BREAKING FRAMES

BREAKING FRAMES

Towards a “Habitable Multiculturalism” in the French Banlieue

Dr. Beth Epstein ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2018–19

In 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 afroeuropean colleagues had castigated as “a white feminism that ignores the racial question and excludes black women and more generally non-white women.” 2 “Le féminisme des femmes blanches,” Surduts replied, “I don’t know what that is.” Proceeding to defend 2nd wave feminism as an affair not of race but of a struggle against “domination, exclusion, discrimination,” she stated “it is more in these terms, in this dynamic, that we defined ourselves.” To this, Omankoy exclaimed “You are giving us history lessons… I’ve been to university, to the EHESS, I learned about feminism, but the Black Women’s Movement 3 was not included. So my history, me, my identity, when do I write it, when? On what basis? You have your story, but what about us?” 4 The exchange finished with Surduts and a few of her colleagues angrily leaving the room.

This dispute lays bare the terms of a deep and thorny debate about racially-inflected social tensions that has become increasingly heightened over the past 15 years in France, and that shapes the terms of my current project. One of a handful of militant ethno-racial groups actively challenging the official “difference-blind” universalism of the French state, 5 the Mwasi Collective fits into a broader landscape of post-colonial critique that took a marked turn following the suburban uprisings of 2005. 6 Made up mostly of young people born in France, many of whom grew up in the country’s disadvantaged suburbs, Mwasi and associated groups seek to bring attention to racism and their experience of it as part of a vital existential struggle: “and me, when do I get to write my history, when do I exist,” we hear Omankoy ask. Inspired by the writings of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis and others, these organizations situate their project in an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-patriarchal framework that draws heavily on the US experience and on theory from what in France they call the “Anglo-Saxon” world. 7 This, they say, is at least in part because the French intellectual establishment turns a deaf ear to their concerns, and offers little in the way of relevant critique to help shape their investigations. At the same time, they are aware that the French sociopolitical landscape offers challenges that are quite different from those present in the US; their struggle is thus also deeply tied to the need to “position themselves in a society that acts as if racism doesn’t exist”, and to open a space from which to stake a claim. 8

As we hear in the debate cited above, however, the overtly raceconscious orientation of this work is also understood as politically dangerous by many who are equally engaged in the fight for social justice. More at ease conversing in the abstract language of “domination,” “exclusion” and “discrimination,” as Surduts put it, many in France refuse the overt racialization of these debates, and are deeply suspicious of the essentializing dangers that they see as latent in struggles for recognition and the identity politics to which they give rise. 9 Such developments only serve, they claim, to polarize groups and exacerbate extant social tensions. Indeed, Mwasi’s and other groups’ practices of “non-mixité,” which their members defend as necessary to their political advancement, have in particular come under fire as balkanizing and threatening to French republican values. 10 Numerous “affairs,” scandals and talking heads serve regularly to deepen this schism, defined on the one hand by efforts to direct attention to racebased experiences of discrimination that are continually subsumed to an unsatisfactory status quo, 11 and on the other, by concern about alarming trends toward ethnic retrenchment among peoples of all colors and on all sides of political debate. 12

So what does all of this have to do with my current project? For the past 25 years I have followed these developments from a distance, an interest that began with ethnographic research that I conducted in the mid-1990s in an officially designated “sensitive urban zone” in a city outside of Paris. I am currently going back to that neighborhood, both to get caught up and see what has changed, and more notably to see how this tension plays out there on the ground. The French suburbs, I argue, despite the miserabilist image of them that is regularly broadcast in the press and considerable amounts of scholarship, add another and singularly important dimension to this debate. They do so both because they are so diverse—in the town where I work, officials speak proudly of their city as “multicultural” with over “140 nationalities” present 13 —and because they are so “mixed,” a concept that in France carries particular significance. Indeed, mixité expresses more than the de facto confirmation that cities and towns are culturally plural because that is the way of the world these days, but rather that they should be deliberately so—because “mixing” is considered good for society, because it is mixing that helps build “solidarity” and mutual assistance, because it is mixing that helps preclude against segmentation and social breakdown.

As many have pointed out, mixing and/or integration are eminently political concepts that lie at the center of the debate about how diversity should be articulated in France. Implicated in the making and marking of difference, aggressive state-directed integration policies comprise practices of exclusion and belonging via their definition of who needs integrating and how this is best to be done. 14 The strong ideological and moral valence placed on “mixing” moreover renders overtly differentialist positions problematic, as evidenced in on-going debates about “communitarism” in France and the supposed dangers it poses to the higher order project of building the collective core.

I argue however that what goes on in the French suburbs can also allow for a different view, that these polemics hide from sight. What draws me to the suburbs are the efforts I see there of people striving to craft a viable and engaged social fabric made up of their multiple parts, that engages seriously with the French republican injunction to “transcend difference” in the public sphere without necessarily succumbing to it. The desire of local residents to locate their shared interest is more than just pretty talk, but embraced by many as vital to the well-being of their town and necessarily the way to build their collective way forward. Their embrace of the vivre ensemble, which can take many forms, includes strategies to promote entrepreneurial self-help, to encourage what they call “solidarity” across ethnic and generational lines, to build local-global alliances, and to mock national stereotypes about the communitarist threat to republican values in the banlieue. These strategies both resist and accommodate neoliberal reforms, and stand in pointed contrast to the entre-soi, the welldocumented tactics adopted by the elite classes to live in endogamous isolation. 15

Paul Gilroy among others has put out a call for a new humanism, or what he calls a “habitable multiculturalism,” that recognizes the violence of past and present racial and colonial histories without then reproducing and/or becoming subject to the racial orders that undergird them. Arguing for the “need to appreciate and perhaps also cultivate exposure to alterity as something beyond mere plurality and something apart from loss, anxiety, and risk,” 16 he and others strive to locate an ethics that can tie the claims of a critical politics of recognition to a broader project of universal emancipation. 17 The antagonisms articulated in the encounter I start with above illustrate this tension. They reflect both a compromised republicanism, further corroded by the aggressive market logics of global capitalism, and the need and/or desire on the part of many to locate a new common ground. These are challenges that people living in the mixed and lively neighborhoods of the French banlieue wrestle with in the course of their everyday. Staying attuned to that experience, I argue, can help shine light on what has otherwise become an entrenched reading of race, diversity, and social inequality in our times.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1RJhJJQDF0.13

2. Quoted in Silyane Larcher, “‘Nos vies sont politiques !’ L’afroféminisme en France ou la riposte des petites-filles de l’empire,” Participations, 19 (2017)

3: 97–127, my translation. 3. La coordination des femmes noires, founded in 1976.

4. Vous nous faites les leçons d’histoire... J’étais à l’université, à l’EHESS, j’ai appris les choses sur le féminisme, mais la Coordination des femmes noires n’y était pas. Donc mon histoire, moi, mon identité, je l’écris quand, je l’écris quand ? Sur quelle base ? Vous vous avez le vôtre, et nous ?

5. See also the Collectif Cases Rebelles, Sawtche—Collectif Afroféministe, and the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie.

6. See Jim Cohen, Elsa Dorlin, Dimitri Nicolaïdis, Malika Rahal, and Patrick Simon, “Dossier. Le tournant postcolonial à la française,” Mouvements 51 (2007) 3 : 7–12.

7. The US model figures broadly in many sides of this debate. Referenced often as an antithetical foil for French universalism—an example of what not to do in the organization of social difference—American racial histories and repertoires are also cited regularly by actors seeking alternate frameworks from which to think through these questions. See among others Beth Epstein, “Redemptive Politics: Racial Reasoning in Contemporary France,” Patterns of Prejudice 50 (2016) 2: 168–187; George M. Fredrickson, “Diverse Republics: French & American Responses to Racial Pluralism,” Daedalus 134 (2005): 88–101; Loïc Wacquant, “Banlieues françaises et ghetto noir américain. Eléments de comparison sociologique,” in: M. Wieviorka (ed.), Racisme et modernité (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1992).

8. Interview with Gerty Dambury, accessible at https://nyansapofest. org/ressources/.

9. See among others Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché : enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Les éditions Pluriels, 2011); Jean-François Bayart, “Post-colonial studies, a political invention of tradition?” Public Culture 23 (2011) 1: 55–84; Michel Giraud, “The ‘Question of Blackness’ and the Memory of Slavery: Invisibility and Forgetting as Voluntary Fire and Some Pyromaniac Firefighters” in:Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall (eds.), Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

10. This came to a head in the summer of 2017 when Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, threatened to shut down a festival organized by the Collective on the grounds that it was not mixed and therefore antithetical to French republican principles. This caused a bit of an embarrassment for Hidalgo when she learned that the original tweet condemning the festival on these grounds was composed by a member of the far-right National Front.

11. https://mwasicollectif.com/portfolio/declaration-politique/; see also Nancy Fraser, “Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down? Post- Polanyian Reflections on Capitalist Crisis,” in: Thomas Claviez (ed.) The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?,” Public Culture 23 (2011) 1: 85–119; Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

12. Beth Epstein, Romi Mukherjee, Janie Pélabay, and Réjane Sénac (eds.), “Special Issue, Dilemmas of Equality: Perspectives from France and the USA,” International Social Science Journal 223–224 (2017).

13. This is a notable development, as 25 years ago the word “multicultural” was never even uttered, even as the city was just as diverse then as it is now.

14. Beth Epstein, Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Mayanthi L. Fernando, “Exceptional citizens: secular muslim women and the politics of difference in France,” Social Anthropology 17 (2009) 4: 379–392; Neil Mac- Master, “The ‘seuil de tolérance’: The Uses of a Scientific Racist Concept” in: M. Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse & Power in France (Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing Co., 1991); Olivier Masclet, “Une municipalité communiste face à l’immigration algérienne et marocaine, Gennevilliers, 1950–1972,” Genèses 4 (2001) 45: 150–163; Sylvie Tissot, Sylvie, “‘Une ‘discrimination informelle’ ? Usages du concept de mixité sociale dans la gestion des attributions de logements HLM,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 159 (2005): 54–69.

15. Fabien Desage, “‘Un peuplement de qualité’. Mise en œuvre de la loi SRU dans le périurbain résidentiel aisé et discrimination discrète,” Gouvernement et action publique 3 (2016) 3: 83–112 ; Michel Pinçon & Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Sociologie de la bourgeoisie (Paris: La Découverte, 2016). See also https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/06/21/sommes-nousmoins-francais-parce-que-nous-vivons-de-l-autre-cote-du-peripherique_5479415_3232.html

16. Paul Gilroy, “Antiracism and (re)humanization,” in: Claviez (ed.) The Common Growl, op. cit., 113.

17. See also https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/conversation-achille-mbembe-and-david-theo-goldberg-on-critique-of-black-reason/#_ftn1; and Fraser, “Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down?”