Breaking the Republic in Half? Black Worldmaking Practices in Contemporary France

Abstract

This thesis explores black worldmaking practices in contemporary France. I define worldmaking as the ongoing efforts to bring about futures made impossible in the present. In the French national context, dominant republican universalism stifles the recognition of the very existence of race and racism. Against this background, this project asks how black postcolonial citizens resist their oppression in the present and sketch out alternative possibilities of being and belonging in France for the future. I excavate these two research questions across three main locations of analysis: rap, black women’s self-narratives in film and literature, and afrofeminist organising and theatre performances. First, I posit that French rap intervenes into discourses around the nation and belonging to make sense of identities constructed as contradictory or impossible. Understanding music as a site where identity is lived and produced, I show how rap constitutes a powerful counter-hegemonic discourse on colonial remembrance, and resists the erasure of black postcolonial citizens’ experiences and identities by making them tangible in its sound. Second, I explore how black women’s self-narratives work to resist the dominant representational landscape that produces Frenchness and blackness as mutually exclusive. These works challenge the status quo by de-naturalising blackness, refusing the negation of their interiority, and affirming community against the spectre of communitarianism. In doing so, they make blackness in France thinkable, by articulating specific modes of relating to blackness, displaying a dialogic construction of identity, and affirming the possibility of taking each other as audience. Together, these dynamics also open the door to new fictional representations. Finally, I explore how the concept of flamboyance is deployed in afrofeminist organising and theatre performances. I begin by interrogating flamboyance as a refusal of respectability, which translates into a refusal of universalist injunctions; of colonial forgetting; and of white space/white time. Then, I focus on the emerging futurities at work in my chosen case-studies, exploring the material prefiguration of alternative futures, the related centring of case, and flamboyance as black aliveness. Taken together, these examples make a case for flamboyance as a pedagogy of worldmaking. In answer to my first research question, I find that refusal is central to worldmaking practices deployed in all three sites of analysis. All the sites analysed in this thesis articulate a continued and overarching refusal of the negation of black postcolonial citizens’ existences. Given the centrality of this negation to the present assemblages, these lines of flight do threaten to break the Republic in half — and form new assemblages among its ruins. This project’s first contribution is therefore an empirical study of productive refusal as an essential element of worldmaking. In answer to the second question, it emerges that actors are not particularly invested in making a case for a “black Frenchness” or a “French blackness” that could include them. Instead, that they are French is taken as evident, and various claims about identity emerge, encouraging us to rethink the “thin/thick blackness” distinction that until now has dominated scholarship on blackness in France. Indeed, there is always an excess to resistance strategies. In resisting, people also sketched out an emerging hexagonal blackness as something deeper than the shared experience of antiblack racism. Together, these two contributions demonstrate the need to move beyond the study of racialised minority groups understood through a strict “racist oppression/antiracist resistance” binary. While it is imperative to account for and study these dynamics, we must also think much more expansively, to think of the production of identities that takes place through black oppositional practices.