In 2005, following the death of two youths of African origin, France erupted in a wave of violent protest. More than 10,000 automobiles were burned or stoned, hundreds of public buildings were vandalized or burned to the ground, and hundreds of people were injured. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, Peter J. Bloom, and a group of international scholars seek to understand the causes and consequences of these momentous events, while examining how the concept of Frenchness has been reshaped by the African diaspora in France and the colonial legacy.

The black population in France is still not accepted as a racial identity because of the concern of preserving the myth of colorblindness. While they are not officially viewed as a racial identity, black people go through an overt racial discrimination because of the color of their skin. This racial discrimination is recurrent in the political spectrum, through the derogatory and divisive rhetoric of political leaders, as well as in public life, but it is often explained as a social rather than a racial problem. This racial discrimination is accompanied by a systematic silencing of black people, which makes it difficult for them to tackle the racial issue from a racial perspective. Any attempt at claiming one’s rights from a racial standpoint is thought to be incongruous with “values” of the French nation. The silencing of the discourse on race through the notion of colorblindness and the perpetration of racial practices make the life of people of African descent difficult as to how they should go about defending themselves within the French nation-state. In this respect, after giving a theoretical analysis of the Western states—based on my conception that they are founded from anti-black principles, I focus on people of African descent in France to see how they negotiate their space, how they grapple with their identity, and more importantly what strategies of resistance they adopt in reaction to racism and racial discrimination. In that sense, my main point is that the African-centered expression of belonging of people of African descent is a neo-discourse of modernity because it implies the reconciliation of Blackness and Frenchness. This helps me clarify that the African-centered expression of belonging implies that multiculturalism cannot only be achieved from an integrationist or anti-negritudist perspective, but through the assertion of blackness for visibility.

An examination of French citizenship and cultural identity in Algeria during the last quarter-century of colonial rule. In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitionsof French identity from the past, but not those forged within the borders of the French 'Hexagon, ' as French geographic space is sometimes called. It is the study of French sentiment in colonial Algeria of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during the last quarter century of colonial rule in North Africa. It seeks to uncover elements of French identity that were generated past the Pyrenees and the Alps, beyond the bordering Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and Mediterranean Sea, outside the physical space so central to "Frenchness." It asks whether far-reaching state institutions could transform indigenous and settler populations in colonial Algeria -- Europeans, Jews and Muslims -- intoFrench men and women. It examines what these individuals wrote of French sentiment in colonial Algeria. Did they articulate alternative definitions of French identity? The colonial "periphery" is clearly quite central to France'sevolving postcolonial sense of self. Colonial Algerian heterogeneity and the country's unique relationship to France make it an especially rich site in which to study French national and cultural identities. French military conquest and the occupation of the North African coast established one of the oldest and largest settler colonies within the French Empire. Unlike other colonies, Algeria lay relatively close to metropolitan France, a daylong journey by ship from Marseilles. No colony other than Algeria was granted French departmental status. No other land administered under the auspices of the French Empire had as numerous a European settler population, many of whom becamenaturalized French citizens. This study suggests that although Algeria had become officially French, "Algerie française", even at the pinnacle of its acceptance, was more diverse and more contested than its title suggests.

The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.

An “excellent [and] incisive” look at identity, immigration, and culture in postcolonial France (Journal of West African History). This stimulating and insightful book reveals how increased control over immigration has changed cultural and social production in theater, literature, and even museum construction. Dominic Thomas’s analysis unravels the complex cultural and political realities of long-standing mobility between Africa and Europe. Thomas questions the attempt to place strict limits on what it means to be French or European and offers a sense of what must happen to bring about a renewed sense of integration and global Frenchness. “Essential reading for anyone investigating the debates surrounding contemporary French identity and the ever-changing relationship between France and her former colonial possessions.” —African Studies Bulletin

Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different picture. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Jean Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of Maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.