Friday, March 14, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
Despite an official “masking” of difference based on France’s Republican ideology, the state has an increasingly narrow definition of what it means to be “French,” a definition which often excludes particular populations within French society, including those who were born in France to parents who are immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. Based on participant observation and interviews with middle-class adult children of North African immigrants in the Parisian metropolitan area, I consider how this minority population invokes blackness and race, particularly an American conception of race, in making sense of their social locations. As I show, despite the multitude of differences between France and the United States, especially in terms of identity politics, African-American culture and identity resonates with children of Maghrébin immigrants, and provides a way for them to make sense of their own marginalized social locations. This conception of blackness builds upon French historian Pap Ndiaye’s notion of transnational blackness and Tommie Shelby’s notion of thin blackness. Considering the symbolic boundaries the Maghrébin second-generation draws with African-Americans allows us to consider how notions of diaspora and transnational blackness apply not only to blacks in France but to North African-origin minorities in France as well. This research also reveals implications for thinking about how race and ethnicity matter in French society – one which locates an American understanding of race as part of the cultural repertoire of this segment of the North African second-generation population.
