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This essay presents and studies five different words used in French to express the notion of Blackness. The five words analyzed—nègre, noir, black, renoi, and négro—entered the French language between the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century and the 1980s and were often borrowed from other languages. The way the terms have been and continue to be used illustrates France's complicated and shifting relation to people of African descent, notably within its own population. In the context of culture wars that have been shaking the country in the past decades and have seen the rise of organized Black political groups on the French public stage, how one speaks Blackness in France has become especially fraught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explain racial fissures in France today, one must revisit the structural and ideological failings in the origin of key Republican institutions. This article analyzes how the symbolic and material significance of labor structures imposed on black French citizens in the Third Republic produced differentiation in the value of labor to the nation. The production of social patterns and belief systems based on racial inequality were integrated into the structure of the French welfare state. The experience of black political actors, Hégésippe Légitimus, Blaise Diange, Lamine Senghor, and the state illustrates how the welfare state, as an engine of assimilation, defined a differential and racialized status for blacks during the process of crucial institution building. Although the majority of blacks in the French Empire were subjects during the Third Republic, the experience of those who were citizens indicates contradictions related to incorporation and race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the action of Black Jewish organizations (the Fédération Internationale des Juifs noirs and Am-I-Farafina) in France has made visible the existence of a category of French Jews which had so far been little-known and hardly studied. They are native Jews or converts hailing from African countries, the West Indies, or the USA, and offer a wealth of new elements for observers and scholars of Jewish identity by introducing the question of interethnic relations in this frame. How do they perceive themselves as Black and Jewish, and what is their place in the Jewish community in France? The present study addresses these two questions over the past six years, focusing both on expressions of community membership and commitment, and on the religious and personal experiences of the Black Jews of France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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According to the French republican model, group identities are conceptualized as a threat to national identity. Thus, identity politics in France faces specific challenges. The following article focuses on the Black gay population in Paris. Their everyday interactions and activities in their own spaces reveal recurring instances of marginalization and invisibilization, notably linked to this republican model. We explore their activism and the obstacles identity politics faces, especially the challenge in bringing together Black and gay politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1962, the BUMIDOM, a state agency, was founded to organize and increase migration flows from the West Indies and La Reunion to the metropole. A major difference with the immigration from Sub-Saharan Africa was that, as French citizens, the migrants from the DOM were encouraged to come to metropole. Paris was a pivotal place where they were welcomed thanks to the creation of community centers. But experiences of living in the capital city also exposed the hardship and contradictions of this migration. Indeed, the egalitarian and republican discourse generated hope among migrants while the living conditions, particularly housing, were found to be disappointing. For these migrants, citizenship was not only formal but it enabled them to define places in Paris, such as the community centers, as specifically West Indian or Reunionese. These were spaces where a regional identity was built in-between a racialized definition and the2017 celebration of cultural particulars. It also expressed an irreducible difference between Sub-Saharan migrants on the one hand and West Indian and Reunionese ones on the other. Then, the common experience of discrimination was not enough to create a unified representation of a Black Paris beyond legal statuses and geographical origins. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the 10 May 2008, approximately 2000 people marched through the center of Paris proclaiming that, ‘Slavery has been abolished, but prejudices not!’ Based on participant observation of this march, this article explores two main issues with regard to the challenges of blackness in contemporary Paris. First, it examines how the ethno-racial category of ‘black’ becomes significant for collective action in the French republican context, specifically in terms of how French black people symbolically occupy the French national imagination by physically occupying Parisian urban space. Second, the article shows that, as a commemorative march, one of its key objectives is to make present-day claims of social justice, namely, a denouncement of ongoing racial discrimination experienced by French black people. The article seeks to understand how the marchers, paradoxically by making themselves visible in public space, are in effect also proclaiming a demand for social invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the rise of Black question in French society focusing on the black people in the French society and use of the term Africa post World war II. It focuses on the return of black label due to rejection of black minority in Paris. It also discusses challenges faced by the black people, which includes identity affirmation, racial discrimination, social and political invisibility.

The interview with Tyler Stovall, Professor of French History at the University of California-Santa Cruz, U.S. is presented. When asked about black people in France, he refered to the citizenship of black people is important and not only treatment to Blacks in France. Stovall believes that study about black population in France is difficult than U.S., as France government does not keep racial statistics. According to him nation plays important role in shaping people's culture and the society.

This article explores daily online conversations between Black young people of West African descent in the Paris region. It analyses how they react to the racial and social categorizations which they are subjected to. How do they express and/or contest everyday racism, discrimination, and their being defined as a social and ethno-racial minority? What are the social effects of these modes of expression? Away from the explicit and organized discourses from associations and anti-racist groups, these conversations show how people invent modes of expressions and/or contest everyday racism, using spaces and modes which are not always explicitly political or militant, but refer to their experience of minoritization. Analysing ‘minor modes’ of expressing and contesting opens to a study on the processes of community building among black people in the French migratory and postcolonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is much concerned with what it regards as the unwillingness of progressive thinkers of the eighteenth century to accept the legitimacy of national or cultural groups that differed significantly from norms in Western Europe. My aim is to examine how eighteenth-century thinkers, including Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, and the Abbé Grégoire, perceived prototypical “others” such as Blacks and Jews, by looking at the sources—from contemporary medical science to travel literature, proto-anthropology, history, biblical scholarship and reformist projects—on which these views were based. Perceptions of Blacks cannot easily be separated from the issue of slavery, nor that of the Jews from biblical history and theology. I argue that those who wanted to exclude these groups from mainstream society generally based their arguments on a one-dimensional, self-referential empirical methodology, while those who argued for their eventual inclusion usually posited a multidimensional reality in which a shift from one dimension to the other was a matter of will and planning. While the inclusionists tended to use general categories, such as humanity or a universal spiritual order, the exclusionists tended to use particularizing categories such as race or nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1930s, when scholars from both sides of the Atlantic did not see Frenchness and blackness as mutually-inclusive categories, Mercer Cook, a prolific African-American scholar and diplomat, laid the foundations of black French studies. His scholarship on black subjects in France and its colonies was both expository and critical. Unlike his contemporaries, he refused to let racism and ethnocentrism taint his research. He inscribed black intellectual life and black experience into the historical narrative of France, and he did so from the perspective of an outsider with insider connections. As an American, he distinguished himself from black authors and intellectuals from France and its former colonies, who typically injected a strong dose of political activism into their novels, poems, and essays. Simultaneously, the close friendships he maintained with African, Caribbean, and black French authors influenced his understanding of what we would now call black France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which cites the theme of the special issue, black political and social movements, and discusses articles in the issue on topics including black activism in France, prosopography as an approach to the history of the Niagara Movement, and the limitations of political process theory in theorizing black activism.

Formerly, issues of race were written out of the public landscape of the French Republic. Now the “black condition” is openly debated. This shift is informed by self-identified black movements and their responses to French Republican avoidance of thematizing racialized social inequalities. It is simultaneously contested by groups that experience anti-black racism as it reduces their alternate use of race and ethnicity. Does blackness lead to the homogenization of black experiences or can it initiate solidarity? This article examines current debates on blackness in Paris by drawing upon ethnographic activist research with a black activist group. I analyze how the group maneuvers through a supposedly race-blind discourse, in which the act of identifying race risks being disqualified as communitarian. I argue that a conception of blackness is introduced that provides the potential to recognize the pluralities of blackness, re-shaping notions of blackness, and the abstract Republican model itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of a 'France arabe' has long had political and cultural currency - and was clearly at the heart of Le Figaro magazine's alarmist front cover back in 1985 - but that of 'la France noire' is still relatively new. The article explores why 'Black France' has become a common popular and critical term over the past decade. In addition, it examines some of the main arguments that have come to underpin discussion of 'black' questions in France, exploring the parameters of the 'black debate' and the ways it which has been intertwined with the wider 'postcolonial debate'. Finally, the article examines some key figures such as Lilian Thuram and Christiane Taubira who might be seen to represent different facets of this emerging 'France noire'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the black body usually means delving into endogenous and exogenous imaginaries to deconstruct how it has long symbolized a desired or repelled otherness. In the light of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford's works, one may consider the black body in terms of space and circulation. This analyzes how contemporary cultural, social, and economic interactions between African and Afro-descendant people have turned the black body into a space of encounter which parts become elements to represent a global black self encompassing local, national, ethnic, and diasporan ascriptions. It interrogates the commodification of this body as the predicament of multi-scaled identities and crossed visions of blackness in the twenty-first century. This study explores images formed by the black media and international trademarks and questions the connection between esthetics, politics, and modernity they initiate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers changes in the symbolic boundaries of French society under the influence of neo-liberalism. As compared to the early nineties, stronger boundaries toward the poor and blacks are now being drawn, while North-African immigrants and their offsprings continue to be largely perceived as outside the community of those who deserve recognition and protection. Moreover, while the social reproduction of upper-middle-class privileges has largely remained unchanged, there is a blurring of the symbolic boundaries separating the middle and working class as the latter has undergone strong individualization. Also, youth are now bearing the brunt of France's non-adaptation to changes in the economy and are increasingly marginalized. The result is a dramatic change in the overall contours of the French symbolic community, with a narrowed definition of cultural membership, and this, against a background of growing inequality, unemployment, and intolerance in a more open and deregulated labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the subject of racial advocacy in France, black internationalism during the interwar era, and the emergence of Republican consensus in France.

This article examines the career of Lamine Senghor, a Senegalese veteran of the First World War, who emerged in the mid 1920s as the most influential black anti-colonial activist of the period. Senghor combined a communist-inspired critique of empire with an attempt to forge a transnational sense of black identity. Many of the questions facing Senghor remain relevant today: should the black community seek equality through its own independent pressure groups or through strategic alliances with mainstream political parties? And how does one engage with issues of racial (or religious) equality within the terms of the purportedly colour-blind and secular Republic? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to tease out the composite set of narratives and actions displayed in the frame of the organisational dynamic of the black population in France, with a special focus on the issue of blackness. The objective is to lay out a comprehensive theoretical framework capable of making sense of the competing and sometimes divergent discourses and actions within the black French associative space. Neither generation nor class nor education will be sufficient to explain this divergence. A structural approach-based framework seems the most adequate to do so as it replaces the creation of these divergences and dissonances in a relational perspective. The stories of these associations and their efforts help to frame the historical context of racial advocacy and the role of immigrant and French organisations in shaping the debate about integration, republicanism, identity and belonging in contemporary France. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The French national historical narrative, epitomized by the anthem 'liberty, equality, fraternity', has long been a monochrome one. Despite a long black presence, Blackness was ignored. Black people were considered as outsiders. After the 2005 riots in the suburbs and the 2007 presidential election, they gained attention as a community significant to the constructing of a multicultural society. Black communities seize this time as an opportunity to remedy their political and social invisibility. One way chosen by some black people is to look back at history. Whether calling for an 'African-centered' or 'black-centered' perspective or knowledge, some now define their approach as Afrocentric. Though the ideas and concepts carried by Afrocentrism are not new in France, they now gain popularity among people of African descent as a means to challenge black people's outsider/insider status in French society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early 1960s, an increasing number of Africans migrated to France from their former colonies in West Africa. Most were men hoping to gain employment in several different industries. Their settlement in Paris and other cities signaled the start of "post-colonial" African immigration to France. While scholars have analyzed several facets of this migration, they often overlook the ways in which France's role as a colonial power in West Africa impacted the reception of these immigrants after 1960, where surveillance played a critical role. Colonial regimes policed and monitored the activities of indigenous populations and anyone else they deemed problematic. The desire to understand newly arriving immigrant groups and suspicion of foreign-born populations intersected with the state's capacity to monitor certain groups in order to regulate and control them. While not physically violent, these surveillance practices reflected the role that symbolic violence played in the French government's approach to this post-colonial immigrant population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]