Frenchness and the African Diaspora PDF Download

Author: Charles Tshimanga
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253003903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In 2005, following the death of two youths of African origin, France erupted in a wave of violent protest. More than 10,000 automobiles were burned or stoned, hundreds of public buildings were vandalized or burned to the ground, and hundreds of people were injured. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, Peter J. Bloom, and a group of international scholars seek to understand the causes and consequences of these momentous events, while examining how the concept of Frenchness has been reshaped by the African diaspora in France and the colonial legacy.

Author: Dominic Thomas
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253007038
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
An “excellent [and] incisive” look at identity, immigration, and culture in postcolonial France (Journal of West African History). This stimulating and insightful book reveals how increased control over immigration has changed cultural and social production in theater, literature, and even museum construction. Dominic Thomas’s analysis unravels the complex cultural and political realities of long-standing mobility between Africa and Europe. Thomas questions the attempt to place strict limits on what it means to be French or European and offers a sense of what must happen to bring about a renewed sense of integration and global Frenchness. “Essential reading for anyone investigating the debates surrounding contemporary French identity and the ever-changing relationship between France and her former colonial possessions.” —African Studies Bulletin

Author: Laila Amine
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299315800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

Author: Jean Beaman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520967445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different picture. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Jean Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of Maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.

Author: Félix Germain
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496210352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 explores how black women in France itself, the French Caribbean, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque, and Saint-Louis experienced and reacted to French colonialism and how gendered readings of colonization, decolonization, and social movements cast new light on the history of French colonization and of black France. In addition to delineating the powerful contributions of black French women in the struggle for equality, contributors also look at the experiences of African American women in Paris and in so doing integrate into colonial and postcolonial conversations the strategies black women have engaged in negotiating gender and race relations à la française. Drawing on research by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries, this collection offers a fresh, multidimensional perspective on race, class, and gender relations in France and its former colonies, exploring how black women have negotiated the boundaries of patriarchy and racism from their emancipation from slavery to the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Author: Ch. Didier Gondola
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253020808
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
“An innovative and original study that sheds light on masculinity, youth culture, performative violence, and the circuit of global imagery.” —Stephan F. Miescher, author of Making Men in Ghana During the 1950s and 60s in the Congo city of Kinshasa, there emerged young urban male gangs known as “Bills” or “Yankees.” Modeling themselves on the images of the iconic American cowboy from Hollywood film, the Bills sought to negotiate lives lived under oppressive economic, social, and political conditions. They developed their own style, subculture, and slang and as Ch. Didier Gondola shows, engaged in a quest for manhood through bodybuilding, marijuana, violent sexual behavior, and other transgressive acts. Gondola argues that this street culture became a backdrop for Congo-Zaire’s emergence as an independent nation and continues to exert powerful influence on the country’s urban youth culture today. “Aligns social banditry with popular cultural formations and subcultures. This has been a longstanding feature of Didier Gondola’s scholarship that is of great interest.” —Peter J. Bloom, University of California, Santa Barbara “Its approach in terms of poverty and unemployment combined with a subtle interest in performance and the creation of an original culture makes this book an eye-opener. Both the dramatic subject and the author’s vivid style make it a pleasure to read and also food for thought regarding issues that haunt not only Africa but also the world at large.” —American Historical Review

Author: Dominic Thomas
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253218810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"[W]ithout a doubt one of the most important studies so far completed on literature in French grounded in the experiences of migrants of sub-Saharan African origin." —Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University France has always hosted a rich and vibrant black presence within its borders. But recent violent events have raised questions about France's treatment of ethnic minorities. Challenging the identity politics that have set immigrants against the mainstream, Black France explores how black expressive culture has been reformulated as global culture in the multicultural and multinational spaces of France. Thomas brings forward questions such as—Why is France a privileged site of civilization? Who is French? Who is an immigrant? Who controls the networks of production? Black France poses an urgently needed reassessment of the French colonial legacy.

Author: Robin Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Author: Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252084751
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging.

Author: Sophie White
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture—especially dress—was central to the elaboration of discourses about race. At the heart of France's seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy—Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable conception of identity carried a risk: while Indians had the potential to become French, the French could themselves be transformed into Indians. French officials had effectively admitted defeat of their policy by the time Louisiana became a province of New France in 1682. But it was here, in Upper Louisiana, that proponents of French-Indian intermarriage finally claimed some success with Frenchification. For supporters, proof of the policy's success lay in the appearance and material possessions of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen. Through a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the material sources, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of the contours and chronology of racialization in early America. While focused on Louisiana, the methodological model offered in this innovative book shows that dress can take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies—for the process of colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.