire to the present and will cover recent discussions on slavery and memory, the banlieuesriots of November 2005, the political uses and abuses of diversity, and “affirmative action”measures to shed historical light on current controversies as well as to offer comparative materials to students of race, nation, and citizenship in other countries and epochs.
This conference is wheelchair accessible; it is free and open to the public. Presentations and discussion will be in English throughout. For further information, please contact Heddy Riss, Program Director, Center on Institutions and Governance, UC-Berkeley, at 510 643 4487; <> or go to: [21 August version 4pm]
RACING THE REPUBLIC
ETHNICITY AND INEQUALITY IN FRANCE
IN AMERICAN AND WORLD PERSPECTIVE
7-8September 2007
Lipman Room, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
DAY ONE
10:10-10:30am, Introduction
Jack Citrin, Political Science, IGS Director, UC Berkeley
Pierre-François Mourier, Consul general of France in San Francisco
Tyler Stovall, History, UC Berkeley
Loïc Wacquant, Sociology, UC Berkeley
10:30am-12:30, Session 1: Rethinking racialization in history:
bringing France into the mix
Chair/discussant: Ramon Grosfoguel, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Loïc Wacquant, Sociology, UC Berkeley, and Centre de sociologie européenne: “Mix and Stir: Irreverent Suggestions for Renewing the Sociology of Racial Domination”
The social analysis of racial domination suffers from several perennial limitations that harmstring and marginalize it, preventing its incorporation into the core of sociological and historical studies: continued confusion about its object (denegated ethnicity); the triangular pull of substantialism, groupism, and moralism (when it should focus on group-making); the interference of the logic of the trial (which truncates observation and vitiates analysis); strong residues of Eurocentrism and essentialism (even among their most eloquent critics); persistent use of the United States as “Archimedean point” (when it is a historical outlier); enclosure into area studies (which prevents fruitful empirical comparisons and analytical extensions across geographic zones); and a powerful presentist bend (which encourages political posturing at the expense of full historicization). Some remedies are proposed to help reenergize and reorient the field, including specifying the origins and bases of ethnoracial categories; harnessing the power of comparison; unifying the study of colonial/peripheral and modern/metropolitan experiences of racialization; establishing a dialogue between West and East; bringing subordinate forms and experiences of racialization into our analytic ambit; highlighting the role of the state as central symbolic and material agency; putting instances of failed racialization and experiences of deracialization on an equal epistemic footing with the canonical racialized societies. The trajectory of France since the Revolution is discussed as an empirical case that can help realize several of these objectives.
George Fredrickson, History, StanfordUniversity: “Varieties of Group Prejudice: How Differences in Terminology Complicate Comparisons of France and the United States”
American social scientists and historians tend to differentiate between three ideal-types of group prejudice or denigration: 1) racism, which connotes a belief in inherent, hierarchical, and unalterable genetic differences; 2) nativism, or hostility to immigrants and aliens based on cultural differences associated with nationality or ethnicity rather than with phenotypical or alleged biological characteristics (unlike racism, nativism holds out the possibility of assimilation); 3) intolerance, orcontempt for, and discrimination against, groups with belief systems other than those that are ideologically dominant in the society. Clear-cut examples of racism would be the kind of white supremacist beliefs and practices found historically in the United States and South Africa, as well as the Nazi brand of antisemitism. The crux of the terminological problem for comparative discourse is that what the French call “racism” is often what Americans would call “nativism.” In both countries intolerance is associated with theocratic regimes, such as exist in some Islamic nations, and also with the suppression of all religion in general that was attempted in communist countries. In the United States intolerance can also mean restrictions on the right to express a religious identity in public. Hence many American believe that the headscarf ban in French schools is an example of intolerance--not by a dominant religion but by a dominant secularism which is, by American standards, intolerant of religion.
Mara Loveman, Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “Race and Republic: Lessons from Latin America”
Social analysis of the complicated historical relationship between ethnoracial distinction and republican forms of government has much to gain from systematic consideration of the full range of Latin American cases. Questions that are hotly debated in France and the UStake on new dimensions when considered in light of the experiences of the republics of South America: why do some modern democratic states routinely use racial and/or ethnic categories in the bureaucratic administration of their populations while others refrain from such practices at all costs? What purpose did such official administrative categories serve in the historical context of nation-state building, and what purposes do they serve today? How has official use of such categories affected the lives of those thus categorized? And in what ways are today’s political battles over the use of ethnoracial denominations in public policy created and constrained by how states deployed such nomenclatures historically? Adopting a broadened comparative lens promises to advance current theoretical understanding of these issues --but only if the inclusion of more cases is accompanied by a fundamental shift in analytical approach. Instead of cross-national comparison of racial/ethnic groups and the relations between them, the focus of analysis must fasten on the social practices that create, maintain, fortify, or dissolve ethnoracial boundaries. And among the myriad practices that contribute to the instantiation of ethnoracial boundaries, those undertaken by state institutions belong at the center of comparative analysis.
12:30-1:30pm, Lunch
1:30-3:30pm, Session 2: Colonial experiences and experiments
Chair/discussant: Tabitha Kanogo, History, UC Berkeley
Gary Wilder, History, PomonaCollege: “Thinking Through Republican Racism: Negritude, Federalism, Futurity”
This paper addresses the relationship between (French) racism and (French) republicanism through the optic of Negritude and the question of political form. Negritude must be understood not simply as a reflexive anti-racism, but a self-reflective attempt to imagine a post-racist polity and planetary order. The Negritude critique attempted to “think through” racism by posing fundamental questions about the presumed identity among culture-nationality-citizenship and people-territory-government series that were assumed to form the substratum of republican politics. In the first part of my paper, I raise critical questions about the ways in which French racism is typically treated by historiography. I analyze republican racism in the metropole and in colonial West Africa during the interwar period by framing France as an imperial nation-state. The second part briefly outlines Negritude’s attempt to think through race during the 1930s. The third and last part draws on new research on Negritude, decolonization, and federalism, paying special attention to Léopold Senghor’s post World War II project to think beyond the existing imperial racial formation by transforming France into a federal republic that would be extraterritorial and multicultural, founded upon legal pluralism and local autonomy, and in which sovereignty would be decentered or distributed. This project for decolonization without national independence was at once historically possible (insofar as adequate to existing conditions) and politically impossible (insofar as it presumed and anticipated a prospective France that did not yet exist). I suggest that this cosmopolitan, utopian, and future-oriented project to “think through” republican racism illuminates both the history of race in France and racial politics today.
Emmanuelle Saada, Sociology and History, EHESS-Paris: “Citizens or Subject? Race and the Fate of the métis in French Indochina and Beyond”
Historical analysis of the scientific, administrative, and legal treatment of the métis population (“racially mixed” children of French and indigenous parentage) at the apex of France’s Empire offers a unique perspective on racialization in the French ambit. Considered a “humanitarian, social and political” threat, the métis were the subject of a long controversy over their legal status as French citizens or indigenous subjects. These debates led to the introductionof the notion of race into French law as a condition of French citizenship in the 1920s. This paper offers a socio-historical analysis of that controversy and its implications. Starting from the case of Indochina, I insist on variations across the empire andrefute national or cultural essentialism as a basis for explaining aspecific “French mode of racialization”. These differences turn out to depend on local power relations and on the agency ofthe colonized populations and their handling of imperial imposition. Despite the absence of direct repatriation ofthe racialization techniques associated with the métis question from thecolonies to the metropole, this case reveals the intricate relationshipbetween race, nationhood and citizenship in the French context since thelate nineteenth century.
Véronique Helenon, African-New World Studies, FloridaInternationalUniversity: “Colonized and Colonizers: French Caribbeans in Colonial Africa before World War II”
During the period of the ThirdRepublic, the French government launched an aggressive policy of colonial expansion. An important percentage of the men who administered the new coloniescame from the colonies themselves. This paper examines the participation of French Caribbeans to the colonial administration in Africa. Specific attention is paid to the way their status placed them in the ambiguous or contradictory position of colonized and colonizers as well as to the impact of their presence on the workings of the colonial system.
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, History and Philosophy, University of Evry-Val d’Essone: “Brutalization and the ColonialState in French Algeria, 1830-1962”
After the takeover of Algiers by the French military in 1830, several questions were left unanswered: how far to push conquest? How to wage war against the “indigènes”? How to bolster French rule over them? These questions generated drawn-out controversies and were given a variety of answers by contemporaries. Studying these controversies allows us to uncover distinctive and elaborate conceptions of the “Arab” enemy, of the techniques of warfare to deploy against him, and in particular of systematic practices of extreme violence compared to those employed around the same time inside of Europe. By its methods, nature, and consequences, colonial war had devastating consequences for the land conquerred and its populations. In this paper, I survey the techniques of the French Army of Africa in the 1840s, when conquest turned into a total war implying the complete militarization of Algerian populations and their territories. The “brutalization” of the Algerian conflict was as swift as it was spectacular. Remarkably, it occured just as the clashes between European states were being moderated or civilized. During the final war of decolonization (1954-1962), some of the techniques of brutalization elaborated during conquest were employed again and sometimes perfected. When this criminal past of the state in Algeria is obfuscated if not excused by a new official vision hailing the “positive contribution” of colonization, French citizens of Maghrebine origins cannot but feel the added burden of what amounts to memorial discrimination.
3:30-4:00pm, Coffee break
4:00-6:00pm, Session 3: Race, Gender/Sexuality, and Personhood
Chair/discussant: Winnie Woodhull, Literature, UC San Diego
Elizabeth Colwill, Women’s Studies, San DiegoStateUniversity: “Ritual, War, and Freedwomen’s Familial Politics in Post-Emancipation Saint Domingue”
The slave revolution that erupted in the French colony of Saint Domingue in 1791 and the subsequent emancipation decrees resonated throughout the Atlantic world. In the ensuing decade, the reinvention of slaves as citizens put its imprint on the état civil, as new rituals of inscription transformed racial terminology and sanctified republican marriage, while government officials promoted military service, labor, and the republican family as essential to the preservation of the colony. For Toussaint L’Ouverture, the future of emancipation itself was dependent upon the restoration of the plantation economy --a labor and military regime intertwined with a social and matrimonial program. This paper explores the intimate intersections of labor, martial and marital policies in revolutionary Saint Domingue, arguing that freed women, in dialogue with state officials, elaborated their own familial politics as both a practical response to violence and dearth and a direct intervention in the political debates of post-emancipation Saint Domingue.
Tyler Stovall, History, UC Berkeley: “The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France”
This paper considers a conundrum in the career of Josephine Baker:despite her immense success as a star of screen and stage in interwar Paris, in her movies she is invariably portrayed as a woman who is unlucky in love, losing out to a white woman in the competition for the affections of her leading man.The answer to this conundrum is more complex than simply a fear of miscegenation. I argue that anxieties about both the New Woman and the new role of the colonies in French interwar life doomed Baker’s heroines to a fate of unrequited love.By reconsidering three of Baker’s feature films, La Sirène des Tropiques, Zou Zou, and Princesse Tam-Tam, this paper explores intersections of race and gender in French popular culture between the two World Wars.
Paola Bacchetta, Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley: “Movements from the Imperceptible: On Lesbian of Color Collective Actant(e)s in Paris”
This paper engages with circuits of constructive, disquieting, disruptive and resiliant action produced by subjects who remain imperceptible in dominant accounts of current theories and practices of “French feminism,” immigration, and queer in France, that is: lesbian “of color” political-social actant(e)s. At the center of the discussion is one particular lesbian “of color” collective, the Groupe du 6 Novembre: lesbiennes issues du colonialisme, de l’esclavage et de l’immigration (6 November Group: Lesbians Begotten of/Out of Colonialism, Slavery and Immigration). The collective is based in Paris, but its theories and practices position it in an infinitely wider and thicker circuit of flows and blockages, from the local to the transnational. This paper considers some of the complexities of four circuits of action produced and effected by the Groupe, its members and allies: the psychic-mental, the transgressive, the directly oppositional, and the transformative. The primary archive includes the full set of the Groupe’s textual productions (book, tracts, essays, a special issue of a journal, its website, internet postings, etc.), data from interviews with Groupe members, and notes from fieldwork. Beyond the merely additive element constituted by what Gayatri Spivak would refer to as “information retrieval” about the Groupe as a socio-political fragment that has been erased, opening a space of perceptibility for the Groupe in the analytics of “French feminism,” of immigration and of queer, could have implications for productively interrogating the dominant grid of intelligibility through which these categories (“French feminism,” immigration, queer) have been constituted.
Rachel Moran, Law, UC Berkeley: “Loving and the Law of Unintended Consequences: Racial Categories, Intimacy, and the Courts”
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, a landmark case in which the US Supreme Court declared legal barriers to interracial marriage unconstitutional. Because the Court interrogated the meaning of neither race nor marriage, Loving has been invoked since in a number of later struggles in ways that would have surprised the Justices. This result illustrates the law of unintended consequences: the more that is left unexamined, the more likely that a fresh look will reveal implications beyond those originally contemplated.I explore Loving’s complex legacy by first considering how the Court came to its assumptions and how the opinion was later deployed in unexpected ways. I show that the Justices accepted monoracial categories as a given, despite evidence of multiracial complexity. The Justices also regarded marriage as a self-evident institution. Ironically, the Court’s assumptions about race and marriage have been directly subverted by those who most openly lay claim to Loving’s legacy. Proponents of multiracialism and advocates of same-sex marriage argue that their reform proposals are a natural outgrowth of the Court’s conceptualization of freedom and equality. At the same time, Loving’s subtler consequences have gone largely unaddressed. The case ushered in a jurisprudence of colorblind segregation with devastating consequences for racial equality. The decision also helped to entrench the primacy of marriage and the nuclear family in the law, marginalizing the importance of other long-term relationships. Finally, Loving acquiesced in the presumption that romance happens only among Americans and so the decision has been of little import in dignifying and protecting the intimate attachments of non-citizens.