Tuesday, June 25, 2013
5.60 (PC Hoofthuis)
This paper sheds light on ethnic group relations in France by examining the case of French Antilleans—migrants from the overseas French departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The data are drawn from a larger study of group boundaries and ethnoracial categorizations in contemporary representations of the French colonial past. I collected three sources of data: (1) 127 in-depth interviews with activists, educators and administrators involved in the commemoration of French Atlantic slavery as well as ordinary French Antillean migrants outside of the commemorative movement (2) ethnographic observation of commemorative mobilizations and related cultural events in the Paris region between 2007 and 2010 and (3) a historical database of speeches delivered by French politicians over the course of the last 30 years. While French Antilleans are born with French citizenship, share much of mainstream (dominant) French culture (e.g. French language, familiarity with Catholicism, secularism), they sometimes also report being mistreated due to anti-black racism, the distinctiveness of their Caribbean culture as well as their presumed class background. The precariousness of their belonging within the Republic – and the fact that many 2nd generation migrants grow up in the same working-class banlieues as youth with family ties to sub-Saharan and Northern African – provides French Antilleans with cultural logics to both include and exclude immigrants in their definitions of their collective identities. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with 1st and 2nd generation Antillean migrants, I examine three factors related to Antilleans' symbolic inclusion and exclusion of immigrants in France: (1) their views on inequality and group relations in France (2) their personal experiences with discrimination and (3) their understandings of national and colonial history.
