Sayyid Empire Islam Postcolonial

There Are No Blacks in France:
Fanonian Discourse, the Dark

Night of Slavery1 and the French
Civilizing Mission Reconsidered
Franc oise Verge's
Abstract
During the Algerian struggle, Fanon warned us about the influence on politics of the few European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who have
at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats, blocked
every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of
democracy into Algeria. Is this remark still pertinent? How does Frantz Fanon
help us understand current reactionary politics in France? Is his analysis of the
French Left still pertinent? How does colonial discourse weigh on the postcolonial present? In this article, I explore current expressions of French postcolonial reactionary politics focusing on an event in Reunion Island, a French
postcolonial territory. I argue that it is important to observe what is happening in French postcolonial territories because they remain laboratories for
repressive policies and discourses. What I call the discourse of French
Algeria , a mix of revisionist history, resentment, wounded narcissism and
racism, embodies a political trend that seeks to counter the small progress
made in rewriting history from the point of view of the colony in France.
Key words
colonialism j conservative linguistic revolution
j postcolonial j slavery
Fanon
memory
NE OF these days, it will be by kicks in your arse that France will

force you to take your independence, Frantz Fanon said to his
friend Berte'ne Juminer, from Guyana, after the December 1959
riots in Martinique (Macey, 2000: 419). In Fort de France, an initial dispute
j
Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 27(7- 8): 91^111
DOI: 10.1177/0263276410383715
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Bobst Library, New York University on February 17, 2015
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Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)
between a white man and a black Martinican man had led to three nights of
riots. A curfew was imposed. Three young men were shot dead by the
CRS (2000: 417^20). Though Fanon had described the riots as an embryonic
revolution in El Moudjahid (in Fanon, 1967b: 167^9), he was in private dismissive of the capacities of Martinicans to truly win their freedom. They
are not going to do anything about it, he continued:
Theyll probably vote for some symbolic motions and then begin all over to
croak from misery. In reality, a flash of anger on their part reassures the
colonialists. It will be a question of a manifestation and nothing more,
somewhat like an erotic dream. (Macey, 2000: 421)
It was true that the riots and their repression failed to mobilize French
opinion and that local political parties called for calm. The 1959 riots
belonged to the postcolonial history2 of crisis, riots and violent demonstrations that have been the actuality of French overseas departments. F|fty
years later, the French overseas departments again went through massive
mobilization, against what Elie Domota, the leader of the Guadeloupes
movement, called pwotasyon, or blind exploitation and prots. For once,
French public opinion followed the events and the French media tried to
unpack the complexities of the situation. Guadeloupe was seen by some
French intellectuals3 as the terrain of post-capitalistic politics, for a new
dawn for oppressed peoples. Months later, a referendum organized in
Martinique and Guyana proposing more local autonomy was in both cases
massively rejected by the population (though a signicant proportion
abstained). Regional elections in March 2010 brought a conservative majority in Guyana and Reunion against local Left alliances; in Guadeloupe, the
Socialist candidate, whose second on his list was the local UMP (Union
Mouvement Populaire, the centre-right party currently led by Sarkozy) parliamentary representative, won handily. Does that mean that Fanons assessment about French postcolonial territories still holds true? That his
remark ^ One makes love to a shadow, soils the bed and the next morning
everything is back in order again and soon forgotten (Macey, 2000: 420) ^
signals an uncomfortable truth? What do the repeated crises ^ or, to be
more precise, the constant low-intensity crisis, with its regular moments of
violence ^ in the French overseas territories say about republican France, citizenship and postcoloniality? What is it about French republicanism that
cannot imagine the autonomy of groups and people? Can French republican
colonialist doctrine and propaganda be said to have been partly successful,
thus explaining the permanence of the deleterious and morbid relation
between France and its colonial territories? Why did Fanon marginalize the
matrix of slavery as the site of race formation and memories of resistance?
Can the resistances to slavery be a source of references for action and hope
in France today?
Using Fanons method of starting from a contextualized case to then
propose a larger analysis, I would like to examine French postcolonial
Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France
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politics in its overseas territories as well as local dynamics by looking at a

cultural project in Reunion Island which has been aborted by the conservative majority elected in March 2010 to the islands Regional Council.
I would also like to explore Fanons analysis of the impact of French colonial
settlers upon French politics and to see if his analysis helps us to understand
current resistance to postcolonial demands coming from disenfranchised
youth in the French overseas territories or in hexagonal France.
Fanon and the French Postcolonial Canon
There has been in the last decades an impressive literature in English about
Frantz Fanon, who has entered the canon of postcolonial studies, visual studies and philosophy. His place in French thought, however, is marginal.
Antillean intellectuals rarely refer to him; a 2009 manifesto of Antillean
intellectuals did not quote him (Le Monde, 2009); his writings are barely
cited in works about diversity or the black experience in France. Fanon is
notably absent from French current public conversation. He remains a problematic gure. He belongs to the forgotten gures of French colonial and
postcolonial history, like Aime Cesaire, who had also been erased from
memory until he refused to receive Nicolas Sarkozy in 2005 following the
passing of a law in that year which requires that French colonization be
taught in a positive light. Fanon is also associated with Third Worldism,
which has been under constant attack from French intellectuals whose disillusion with national liberation movements matched their previous idealization of colonized people. There are other reasons. His focus on post-slavery
colonialism tends to set him apart from the disenfranchised youth of the
jungles, banlieux and outre-mer, as the postcolonial territories of the
Republic are known. To them, for whom colonial memories have served as
sites of references, metaphors and discourses to make sense of their present,
there is a stronger connection between slavery and colonialism than Fanon
saw. However, Fanons anger seems perfectly attuned with what current
issues in France reveal: growing discrimination, growing inequalities, growing racism, in which colonial and postcolonial shadows can be discerned.
In 1996, Stuart Hall asked What action, what hope is proposed? in
Frantz Fanons invitation to an action and a basis of hope, when the colonized people use the past with the intention of opening the future (1996:
14). For Fanon, the past that was the basis of action and hope was never
the past of Martinique, marked by slavery and colonialism. It was the past
of the African-American struggle against racism, of the Vietnamese, of the
African and Algerian struggle against French colonialism. Fanon never saw
slavery as the past, which would constitute an invitation to action and a
basis of hope. Deeply marked by the Hegelian dialectics of the master^
slave, he could not envision the dark night of slavery as a way of opening
the future. The struggle within the French overseas territories did not fit
into his theoretical frame about sustained violence as the only way to
defeat colonialism, in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and
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capitalism (Fanon, 1990: 62). Decolonization, Fanon wrote, unies that

people by the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity, and by
unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial basis (1990: 35). The French
overseas territories seem to question that armation. Regardless of their
diversity,4 none of them is ghting for independence but all are seeking a
new relation that will acknowledge their singularity.
To the disenfranchised youth of France (both in the Hexagon and overseas territories), discrimination against their parents, against themselves,
the perception that they remain second-class citizens, that they have been
pawns for political parties of the Left and the Right, that regardless of
their diplomas, they will not be hired, all could be explained by slavery,
racism and the legacy of colonialism. A growing sense of black identity,
observed in music, arts, cultural expressions, encompasses the experience
of being a second-class citizen, harassed by the police, under constant
suspicion.5
French overseas territories and banlieues have emerged as sites where
French national identity, the myth of the Nation, national narrative and
national culture are questioned from the viewpoint of a still unwritten
story: the story of slavery and of the republican colony. It is within the
French national body that we now observe the frame of French colonialism,
the effect of postcolonial amnesia, of the return of the repressed. The
ghosts of the slaves, of the indentured workers, of the poor settlers, of the
colonized, the spectres of the colonial politics of race and gender, inhabit
the contemporary French Republic. Though mixing culture and creolization
are celebrated, the necessity to affirm a history and a culture linked to the
historically constructed fact of blackness can no longer be ignored. The
slave trade and slavery are increasingly seen as sites of memories, discourses
and meanings to make sense of the present. With regard to slavery and its
place and role in the making of France, Aime Cesaires Return to My
Native Land and Discourse on Colonialism6 have for now been a source of
inspiration. However, Fanon deserves to be rediscovered, if only to explore
his indictment of settlers in relation to the role and place of people from hexagonal France in these territories today, and his call for violence in the context of the current climate of talk of new republican unity. Fanons writings
are complex, full of redundancies and poetic licence, but also clear insights
that cut through the lies and hypocrisy of the postcolonial petty bourgeoisie
and French abstract universalism.
The titles of Frantz Fanons books were always creative. They were a
call to arms, an invitation to action. Among them, A Dying Colonialism,
the English translation of an edited volume of Fanons articles in
El Moudjahid, the newspaper of the Front National de Liberation
Algerien (FLNA), signalled a process whereby oppressed peoples were
engaged in the late 1950s, to end colonialism once and for all. In the preface,
written in July 1959, Fanon gave an answer to the question of why France
[had been defending] foot by foot this shameless colonialism for five
years, and why five years of struggle have brought no political change
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(Fanon, 1967c: 26, 23). It was not enough to say that colonialism is still powerful, he argues, or that economic interests were at play. What Fanon saw
as the principal cause upon which men of good will and the French government stumble was the European community. Since Europeans have never
quite given hope of breaking with France and of imposing their iron law
on the Algerians, there was no other solution than to smash the European
feudal interests in Algeria (1967c: 29). Fanon insisted on the inuence on
politics of the few European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who
have at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats,
blocked every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of democracy into Algeria (1967c: 52). The current resistance to the
emergence of memories and histories that belie the narrative of the universal
demonstrates again what Fanon saw as a form of narcissism deeply
ingrained within the French political psyche, the idea that the French
people is incapable of mass murder, crimes and massacres.
The Shadow of Slavery
In recent years, French society has been experiencing, with great reluctance,
the return of the discussion of race, its role and place in the making of
national narrative and citizenship, in connection with the militant resurgence of the memories of slavery and colonialism. These memories cut
through the hegemonic narrative which claimed that, with the abolition of
slavery in 1848, liberte, egalite et fraternite came to the post-slavery societies,7 or that, once the colonial empire ended with Algerian independence
in 1962, colonial racism belonged to the past. In the 1960s and 1970s,
French society was engaged in a programme of modernization. The colony,
as a site of exception and pre-modern politics as it was then seen, belonged
to a past that had no place in a modernization that needed, as Kristin Ross
(1995) has argued, forgetfulness and denial of that very past. Race, however,
never disappeared, it was always below the surface, noticeable in the 1960s
struggle of migrant workers within the unions, in the 1970s womens movement (which remained mostly insensitive to the question), in French policies
towards its former colonies, in French policies in French overseas territories,
in its policies of housing, education and health.
The French republican doctrine has always been extremely reticent to
admit that race has played a role in the making of the Republic. It was as
if admitting the role of race meant admitting the existence of race. By the
late 1970s, however, it was more and more difficult to deny that racist
attacks occurred. The murders of young men of African or North African
descent by the French police and increasing discrimination revealed that
the legacy of colonial politics still cast its shadow upon French society. In
the French overseas territories, a low-intensity crisis interrupted by violently
repressed demonstrations showed that the postcolonial moment was fraught
with tensions and conflicts inherited from slavery and colonialism. A new
generation demanded that the country reflect on its racism. The 1979 riots
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in Vaux-en-Velin, the 1980 riots in Venissieux, in both of which the young

disenfranchised battled with the police in the banlieux, and a series of
unpunished racist murders in 1980 and 1981 led to the organization, in
1983, of the Marche pour legalite et contre le racisme throughout the country. It was a huge success and there was hope for radical change, but the
movement was soon divided. The media chose to present the image of a reconciled fraternity rather than expressions of anger and frustration. The
Socialist Party invited the movements leaders to join their party, whereas
some leaders pushed for an acknowledgement of the working conditions of
migrant workers, refusing to be integrated in the Socialist Party.8 Since
then, dozens of reports, books, documentaries and lms have recorded the
expressions of racism in France. Institutions have been created, laws have
been voted on. More than twenty years later, the 2005 controversies around
the memories of slavery and colonization9 revealed that slavery and colonization remained a blind spot in French thought. Colonization could be a legitimate object for historical research but not with regard to thinking about
contemporary tensions and conicts. However, during the 2008^9 demonstrations in Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion, people used
slavery and racism to explain their situation and support their demands for
justice and equality.10 None of their demands was met and recent economic
measures taken by the French government indicate that there are dicult
times ahead. Struggles on the cultural terrain testify to the intensity
of conicts.
Starting in the 1970s in the French overseas territories which had experienced slavery (Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, Reunion Island), then
moving in the 1990s to the Hexagon, the memories and history of slavery
have been a terrain for actions, for new demands and new struggles. It is
not that people think slavery has been the sole organizing principle of their
societies, but they understand slavery to have been the matrix of a series of
practices and processes: the economy of predation, the fabrication of disposability (in which peoples survival and status are linked to the perception of
their social usefulness, their death, the denial of their existence under
the category of anonymous lives through their erasure from narratives
and facts, and the perpetuation of what Sarat Maharaj has called natal
alienation, the fact that at birth a stigmatized status is attached to the
individual ^ slavery, apartheid racial categories . . .), human laundering on
a global scale (Vitit Muntabhorins metaphor for the practice whereby
human beings are circulated, trafficked, sold, left to be killed or to die),
the gendered and sexualized racialized body, the emergence of whiteness
and blackness as social and cultural categories, the lasting memory of torture and punishment as public forms of disciplining and repression, the
lasting memory of fear of death, the lasting memory of the thousand gestures of daily resistance, the lasting memory of revolts, insurrections and
marooning. They have used this past ^ the way slaves succeeded in asserting their humanity and reinventing their diverse cultures, despite being
torn away from their natal African families and societies, despite being
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continuously humiliated, bought and sold, and often subjected to torture

and the threat of death (Davis, 2006: 3) ^ to suggest a way of being in the
world that integrates the memories of inhuman bondage and of resistance,
and connects them with other groups that have had similar experiences.
They use slavery as a metaphor for the politics of brutality and force that
have emerged in the post-Cold War era. The slave trade and slavery produced a world economy, aecting commerce, international relations, the
vocabulary of philosophy and culture, notions of freedom and citizenship,
representations of work, the system of values . . . they also led to the emergence of global cosmopolitan cities, as well as to the practices and processes
of creolization embodied by the birth of Creole societies.
The implicit consent of the elites of both overseas societies and French
society to the erasure of that past explains why we have had to wait until the
second half of the 20th century for slavery to re-emerge in the public debate.
In overseas societies, the memories were kept in vernacular rituals to the ancestors buried without a tomb, in poetry and language, in songs and cultural practices.The elite went along with the silence of the Nation. Nowadays, answers to
the new challenge have been twofold. In 1998, the famous declaration of Fanon
at the end of Black Skin,White Masks, I am not the slave of Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors, was invoked in official governmental documents to
challenge emerging demands for reparation, and to expose them as backwardlooking expressions of victim syndrome.11 Fanons remark was interpreted in a
way that erased its potency. He was not advocating amnesia, he was calling for
emancipation from the prison built by race. To endorse the identity slave
(therefore black or Negro, since in the French language these terms had
become synonymous by the beginning of the 18th century) was to conform to
racialized discourse. Fanon (wrongly) argued that since freedom had been
given to slaves in the French colonies (they had not fought for it), their descendants remained caught in the prison of race and the contradictions of the politics of identity. Although Fanons arguments were not totally wrong (the
politics of identity have also led to dead ends in the French territories), his dismissal of the forms of struggle in French postcolonies leads to an impasse. If
slavery has become a terrain upon which struggle against French domination
can be imagined, it might be useful to reconsider Fanons statements.
In 1998, associations and groups mobilized to push for a law that
would recognize the responsibility of France for the slave trade and slavery.
Their mobilization led to the law of 21 May 2001, known as the Loi
Taubira, recognizing the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity
(see www.cpmhe.fr). In 2006, a governmental decree instituted each 10 May as
a national day of commemoration of the memories of the slave trade, slavery
and their abolition. Yet, the continuous obliteration of slavery as a constitutive
past, with cultural, economic and political consequences, still operates within
French thought. Although it remains a reservoir of significations, symbols and
counter-history for the populations of overseas departments12 and in the
Hexagon for groups which experience marginalization and discrimination,
French thinkers and political leaders continue to evade its potent force.
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Far from being expressions of an inability to transcend suffering, the

memories of slavery and colonialism cut through the lies of French history.
Fanon rejected with force any attempt to imprison his body, his mind, his life
withintheconstraintsinventedbyothers, whether they werewhite supremacists
or black civilizationists. He wanted freedom, absolute freedom, the possibility
to invent himself, to recreate himself as a man among other men (Fanon,
1967a: 222). Fanon did not see the terrain of slavery (as references for dreams,
resistance, identity formation) as a political, philosophical and cultural event
but only as a machine of dehumanization, whose resurgence would only hinder
the wish of theblack man to become aman among other men. Fanon could not
foresee how slavery could become a terrain on which to ght against the French
civilizing mission because he was caught up in the European theoretical frame
that saw slavery as a moral problem. Nor could he foresee how what he had
observed in Algeria ^ that in a colonial territory democracy is tantamount to
treason (Fanon, 1967c:150) ^ could contaminate the French Republic, because
he could not see that colonialism had created knots of memory and contact
zones between the colonizers and the colonized.
The MCUR Project

Let me turn to my concrete example. In 1999, Reunion Island Regional
Council launched the project of Maison des civilisations et de lunite reunonnaise (MCUR).13 The objective was to valorize, against the French hegemonic discourse of civilization, the contributions of slaves, indentured
workers, migrants and poor settlers, the role and place of the poor and anonymous in the making of Reunion society and culture. Seminars and studies
led to the idea of a museum without objects. The argument was to accept
the absence of objects, representations and material testimonies of the lives
of the anonymous. Slaves had no graves, no names, the colonial order
erased them from the face of the earth. No vernacular object before 1848
has survived. There was no collection of testimonies of slaves after the abolition of slavery. No one (freemen, abolitionists, writers . . .) thought of collecting oral testimonies of the freed slaves. The voices of 60,000 freed women,
children and men survived in oral literature, songs, poetry, and in police
and trial reports, but no direct testimonies remained. The lives of poor settlers have also been erased. A whole sector of humanity has been banned
from the colonial archive. Works and days, joy and grief, love and sorrow,
festivities and mourning, everything that forms the texture of a life was
erased. Starting from an accepted absence leads to a revision of the notion
of the object. The object was treated as a trace whose meaning emerges
from a scape. The object at the heart of the MCUR would be be the object
of exchange, of conversation, of encounter, of what lives in people rather
than in stones. (The webpage of the project has been erased from the
Regional Council webpage. It is as if the project has never existed. Only
attacks on the project can be found.)
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The MCUR situated the island squarely within its seascape: the
indiaoceanic world, to transform the hegemonic cartography of the world
taught in the islands schools and which mentally organizes a dominant
North^South axis. It also suggested other temporalities, other modernities.
Mapping the different levels of meaning as well as geographical and political
maps throughout the centuries makes visible the dynamic creation of centres and peripheries. The Indian Ocean connects six worlds: Eastern Asia,
Southern Asia, the Muslim world, Africa, Europe and the islands. Arabs,
Chinese, Malayans and Indians shared the knowledge of the ocean.
Showing the networks of encounters replaces the island in a broader and
more complex space. The place of origin is not the place of lost purity. It is
a place of culture, with a social, political and economic organization. Bits
of Europe, Asia, Africa met. The native place is already a place of mixing,
crossed by conflicts and tensions. History is always the history of contacts,
conflicts and exchanges.
Before the construction and opening of the building, the MCUR organized actions with the population and schools. There was a diversity of
actions: valorizing vernacular practices and knowledge; collecting testimonies of grassroots struggles; organizing conferences on Indian Ocean
routes of exchanges and encounters, and on contemporary issues; publishing
books, CDs and films; working closely with the architects and scenographers to ensure that local needs were met; carrying out studies about the
attitude of the Reunion public to museums; confronting central issues for
the museum, such as the 21 percent illiteracy rate, the 37 unemployment
percentage, the 52 percent of people living on less than E800 per month
in a country where goods are often more expensive than in the Hexagon . . .
Quite early on, the media and the conservatives launched a relentless campaign against the project. It was too expensive (why spend so much money
on a cultural project when there is a lack of low-income housing?), too intellectual, trying to pit blacks against whites, imposing a skewed view of
history indicting France, and having as the head of the team a person who
was too cosmopolitan and not sufficiently Reunionnese, and who had got
the job through nepotism and without the right skills.14 The project
became the target of conservative politics. They promised to put a stop to
the project. It was not surprising. It was symptomatic of the refusal to
acknowledge the centrality of slavery in the making of the world. It was
symptomatic of the way in which the bid for emancipation reproduced the
abject position of the slave, which the European narrative seeks to maintain.
Forgetting slavery or remembering slavery become a potent means of silencing the past and to curb all discussion of slavery and its entailment ^ class
exploitation, gender inequality, wars of predation . . ., Saidiya Hartman
has written (2007: 133). Hartman has remarked that: If slavery feels
proximate rather than remote and freedom seems increasingly elusive,
this has to do with our dark times. If the ghost of history still haunts
our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison
(2007: 133). The philosopher Jacky Dahomay (2010), reecting on the
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2009 crisis in Guadeloupe, has argued along these lines. Slavery framed the
relation of the Antilleans to culture and politics, he has argued. The colonizing state is seen as both contributing to domination (supporting the interests of the local elite) and to emancipation (against the interest of the local
elite). The politics of assimilation, Dahomay contends, went hand in hand
with the denial of slavery. This history explains why the political parties,
Left and Right, have a vision of politics as essentially managerial with a
high level of patronage, and why they are unable ^ with some rare exceptions ^ to imagine a project of political autonomy. Slavery, and the ways in
which its abolition occurred and its history has been written, have contributed to the ways in which the colonial relation, in renewed forms and congurations, still informs the present.
Dahomays argument, which I support, is not enough, however, to understand why a majority of Reunionnese voted for the conservative candidate
and why the socialist candidate sided with his programme of ending support
to the MCUR (indeed, the local Socialist Party declared that it would support
the decision to stop the MCUR). Fanons insights are useful here. His analysis
of local political parties, which are in fact partisans of order, the new order,
whose leaders are violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes, who
say something while making quite clear they do not really think it (Fanon,
1967b: 46),15 still reverberate. It is even truer today than in 1961 that a large
number of natives are militant members of the branches of political parties
which stem from the mother country (1967b: 47).
Reunion Island is not Martinique. The local group of petits blancs has
become important enough to exercise some influence. It gained respect and
entry into assimilative politics thanks to its strict adhesion to the politics
of Frenchness of the 1960s and 1970s. It advocated repressive policies
against the use of Creole language in schools, confessed its full adoption of
everything metropolitan (it never uses the term France or the Hexagon)
and insisted on a strict programme of economic, cultural and political
dependency on France. The 1970s and 1980s cultural emergences affirming
the singularity of Reunion history, culture and society disturbed them.
They feared abandonment by France and agreed with the repressive policies
of the French state.16
They were the best supporters of French conservative postcolonial politics from the 1950s to the 1970s under constant attack from anti-colonial
cultural and political movements. They were increasingly marginalized in
the 1980s and 1990s. They had to accept the growing presence of descendants of African and Malagasy slaves, of Indian and Chinese indentured
workers, of Muslim migrants, of their cultural expressions and demands of
revision of historical narrative. They planned their revenge. What the Left
underestimated, and what their recent victory underlined, is the extent of
fear, fuelling their rage, as well as the impact of French assimilation.
France has convinced them that their only chance of survival is their dependency on the metropole and their attachment to French culture. They were
made whites during slavery and, with this, acquired the status of free,
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even if poor. The ways in which whiteness had been constructed in Europe
by the dominant class to win over the working class or women had its own
version in the colony.
The MCUR challenged the established truth, or rather proposed to
offer a permanent site for the expression of alternative cartographies and
the invention of new outcomes. It was a threat to the place the petty whites
had built in their effort to imitate the fantasy they had created about what
it meant to be French. The MCUR embodied all that they rejected: greater
connections with Africa, India, China, the peripherization of France, resituating France as one of the worlds that had given birth to Reunion society
and as one of the worlds with which society would invent its future. The
fear of abandonment, Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks,17 leads to
making people ashamed of their existence when what is needed is to interrupt if necessary the rhythm of the world, to upset, if necessary, the chain
of command but in any case, and most assuredly, to stand up to the world
(Fanon, 1967a: 78). In one interview, the conservative president of Reunion
Regional Council declared: I will never say my country when I speak of
Reunion. For me, it is simply a region of France.18 His words spoke to a
petty bourgeoisie afraid of change and of standing up to the world.
The Political Potency of French Algeria
This is where I return to Fanon and his analysis of French republican colonial settlers. French Algeria, I argue, still operates as a reservoir of identifications, speeches and public actions. I use the expression French Algeria
to refer to speeches, words, expressions of resentment, fear and anger that
still pervade French public discourse. The inequality between the French settler and the colonized, which was embodied in the law, is being reconfigured
in the inequality between the Franc ais de souche and the citizens whose
name, skin colour, religion, marks them as non-French,19 as well as, locally,
between those who swear allegiance to France and those seeking more autonomy. The fear about the growing disenfranchisement of poor people,
among them a majority of people living in territories that belong to the
Republic but remain outside the principle of equality, is translated as xenophobia. Albert Memmi has written that European settlers in the colonies
tend to take a holiday from history (1974: 112^13). They put history on
hold, they cover the scars of colonialism, they dress up reality. A similar
process occurs with colonial slavery. It is not totally dressed up but it is
kept at bay.
Tensions, contradictions and conflicts between settlers and the colonial
power have always played a role in the dynamics of colonial politics and culture. The capacity, or incapacity, of colonial settlers to influence metropolitan policies and politics, and vice versa, the capacity, or incapacity, of
metropolitan political and economic leaders to influence colonial politics, is
a recurring theme of the relation among colonizers. Fanon thought that the
clear rupture between Algeria and France, through Algerian independence,
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would allow each country to emancipate itself from the perverse, brutal and
neurotic relation produced by colonialism, the fight to the death of two intimate enemies. The excision of colonized territory from the French national
body was the only solution to becoming free of the colonial shackles: psychological, economic, cultural, political. Fanons approach to exploitation
and emancipation in nationalistic terms foreclosed his capacity to foresee
postcolonial imaginary significations,20as well as to comprehend in which
ways the dark night of slavery would still hinder democracy.
The conservative linguistic revolution ^ proposing a new vocabulary, a
new frame of public discourse ^ has been able to impose a series of approaches
to thecolony (as the site of disciplinary and exclusionary practices and rules, as
a laboratory of repressive techniques) that has contaminated the public
debate.21 The conservatives break taboos, they are decomplexes, they dare to
say loudly what people think privately. The taboos they break are in fact the
free expressionof recurrent themes ofconservatism: theinternal enemy, theforeign body that threatens the Nation, the civilizing mission, the right to be
proudof ones country, ones ag, the right to say no to repeated demands to
revisethenational myth.Thevernacularoftheplain-speakingand regular individual has pervaded political discourse.That individual is invoked, whether to
reject migrants, to transform them into potential criminals and threats to
republican universalism (theyareagainst womens rights!), or to diminish the
consequences of slavery by stressing the values of metissage reduced to a managed melting pot, or to transform French citizens intovictimsof groups which
evoke slavery or colonialism to mask their desire for revenge and covert racism.
The Left has been partly won over by this vocabulary. It also wants to
break taboos and be decomplexee. In this attempt to reach a new cultural
consensus, the colony plays a role. Though Left and Right might recognize
that there were violations of republican and universalistic principles, the
question that lingers is: to what extent does the Other have the right to intervene in the national debate? The terrain is not homogeneous and it would
be wrong to ignore the factional and heterogeneous character of the French
fear of, and resistance to, confronting the multifarious expressions of
French postcoloniality. In fact, it would be a mistake to think that it is the
people who vote conservative who are most concerned with how to rewrite
history, answer demands for reparation or questions about national identity.
In French overseas territories, a fraught but temporary alliance
between civil servants from the Hexagon (often voters for the Socialist
Party) and local privileged whites (often conservative voters) or people of
color (conservatives and socialists) present a complex front against the
resurgence of slavery as a defining moment for understanding the postcolonial present. A movement of vengeful people, determined to have their
voices heard and their memories acknowledged, who claim that they are as
much victims as the descendants of slaves or of colonized peoples. We can
read the words of their unleashed anger on the Internet, where they finally
feel free to speak up. Events at Mayotte, in Guadeloupe, New Caledonia,
Reunion, have given them the opportunity to elaborate on the new civilizing
103
mission: to reconstruct a France where the memories and histories of slavery

and colonization would definitely be marginalized and the borders of each
community clearly redrawn.22
In the Hexagon, the presence of the European minority forced to leave
Algeria in 1962, and later Cameroon, Madagascar and other former colonies
where populations resented the ways in which France continued to enforce a
politics inspired by the rhetoric of the civilizing mission (the fact that this discourse is not yet totally obsolete, despite the loss of French influence upon
African or Asian politics, may be a sign of its psychic potency), also has to
break through the republican amnesia. They demand reparation for their
loss and have already been able to obtain the creation of monuments that
mourn their dead at the hands of brutal natives.23 It is within this context
that populations of territories within the French Republic are raising new
issues about what it is to be French, what the place and role of race in French
citizenship is, why and how gender plays a role within the new civilizing mission, and why the dark night of slavery should be explored.
A Narrow Cartography of Struggles
The map of alterity in France is still contained within the narrow borders of
the Hexagon. Despite a growing interest in colonial history, the geographical
and historical division inherited from colonization remains operative:
France is the Hexagon. The frontiers between here (French) and there
(not quite French) are regularly redrawn to reaffirm what belongs to
France, what it is to be French. Even the banlieues belong to France, albeit
as ghettos, sites of the internal enemy (Rigouste, 2009). The dynamics of
the drawing and redrawing of these borders speak of the continuous struggle
between an abstract idea of the universal, which is said to characterize the
French nation-state, and the reality of the colony within that universal.
When French intellectuals reect on that tension, they continue to focus on
the Algerian case and forget, as Fanon did, the rst period of colonization,
that of slavery.
The French body politic returned to the borders of the Hexagon at the
end of its colonial empire, with the modernization of its infrastructure and
the construction of Fortress Europe. The idea of a Grande France, the metropole and its colonies, disappeared with the loss of the colonial empire
(its reinvention as francophonie and cooperation never captured the
French imagination). Frances recreation as fully European and postcolonial
went along with a narrative of innocence (of colonial crimes, mass murder,
despoliation, exactions . . .). Those who were responsible for these crimes
were not fully French (uneducated settlers or lost soldiers of fortune).
It was a price French society was ready to pay to embrace the benefits
of modernization.
French colonial republicanism was operative in maintaining this caesura between France (where universalism was born and where it flourishes)
and its colonial territories (where the exception can naturally be the rule).
104
During slavery, the universal principle All men [sic] are created equal
suffered a racialized exception in the colonies. The truth created by the
mythos of free soil, that there were no slaves in France, led to a clear distinction in the mind of the French between what was happening on their
soil and belonged to the history of rights and freedom, and what was happening in the colonies where the exception could be explained by the
notion of race and a hierarchy of civilizations. The exception affected the
code of laws and other regulations, civic rights and later working and
social rights.24 After the abolition of slavery, the double cartography of
rights and duties continued to operate, as Olivier Le Cour Grand Maison
has shown (2010). Le Cour Grand Maison has argued that human rights
were challenged by French rights. French republicans could not conceive
that rights, deemed to be universal, would apply to peoples they had conquered. Equality did not mean the equal treatment of unequal things
(2010: 42). No law, no right, no rule, no principle, was universal, because
each race demanded its own set of laws, rights, rules and principles.
The concept of two Frances is deeply ingrained in French republicanism, a child of its civilizing mission. As long as the imagined community
of France (whether of the elite or of counter-elite movements) remains
framed within the borders of the Hexagon, exclusion and hierarchy will continue to appear natural. When, in 1957, Fanon wrote that the contrary to
colonialism is not the recognition of the right of people to self determination, but the necessity, on an individual level, for less racist, more open,
more liberal types of behavior (in 1967b: 80), he was pointing to a recurrent
position among the French democrats who do not always perceive the
neo-colonialist character of their attitude which can be summed up as
[you] cannot live without France (1967b: 84). However, this attitude
appeared long before post-slavery colonization. It was present during slavery.
The Dark Night of Slavery and French Postcoloniality
The slave trade and slavery are still at the margins of French political theory
and public debate. The long silence around this historical event ^ a silence
which lasted from 1848, the date of the final abolition of slavery in the French
colonies, to 1989, when the bicentennial of the French Revolution was celebrated, and with it the first abolition of slavery which occurred in 1794 ^
speaks of the entrenched difficulty in studying something that played a central role in the creation of the worlds first system of multinational production
for a mass market (of human beings, sugar, coffee, tobacco, sugar, cotton . . .)
and Frances place in this system. Slavery happened outof France, away from
its territory; it existed in lands where French ideals were betrayed and violated
by adventurers who could not represent France. The struggle against slavery
remains within the frame of moral declarations.The politics of the slave trade
and slavery are ignored.Their condemnation is left in the realm of moral principles. Jacques Rancie're has clearly described the political consequence of
this division: The difference between a French subject and a French citizen
105
was inscribed in the colonial conquest as the difference internal to the juridical determination of being French (1998: 29). What he does not see is that
this difference goes back to slavery.The color line in the French idea of citizenship, of liberty, equality, fraternity, is rooted in the slave trade and slavery.
Rancie're explores the ways in which the French approached the question of solidarity with Algerians following the 17 October 1961 demonstration, where
hundreds of Algerians were killed and drowned by the French police. He
argues that the political response was not a recognition of the historical validity of a war of liberation, but a condemnation of the brutality of the police.
This political subjectivation was primarily the result of disidentification
with the French State that had done this in our name and removed it from
our view. We could not identify with the Algerians who appeared as demonstrators within the French public space, and who then disappeared. We
could, on the other hand, reject our identification with the State that had
killed them and removed them all from the statistics. (1998: 29)
Rancie're notes a collusion between the leaders of the Algerian struggle and
anti-war activists in the political erasure of the singularity of the fight
(1998: 40). Since war was seen as a language that spoke the truth of a historical process that promises a new humanity, the vocabulary of war contaminated political discourse. Here, Rancie're shares Fanons analysis of the
French Left.
The narrative of brutal rupture with the oppressors as the only possibility for emancipation forecloses the possibility of including the long fight
against slavery within the frame of the tradition of emancipation.The historical moment itself, the abolition of slavery, was ambivalent and did not carry
the promise of equality and full access to rights for former slaves.The struggle
against the slave trade and colonial slavery was long (four centuries), transcontinental and ambiguous, it was a history of setbacks, slow progress and compromises, of millions of individuals resisting dehumanization and creating
new cultures, ideas and practices. Their creations are immaterial, intangible.
They exist in the ephemeral moment of rituals and rites, in music, cuisine,
songs and memories. The struggle against slavery can again constitute a
model for our times, away from the messianic ideal of emancipation, of rupture and redemption, of a Prometheus unbound, the Fanonian ideal, because
it teaches us that struggle is long, tortuous, difficult, contradictory, made of
conflicts and consensus, full of limits and possibilities, transcontinental,
cross-class, gender and race, and opening to new contradictions.
Citoyens Perdus25 and Representation
Judith Butler has written that:
Normative schemes emerge and fade depending on broader operations of
power and very often come up against spectral versions of what it is they
106

claim to know, thus, there are subjects who are not quite recognizable as
subjects, and there are lives that are not quite ^ or, indeed, are never ^ recognized as lives. (2009: 4)
The recognition of the lives of the anonymous, of citizens absent from the
national narrative, is being replayed in current debates about museums of
history and culture. The discourse of French Algeria, the amnesia about
slavery, the narrow borders of France as an imagined community, help to
explain why. What is being said is that the lives and creations of poor settlers, of slaves, of indentured workers, do not deserve a place where they
will be valorized. What is being said is that those who, as Aime Cesaire
wrote, never built palaces or castles but without whom the world would
never be the world as it is, do not deserve a site, a space, a museum.
Further, the argument goes, in times of crisis it is obscene to invest money
in culture. Yet, as Isaac Julien said in a letter of support to the MCUR:
We need culture in times of crisis so that we can breathe. They say we dont,
that we need other things more, but thats a way of telling us we dont need
art when you need shoes and of course it should not be a case of either or,
but rather we need both. . . .They say you dont need culture in a time of
crisis but thats what has always been said to us. . . . Let it be a warning in
times of what gets constructed as a time of crisis ^ when really others are
living in these so-called states of crisis every day ^ that we need culture to
protect our souls. Fanon knew it, Derek Walcott knows it, every artist
worth their salt knows it. Thats how we make the world a better place in
which to live! Thats how we are able to speak, sing and dance. We are
always in a time of crisis and thats why we need culture, so we can understand our time.26
Notes
1. The expression the dark night of slavery is borrowed from Frederick
Douglasss autobiography (1960: 94^5).
2. The law of 19 March 1946 brought an end to the colonial status of Guyana,
Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion. In 2009, I counted the number of riots
and violent demonstrations in overseas France between 1946 and 2009 and identified 22 of these occurrences, some lasting months, all accompanied with violence
and brutal repression, and sometimes with deaths. The history of postcolonial
repression is not very well known. The reference remains the Algerian War
which, however, should not mask subsequent brutality exercised in French overseas territories.
3. See the debate on the crisis in overseas departments on www.mediapart.com, a
website created by the journalist Edwy Plenel, which offers cultural and political
information from the Left and houses personal blogs (Achille Mbembe, JeanFranc ois Byart. . .). It was mediapart that revealed the Bettencourt/Woerth affair
that showed intimate connections between the Sarkozy government and business.
107
4. French overseas territories: in the Pacific: New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna,
French Polynesia); Caribbean: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Barthelemy and
Saint Martin; South America: Guyana; North America: St-Pierre and Miquelon;
Indian Ocean: Reunion and Mayotte. They have different statuses, different
histories, cultures and languages and are situated in different regions. They are
all dependent on France.
5. For instance, see: www.mytrace.tv, Abd Al Malik, the one-woman show MarieThere'se Bernabe, Negresse de France (see www.internaute.com/video/4315/marietherese-benrabe-negresse-de-france), Lilian Thuram (Mes etoiles noires. Paris:
Philipe Rey, 2009), or the growing success of radio stations such as Africa#1.
6. During her show, Marie-There'se Bernabe, Negresse de France, the performer
Souria Ade'le referred to Fanon and distributed Aime Cesaires Cahier dun
retour au pays natal at the end.
7. The abolition of slavery did not put an end to colonial status, leading to the
ambiguous notion, full of contradictions, of colonized citizenship. As in other colonies, owners of slaves received financial compensation while the freed women
and men were left to their own devices. Forms of forced labor were applied. New
inequalities and racial discriminations arose. In 1946, Aime Cesaire demonstrated
what three centuries of French colonization had brought to the colonies which
had known slavery: misery, violation of rights, feudal forms of exploitation.
8. See: www.gisti.org; www.mediacitoyens.org; www.survivreausida.net/a5018 vingt-ans-apres-cconstat-amer-des oragnisate.html
9. In February 2005, an article of a law that required the positive aspects of
French colonization to be taught led to massive protests, launched by the historian
Claude Liauzu. This led to the repeal of the article by Jacques Chirac.
In November 2005, riots erupted and, for the first time since the Algerian
War, the government imposed a state of emergency. In December, renowned
historians such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Pierre Nora and Jean-Pierre Azema
signed a petition Liberte pour lhistoire, in which they protested against the hegemony of memory over history, targeting the laws on memory, notably the
Loi Taubira, which in 2001 had recognized slave trade and slavery crimes against
humanity.
10. See the contributions to the Etats generaux de loutre-mer, launched by the
government, which were very clear about where the blame was assigned: legacies
of slavery and colonization which had bred inequalities and pwofitasyon
(a Guadeloupean Creole term meaning exploitation and unfair profit). See website
of Liannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP or Coalition Against Profit), the coalition of
trade union and cultural and political associations which, from December
2008 to the end of January 2010, led the months of strikes and demonstrations
that paralysed Guadeloupe and forced the French state to neogtiate
(www.lhp-gwa.org).
11. Daniel Maximin, poet and writer from Guadeloupe ^ who in 1998 was
installed by the socialist government led by Lionel Jospin as the commissar for
ceremonies around the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the French
colonies ^ made wide use of this declaration, which has contributed to the
cleaning up of slavery. Fanons declaration was seen as advocating forgetfulness,
whereas I think that it was the expression of his incomprehension of what slavery
108
was, as a cultural and political event, and what resistance to slavery was, as a challenge to first global organization of colonialism.
12. See the debate during the demonstrations and strikes in Guadeloupe at the
beginning of 2009, and the contributions of thousands of people from Guyana,
Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion on the website of the Etats generaux de
lOutre-Mer launched by Nicolas Sarkozy following the popular movements in
these territories. In the category Memory, Culture, contributions often focused
on the lack of research and education, on the necessity to safeguard monuments
and archives relative to this history, and on the necessity to inscribe this history
in the French national narrative. These demands were not followed by governmental actions. The only decision was to organize a Year of the Outre-Mer in 2011
and to name Daniel Maximin as its commissar.
13. I should say that I was the head of the scientific and cultural team of the
MCUR. I might then appear to be both judge and participant, a position I fully
recognize.
14. I was that person. As my father was the president of the Regional Council, the
accusation had an echo. Consequently, I was the target of daily attacks in the
newspapers, on the radio and on the web during 2009, a campaign that intensified
in the first semester of 2010. The accusation of nepotism was among the arguments invoked. In my defence, I might say that my work spoke for me. Let me
also say that (1) since the name Verge's is connected with postcolonial communism, the legacy of the Cold War evidently still carries some weight; (2) the misogynistic dimension must be acknowledged; and (3) the politics of identity on the
island are reminiscent of Fanons analysis: the natives resentment against the colonizers is intimately connected with envy towards other natives. I nevertheless
underestimated the potency of the mobilization.
15. In the 1960s and 1970s, local anti-colonial parties sought to develop programmes of autonomy from France on a collective basis (see the Convention du
Morne-Rouge, 16^18 August 1971, signed by unions and parties of the four overseas departments, which declared that their populations constituted national entities; the full text is available at: www.montraykreyol.org). Today, each seeks
direct contracts with French national parties and barely develops locally based programmes. This is why the 2009 movement LKP, Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon, represented a hope for renewed politics (see www.lkp-gwa.org). Regional elections in
March 2010 seemed to have again endorsed the hegemony of the kind of reformist
politics advocated by French governments and accepted by local parties. But who
can write the future?
16. For instance, the application of a 1960 ordinance introduced to punish French
civil servants supporting the Algerian national liberation movement in the four
overseas departments. Civil servants known for their support of trade unions or
political parties fighting for political autonomy were exiled to the Hexagon: one
Guyanese, three Martinicans, nine Guadeloupeans and thirteen Reunionnese.
The ordinance was abrogated only in 1976.
17. Fanon drew from Germaine Guex, La Nevrose dabandon (1959).
18. Interview in Valeurs actuelles, April 2010.
19. See www.fdesouche.com, an Internet site that is quite representative of the
movement. YouTube and dailymotion.com also carry videos of individuals who
109
dare to say the truth loudly: that French people are losing the battle against
immigrants.
20. Castoriadis: Society is the work of the instituting imaginary. The individuals
are made by the instituted society, at the same time as they make and remake it.
The two mutually irreducible poles are the radical instituting imaginary ^ the
field of social-historical creation ^ on the one hand, the singular psyche, on the
other (1998: 145^6). The instituting society creates society and history as opposed
to the instituted society. This instituting society is the social imaginary in the radical sense, or the radical imaginary without which History is impossible.
Castoriadis argues that to understand a society means, first and foremost, to penetrate or reappropriate the social imaginary significations which hold this society
together (1998: 85).
21. On all these debates, see the very good and very well-informed site, www.ldhtoulon.net
22. See, in Reunion, www.zinfos974.com; in Mayotte, among numerous blogs
denouncing anti-white racism and local demands, see: http://.watwan.over-blog.
com/article-mayotte-emeutes-et-nouvelles-violences-racistes-anti-blanc; http://serumdeliberte.blogspot.com. Mayotte, which refused to join the Islamic Republic
of the Comoros Islands, became a French department in 2009. The status is not
recognized by the Organization of African Unity or by the UN. The society is
Muslim in its majority, has a traditional system of law, and a millenary historical
relation with Madagascar and Africa. Though the situation of Mayotte has been
the object of articles in the French media, it remains, like any other overseas
situation, a temporary concern for the national consciousness, and also geographically and culturally foreign. For instance, although it is there that the most developed camps for illegal individuals (in fact, people of other islands of the
archipelago trying to escape poverty, who often have family and relatives on
Mayotte) have been built, and there that more than half of the national
quota (the French police must prove it has expelled 25,000 persons from France
each year) decided by the government is fulfilled, or there that every week dozens
of people are drowning trying to cross the channels between islands, it is still not
a cause for national solidarity. The crises in Guyana, Martinique, Reunion and
Guadeloupe in 2008^9 attracted national attention for a while, but once an agreement was signed and elections were organized, they disappeared from the national
map. Crises in these territories are ultramarin, literally over the sea, way over
there, and not yet a political question that requires national mobilization.
23. In the city of Perpignan, a stele has been built to the memory of Jean BastienThiry, who in 1961 and 1962 organized two terrorist attacks against General
de Gaulle, and to the memory of other OAS members. The OAS (Organisation
de lArmee Secre'te) was a terrorist organization that arose at the end of the
Algerian war, whose objective was to terrorize and kill Algerian civilians and
French citizens who supported Algerian independence. Each year, a ceremony is
held in front of the stele. A revisionist national movement is leading the slow
rehabilitation of OAS members and their actions.
24. Equality of social rights between overseas departments and the Hexagon was
reached in the late 1990s; but already there are signs that the exception will be
again the rule, this time in the guise of diversity. (See www.ldh-toulon.net, a
very good webpage on these debates.)
110
25. The Association des citoyens perdus is the name taken by an association of
Mahorais in December 2009 to protest against the rise in prices in Mayotte.
Perdus means here absented, put aside, forgotten.
26. Letter of support to the MCUR, 27 March 2010.
References
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Castoriadis, C. (1998 [1975]) The Imaginary Institution of Society: Creativity and
Autonomy in the Social-historical World, trans. K. Blamey. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. (First published in French: LInstitution imaginaire de la societe.
Paris: Seuil, collection Esprit.).
Dahomay, J. (2010) Refonder le politique dans les DOM, in N. Bancel,
F. Bernault, P. Blanchard, A. Boubakeur, A. Mbembe and F. Verge's (eds)
Ruptures postcoloniales. Paris: La Decouverte.
Davis, D.B. (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the
New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Douglass, F. (1960) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave. Written by Himself, edited by Ben jamin Quarks. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Fanon, F. (1967a) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. H. Chevalier. New York:
Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1967b) Blood Flows in the Antilles under French Domination, in
Toward the African Revolution, trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1967c) A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York:
Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1990) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. New York:
Grove Press.
Guex, G. (1959) La Nevrose dabandon. Paris: PUF.
Hall, S. (1996) The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why
Black Skin, White Masks?, in A. Read (ed.) The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon
and Visual Representation. London: ICA.
Hartman, S. (2007) LoseYour Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Le Cour Grand Maison, O. (2010) De lindigenat: anatomie dun monstre
juridique ^ le droit colonial en Algerie et dans lempire franc ais. Paris:
La Decouverte/Zones.
Le Monde (2009) Le manifeste de neuf intellectuels antillais pour des societes
post-capitalistes , 16 February, URL (consulted November 2010): http://www.
lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/02/16/neuf-intellectuels-antillais-contre-lesarchaismes-coloniaux_1156114_823448.html.
Macey, D. (2000) Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta.
Memmi, A. (1974) The Colonizer and the Colonized. London: Souvenir Press.
Rancie're, J. (1998) The Cause of the Other, Parallax 7 4(2): 25^34.
111
Rigouste, M. (2009) LEnnemi interieur La genealogie coloniale et militaire de

lordre securitaire dans la France contemporaine. Paris: Maspero.
Ross, K. (1995) Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Franc oise Verge's is currently Consulting Professor at the Centre for

Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and president
of the Comite pour la Memoire et lHistoire de lEsclavage. She has written
on vernacular practices of memory, slavery and the economy of predation,
the ambiguities of French abolitionism, French republican colonialism, colonial and postcolonial psychiatry in the French colonial empire, Frantz
Fanon, Aime Cesaire, French postcoloniality, postcolonial museography, the
routes of migration and processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean
world. She has worked with filmmakers and artists ^ Isaac Julien, Yinka
Shonibare, Arnaud Ngatcha ^ and was a project adviser for Documenta 11
in 2002. Her most recent publication is Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la societe franc aise (with Nicolas Bancel, Florence
Berbault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubakeur and Achille Mbembe,
Paris: La Decouverte, 2010). [email: fvmcur@gmail.com]

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There Are No Blacks in France:

Fanonian Discourse, the Dark

NE OF these days, it will be by kicks in your arse that France will

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

politics in its overseas territories as well as local dynamics by looking at a

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

capitalism (Fanon, 1990: 62). Decolonization, Fanon wrote, unies that

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

in Vaux-en-Velin, the 1980 riots in Venissieux, in both of which the young

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

continuously humiliated, bought and sold, and often subjected to torture

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Far from being expressions of an inability to transcend suffering, the

The MCUR Project

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

mission: to reconstruct a France where the memories and histories of slavery

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8)

Verge's ^ There Are No Blacks in France

Rigouste, M. (2009) LEnnemi interieur La genealogie coloniale et militaire de

Franc oise Verge's is currently Consulting Professor at the Centre for

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