Friday, March 14, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Comparisons of ethnoracial relations in the U.S. and France have a long and complex history, from the famous reflections of de Tocqueville (1838) to more recent interdisciplinary work (Lamont 2000, Fassin 2006, Celestine 2009, Cohen et al. 2012). I suggest that such comparisons become particularly salient during "unsettled times" (Swidler 1986), when ethnoracial hierarchies undergo reconfiguration or rapid change (e.g. the global abolitionist movement, the U.S. civil rights movement). The U.S./France comparison experienced another resurrection in the wake of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Obama's election stirred populations across Europe - and in France in particular - to consider the place of minorities in politics. Yet despite the tradition of scholarly and popular comparisons of race in France and the U.S., little is known about how minorities themselves view the question. This paper begins to address this gap through interviews (N=52) with French Caribbeans conducted between 2008 and 2009 in Paris. As transnational migrants, Antilleans are an ideal population for tracing how ethnoracial ideas flow through global circuits. Bridging cultural sociology with hip hop scholarship, I draw attention to what I term "socio-cultural sampling"-- the process by which individuals appropriate, transform and (in some cases) distort ethnoracial references, scripts and collective memories borrowed and remixed from a global repertoire. Utilizing an innovative methodology, I systematically tap respondents' transatlantic frameworks by examining how they 1) assess inter-group relations in the U.S./France 2) interpret my identity as an African-American researcher and 3) evaluate the likely impact of Obama's election on French politics.
