This dissertation aims at making visible the pervasiveness of white supremacy in contemporary France. In order to do so, I deconstruct French national identity by critically engaging with the French Republic's universalist and colorblind stance. In the first section, I take stock of France's knowledge production on questions of identity, identifying problems in the conflation of race with immigration studies and noticing the relative absence of racial studies. In the second section, I consider the ways in which the French education system is an ideological apparatus of forceful inclusion by analyzing issues of knowledge production and destruction within the French education system. In the third section, I discuss the racialization of religion in France and historicize the concept of laïcité, France's word for its brand of secularism, in order to show how it has become a technology to oppress Muslims and perceived Muslims in France. In the fourth section, I am focused on issues of representation, recognition and state antiracism in France, questioning and historicizing the French colorblind antiracist institutions through an analysis of two critically acclaimed films, Intouchables and Bande de filles. In the last section, I look at the place of language in the construction of French identity. I discuss how it became such an essential aspect of French identity by looking at its colonial context, and I address what that context might mean for non-white, non-heteronormative contemporary French speakers.

Desiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire. Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France—first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery. Desiring Whiteness traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule. Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy.

This collection examines images of whiteness in literature, film, television, as well as ethnographic studies, and provides preliminary guidance to engage in anti-racist praxis and education.

At least since the French Revolution, France has the peculair distinction of simultaneously fascinating, charming and exasperating its neighbours and foreign observers. Contemporary France provides an essential introduction for students of French politics and society, exploring contemporary developments while placing them in a deeper historical, intellectual, cultural and social context that makes for insightful analysis. Thus, chapters on France's economic policy and welfare state, its foreign and European policies and its political movements and recent institutional developments are informed by an analysis of the country's unique political and institutional traditions, distinct forms of nationalism and citizenship, dynamic intellectual life and recent social trends. Summaries of key political, economic and social movements and events are displayed as exhibits.

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remain one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. Troubling visions is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies - ranging from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France's popular TV series Plus belle la vie - it explores how ethnicities have been represented in contemporary France across a wide variety of different media. Its innovative, interdisciplinary approach and novel subject matter will complement university courses that focus on contemporary French society and visual culture. It will interest those researching and studying French and European film and photography, ethnicity in post-colonial France and visual culture generally.

Maxim Silverman analyzes the connection between racism and the development of the nation-state in modern France. He raises important questions about the nature of French society and contributes to the European debate on citizenship.

Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions is a tightly interconnected and richly collaborative book that will advance our understanding of why it is so difficult to re-form and reimagine whiteness in the twenty-first century. Composed after the election of the first black U.S. president, post-global financial crisis, more than a decade after 9/11, and concomitant with a rash of xenophobic incidents across the globe, the book distills several key themes associated with a post-millennial global whiteness: the individual and collective emotions of whiteness, the recentering of whiteness through governing and legal strategies, and the retreats from social equity and justice that have characterized the late twentieth and twenty-first century nation state. It also attempts the difficult work of reimagining white identities and cultures for a new era. Chapters in Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century draw from the fields of African-American studies, English studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, education, and women’s studies. Using transdisciplinarity as a mode of inquiry for the project and responding to the changing phenomenon of whiteness across several continents (Australia, Canada, France, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States), the collection brings together established and emerging scholars and a range of critical approaches to unveil and intervene in the ideologies of whiteness in our contemporary moment. Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates that complex inquiry and activism are needed to challenge new iterations of whiteness in twenty-first-century political and social spaces.