BREAKING FRAMES Towards a “Habitable Multiculturalism” in the French Banlieue Dr. Beth Epstein ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2018–19
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n contemporary France, questions relating to diversity and social inequality and the way these map out across the centers and peripheries of the country’s metropoles have over the past few decades reached a fever pitch. Turning on the merits of the French republican project and/or the exclusionary consequences of its “difference-blind” ideal, these controversies play out most ostensibly in relation to the country’s disadvantaged suburbs or banlieues, districts that distil the preoccupations of an anxious France. Life in these neighborhoods however also dislodges the terms of these polemics. My current project entails exploring the experiences of people who live and work in these multi-ethnic districts as a means to unblock this entrenched debate. To lay out the terms relevant to this discussion, I begin with a video, available on YouTube, filmed in June 2015.1 The video shows roughly 50 people seated around a table in a seminar room at the University of Paris 8, most of them women in their 20s and 30s, black and white; the subject under discussion is “Féminismes et critiques postcoloniales.” Around five minutes into the video an angry exchange breaks out between the feminist activists Maya Surduts and Sharone Omankoy. Surduts, who died in 2016 at the age of 79, is known in France for her activism in support of women’s reproductive freedoms, and as spokesperson for the Collectif des Droits des Femmes founded in 1996. Omankoy, who at the time of the conference was 29, is one of the founders of the Mwasi Collectif, an afrofeminist collective created in 2014. The dispute between them followed Surduts’ defense of the movements of the 1980s and ’90s, which earlier her younger 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1RJhJJQDF0. 13
