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The Return of the Native:

Postcolonial Smoke Screen and theFrench Postcolonial Politics of Identity

Sandrine Bertaux

Although many scholars have attempted to avoid lapidaryformulations, much of the postcolonial conversation that takes place in France is

a reconfigured formulation of old questions, with a taste of dj vu. Even beforehaving fully landed on French soil, the termpostcolonialis anathema to France: itis associated with a diminished space of discussion, and the debate over its usagehas nationalistic undertones. To paraphrase a famous title, the conversation boilsdown to the following question: is postcolonial studies bad for France?1It recallsthe for or against veil formulation that discredited all domestic opponents of the2004 law on lacit as pro-veil. The law made France world famous, one moretime, for its singularity of clinging to universalism despite the fact that, evaluatedin its context, the law was not free of the charge of being part of a gesture towardmulticulturalism.2

A perusal of the three articles written by Jean-Franois Bayart, AchilleMbembe, and Ann Laura Stoler reveals that the question we are invited to discusshas less to do with the impact of postcolonial studies in French scholarship thanwith the reason why such scholarship that has gained high visibility in the English-speaking academic world has long remained marginal or ignored in French aca-

Public Culture23:1 doi10.1215/08992363-2010-023

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

I thank Mamadou Diouf and Miriam Ticktin, and the editor of this special issue, Janet Roitman,for their insightful comments and suggestions. All translations from the French are mine.

1. The reference is to Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? inIs Multicul-turalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

2. See Murat Akan, Lacit and Multiculturalism: The Stasi Report in Context,British Journalof Sociology60 (2009): 237 56.


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demia and why it emerges today in such a controversial fashion. In other wordswhat is at issue is the receptionof postcolonial studies in France, denoting forBayart an academic carnival, revealing for Stoler Frances colonial aphasia,and representing for Mbembe the way out of its imperial winter.3

Postcolonial studies and its debates are relevant and disrupting not onlybecause they challenge the official claim to a French republican model basedon the principles of the indivisibility of the nation and the equality of all citi-zens before the law, which stem from a legal tradition dating back two hundredyears, but also because postcolonial studies is partly informed by what is knownin U.S. academia as French theory.4The term postcolonialrelates to both thereturn home of reconfigured, or contested, native theories and the return in pub-lic space of a native question raging in overseas departments and territories andin the metropoles underprivileged banlieues(suburbs). What is at issue is whaconnects the two.

Just Landed? Forgetting Orientalism

To begin with, it is necessary to dissipate the postcolonial smoke screen that surrounds a French academia presented by some as if it is about to succumb to thepostcolonial charm. Bayart confesses to being a novice to postcolonial studiesand his interest is precisely aroused by the eruption of the term postcolonialonthe French public scene.5The posture of denunciation of those brandishingthe postcolonial torch in France prompts him, he tells us, to write against thosenot respecting the neat boundaries of knowledge and politics.6Bayart is not theonly one to question the scholarly value of the postcolonial library for being

either devoid of originality and trapped in its original sin of identity or simply

3. Bayarts phrase is also used in the title of his book from which his essay is a shortened ver-sion. Jean-Franois Bayart,Les tudes postcoloniales: Un carnaval acadmique(Paris: Kar thala2010); Bayart, Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? in this issue, 72. AnnLaura Stoler, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France, in this issue, 125; AchilleMbembe, Provincializing France? in this issue, 87.

4. This self-assertive statement is found in the French official response to ECRIs recommendations, European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Second Report on France, Adoptedon 10 December 1999 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2000), 23, hudoc.ecri.coe.int/XMLEcriENGLISH/Cycle_02/02_CbC_eng/02 cbc-france-eng.pdf. On French theory see Franois CussetFrench Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the

United States,trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); originally published as French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelleaux tats-Unis(Paris: La Dcouverte, 2003).

5. Bayart,Les tudes postcoloniales, 6.6. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 58.


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discarded as obscure. While the historian Emmanuelle Sibeud criticizes Frenchhistorians for their lack of attention to postcolonial studies, she nevertheless attri-butes the current revival of an anticolonialism of the rear guard in France to theimportation of the most mystifying aspect of postcolonial studies.7

Admittedly, postcolonial studies is a target that is simultaneously moving andborderless. But even more so, as Terry Eagleton put it in a humorous statementin the first issue of Interventionssome ten years ago, there must surely be inexistence somewhere a secret handbook for aspiring postcolonial theorists, whosesecond rule reads: begin your essay by calling into question the whole notion ofpostcolonialism. 8Thus it is not surprising, as Mbembe notes, that in elaboratinghis critique Bayart draws heavily from existing debates within and about postcolo-nial studies that provide him with ready-made ingredients. He nevertheless main-tains a French touch throughout his criticism that colonizes his whole argument.After having established the influence of French scholars and intellectuals onpostcolonial studies, Bayart concludes that postcolonial studies is superfluous:it stands now for a foreign and univocal import to French scholarship.9Bayartscriticism is predicated on what constitutes French scholarship and French aca-demia. He is blind not only to the transnationalization of French academia by thelocation of French scholars abroad, as Mbembe points out, but also to the PhDsreceived by non-French students from French academic institutions. His criticismseems to suggest what French academia shouldbe.

The yardstick against which Bayart reads postcolonial studies remains thesmall Parisian scene that disqualifies any criticism suspected of appealing toidentity, a preemptive disqualification that constantly reasserts the universal. His

argument rehearses the one formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquantten years ago in their article On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. In thisarticle, they criticize the U.S.-based Afro-American political scientist MichaelHanchard and Brazilian scholars in close professional relations with U.S. aca-demics and funding institutions for being the Trojan horse of American imperi-alism by spreading in Brazil, where they are lacking, racial categories based on

7. Emmanuelle Sibeud, Post-Colonialand Colonial Studies: Enjeux et dbats,Revue dhistoiremoderne et contemporaine51 (2004), 95.

8. Terry Eagleton, Postcolonialism and Postcolonialism, Interventions: International Jour-

nal of Postcolonial Studies1 (1998), 24.9. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 61. It was exactly this kind of misrepresentation that promptedMiriam Ticktin and me to organize the conference A Postcolonial Approach to France: Immigra-tion, Citizenship, Empire, held under the auspices of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at theMaison Franaise at Columbia University in 2003.


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the black-and-white divide forged in the context of the United States.10Similarlyby depicting postcolonial studies as strictly confined to identity politics, Bayartimplicitly opposes to it the figure of the universal intellectual. Thus he offers us adepiction of French academia devoid of power relations based on class, race, andgender in which sole theoretical disputes have droit de citto explain why thegraft did not take.11Unsurprisingly, he ends up calling on postcolonial studiesto let French academia have its own identity politics.

In contrast to Bayart, both Stoler and Mbembe view the emergence of post-colonial studies in a positive light. While Mbembe stresses the fermentation of animperial winter after the discrediting of anticolonial intellectual figures such asFrantz Fanon in favor of French intellectuals who ignored the colonial questionStoler firmly rejects the pervading memory-hole or ignorance thesis. In Mbembesaccount, postcolonial studies represents a way out of the imperial winter, a sortof cultural renaissance that would put an end to Frances anachronistic positionStoler, in contrast, recasts the colonial question by what she terms colonial apha-sia, or a loss of access and active dissociation.12She underlines unchangingsocial and political conditions in French banlieuesto emphasize the role playedby anglophone postcolonial and subaltern studies in fueling new questions. Raceand colonial talks emerged, she argues, in a situation of noncontainment triggeredby security discourse resting on postcolonial spatial segregation.13

Beyond their divergences, all three authors agree on the view that postcoloniastudies has eventually taken root in France, and they situate it with the advent ofthe new millennium. Given this mobilization for and against postcolonial studiesin France, and the autonomous vigor it is credited, one would expect to face a flow

of books and numerous scholars referring to postcolonial studies favorably, or aleast acknowledging it. But instead, there are a handful of scholars credited in thethree essays with carrying the postcolonial torch. At the forefront are two publi-cations that appeared in 2005: Coloniser, exterminerby Olivier Le Cour Grand-maison, and the edited volumeLa fracture coloniale, which gathers the work ofsome twenty-five authors.14Yet references to the postcolonial library are absen

10. Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant, On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason, Theory, Culture and Society16 (1999): 44 46.

11. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 63.

12. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 125.13. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 127.14. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison,Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et ltat colonial(Paris

Fayard, 2005); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial(Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005).


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or allusive in these books as well as in some special issues or articles on the sub-ject of postcolonialism.15Furthermore, the boundaries of postcolonial studies areelusive. Although Mbembe explicitly positions his book published in a series edi-ted by Bayart, On the Postcolony(2000), away from subaltern and postcolonialstudies, it is Mbembes contribution toLa fracture colonialethat set the standardfor the problematization of the postcolonial in France.16Besides, Mbembes pre-sentation of postcolonial studies as debunking a false Western universalism andas seeking to establish instead, in a quasi-messianic message, a humanity- to-come freed from the inhumane figure of the colonized and racial difference, inturn, informs Bayarts presentation of postcolonial studies.17Strikingly, as scarceas the references to postcolonial studies are in this handful of books, so are thevoices of the subalterns. This is not to say that scholarship informed by postcolo-nial studies does not exist in France, but it is not on the central stage of the debate.If the translation partly carried out by new and small publishing houses ofthe ever-expanding postcolonial library is under way, the anti-postcolonial libraryis in full expansion as well.18The paradox is that the French audience is intro-duced to postcolonial studies by its unfriendly critics. Moreover, the mobilizationagainst postcolonial studies has stronger roots in France, and as such it does bringto mind an old story.

Michel Foucault occupies a pivotal and contradictory role in the current textsunder consideration, whether to point to a dj vu (e.g., Bayart), or once more toprovide evidence of the neglect of colonialism and existing forms of state racismby French scholars (e.g., Mbembe), or to underscore a French selective readingthat constantly neglects Foucaults theory of racism (e.g., Stoler). However, the

Foucault link is not new: the (non)reception of Edward Saids Orientalismand thevivid memory it still aroused in the 1990s is deeply connected to the rejection by

15. For efforts to present postcolonial studies and discuss its relevance to the French context, seethe two special issues Postcolonialisme et immigrations, Contretemps16 (2006), and Faut-il trepostcolonial? ed. Laurent Dubreuil,Labyrinthe24, no. 2 (2006), labyrinthe.revues.org/index1241.html.

16. Achille Mbembe,De la postcolonie. Essai sur limagination politique dans lAfrique con-temporaine (On the Postcolony) (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 35; Achille Mbembe, La Rpublique etlimpens de la race, in Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire,La fracture coloniale, 139; Pascal Blan-chard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, Introduction. La fracture coloniale: Une histoirefranaise, in Blanchard et al.,La fracture coloniale,11.

17. Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean-Louis Schlegel, Quest-ce que la pense post-coloniale? Entretien avec Achille Mbembe, Esprit, no. 330 (2006), special issue, Pour comprendrela pense postcoloniale, 118; Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 58.

18. For instance, Jean-Loup Amselle,LOccident dcroch: Enqute sur les postcolonialismes(Paris: Stock, 2008). And the earlier text, with the evocative title, by Jean-Franois Bayart, En finiravec les tudes postcoloniales,Le dbat, no. 154 (2009): 119 40.


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Foucault one endorsed by Said of the notion that knowledge can exist onlywhere the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop onlyoutside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.19Only two years after itspublication in English, Orientalismwas translated into French by the major Pari-sian publishing house Le Seuil.20However, Saids powerful critique fell flat rightaway in theAnnales,then themost prominent French academic journal in thediscipline of history. Lucette Valensi, a prominent member of its editorial teamboldly asked, Shall we burn orientalism? (Faut-il brler lorientalisme?).2

She completely disregarded Saids epistemological critique and, instead, con-tended that like any other scholarship, orientalist studies is the child of its timeand that, in fact, orientalist scholars whom she freed from the charge of eth-nocentrism have underwritten the Muslim intellectual Renaissance.22Immuneto Eurocentrism, independent from imperialist designs, and, most important, anempowerment for Muslim intelligentsia, orientalist scholarship could be rein-

stated: if orientalist studies was not to be burned, Orientalismwas.Even more than a decade later, in interviews conducted by Hassan Arfaoui, theeditor in chief ofMARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique(MARS:The Arab World in Scientific Research), debates about Saids Orientalismhadshown no signs of losing their vigor.23For instance, Maxime Rodinson, in oneinterview, stated that orientalism is today incriminated primarily because of thisdevil that is Edward Said and that institutional Marxists, as he qualified him-self, had long before Said denounced that scholars are conditioned by their milieuthat is, by the bourgeois society organized [anime] by capitalism.24 In herinterview, Valensi recalled how Rodinson had once qualified Saids Orientalism

as a kind of jdanovism, meaning a substitution not of bourgeois science witha proletarian science but rather of a Western science with a science of politi-cal correctness. Nevertheless, she credited and lamented Saids influence in theUnited States for its contribution to the decline of empirical work and to the rise

19. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Michel Foucault,Disciplineand Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books 1995), 27.

20. Edward Said,Lorientalisme: LOrient cr par lOccident, trans. by Catherine Malamoud(Paris: Seuil, 1980).

21. Lucette Valensi, Lorientalisme aujourdhui,Annales: conomies, socits, civilisations35 (1980), 416.

22. Valensi, Lorientalisme aujourdhui, 416.23. The short-lived journal was issued by the Paris-based Arab World Institute and foremosaddressed to a francophone and Arabic-speaking audience.

24. Hassan Arfaoui, Entretien avec Maxime Rodinson, MARS: Le monde arabe dans larecherche scientifique4 (1994): 33 34.


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25. Hassan Arfaoui, Entretien avec Lucette Valensi,MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherchescientifique 7 (1996 97), 20 21.

26. Hassan Arfaoui and Subhi Hadidi, Entretien avec Edward Said,MARS: Le monde arabedans la recherche scientifique4 (1994), 12.

27. Foucault,Discipline and Punish,27.28. Gyan Prakash, Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from

Indian Historiography, Comparative Studies in Society and History32 (1990): 383 408; Cather ineCoquery-Vidrovitch, Plaidoyer pour lhistoire du monde dans luniversit franaise, Vingtimesicle: Revue dhistoire61 (1999): 111 25.

29. Emmanuelle Saada, Il faut distinguer travail historique et positions militantes, interviewwith Philippe Bernard,Le Monde, January 21, 2006.30. Miriam Ticktin, Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Femi-

nist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society33 (2008):863 89.

of a criticism of Western discourse. Yet she argued that the decolonization ofNorth Africa also meant that of social sciences and therefore orientalist studieswas a form of capital bequeathed to the formerly colonized, from which onepart can be used and another abandoned. She stressed the relations of equalityand reciprocity between French and francophone scholars of the Maghreb.25In his interview, Said pointed out that while he was one of the first non-Frenchscholars to become interested in French scholarship, and specifically in Foucaultswork, his interest was not a lasting one, as he found French scholars more andmore provincial.26

My point is that if the graft did not take, as Bayart suggests, it is a conclusionreached not after an assessment of the scholarly value of postcolonial studies butrather after a rejection of Foucaults theoretical approach of power-knowledgerelations.27 The reluctance to think with Orientalism has not only deprivedFrance of an important field of research, namely, postorientalist histories, buthas also contributed to the maintenance of the colonial library as a referencepoint for French scholarship and training.28And because we are told that, as forthe colonial institutional legacy, little has remained, the current postcolonialquestion in France is reduced to the terrain of collective imaginaries, culturalrepresentations, and identities.29After such reductionism, social movements ofundocumented migrants, the struggle of Maghrebi women against postcolonialbilateral agreements that subjugate them to sharia-inspired personal status, or theselective and arbitrary granting of asylum status in France favoring orientaliststories are the kinds of struggles and narratives that are placed in the margins ofthe debate.30


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Which Legacy?

If anything, the mobilization against postcolonial studies indicates that historyis no object to be hijacked in France and that there is a politics of history, resembling identity politics, in which French academia expunged of dissenting

voices plays no marginal role. Stolers evocation of Maurice Papon forcefullyshows the explicit collision between histories that have been hitherto consideredand treated separately in mainstream French scholarship, colonialism and fas-cism, and how, as Mbembe also points out, they continue to be objects of a dif-ferential treatment. Yet if Bayarts dismissal of a colonial genealogy of Frenchcontemporary racism raises questions, so does Stolers and Mbembes insistenceon the colonial genealogy as the primary, if not the unique, site for the productionof race. Stoler underlines how studies of contemporary racism had little to sayabout colonialism and how race and the colonial discourse that fuels the currendebates in France are at times related, at times disjointed. Mbembe focuses on

the politics of remembrance and analyzes it as an official politics of memoryagainst the background of the competing memories of the colonized and the settlers replayed in postcolonial France. Both rightly underscore the many waysFrench colonies are rendered irrelevant to the making of France; yet it is too hastya conclusion to explain with colonial history alone the contemporary treatmentof postcolonial immigrants and their descendants. Can we disregard the historyof fascism and eugenics when bringing in postcolonial studies? What about thegenealogy of race in decolonization?

Stoler contends that sudden knowledge is not at issue because historiansof colonialism had easy access to sources.31However, access to archives was a

the core of the Papon case, which unleashed an important set of questions andresponses beyond colonial history. The unveiling of a state politics of memoryto a broad public raised questions about the role of state archivists and historiansin courts and access to archives and eventually the big question of writing his-tory, all questions not confined to colonial history.32Whereas the U.S. historianof Vichy France Robert O. Paxton testified in Papons trial, the French historianHenry Rousso firmly contended that the courtroom is no place for historians. Thefailure to indict Papon for the 1961 massacre of French Muslims of Algerianorigin was challenged by the independent historian Jean-Luc Einaudi in a pub

31. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 122, 124.32. For instance, Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2009); or iginally published asLa perversion historiographiqueUne rflexion armnienne(Paris: Lignes, 2006).


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lic denunciation.33In the defamation court case Papon engaged against Einaudi,two state archivists came to testify in order to provide evidence from archives towhich Einaudi had no access. It is against this background of the mise au placardof those state archivists, a context not reducible to a site of imaginaries or identi-ties, that a conference bringing together U.S. and French historians and bearingpostcolonial studies in its title was held in Paris in May 2000.34

Paul Ricoeur, in his 2000 Marc Bloch Lecture, gave this debate an authori-tative response by arguing for the necessary differentiation of historiographyfrom memory, and the two from the judiciary.35While Ricoeur made no men-tion of colonial history and instead pointed to the Holocaust, his distinction wasreasserted when, after the publication of the Natives of the Republics manifestodenouncing the colonial treatment of postcolonial migrants and their descendantsand the 2005 riots that took place a few months later, the sociologist EmmanuelleSaada opposed the autonomy of history against the distortions of memory.36

Neither Ricoeur nor Saada felt the need to question how the community of his-torians is constituted, for each defines the historians craft through objective pro-fessional practice.37In many ways, the debate opposing history to memory issimply a reformulation of the science versus ideology paradigm pervading Frenchacademia, which views the universal as the site of objectivity while defining theparticular as subjective and ideologically biased, a theme that runs throughoutBayarts essay as well. Bayarts demonstration that postcolonial critique is blindto historical dynamics rests on his removal of Frederick Coopers and Stolerscontributions from the postcolonial conversation that emerged in the 1980s, afterwhich he can safely reclaim their scholarship as todays best weapon against the

introduction of postcolonial studies in France. Bayart reorganizes the terrainof scholarship that is constitutive of his argument in a way that resembles whatJoan W. Scott described in another French debate as border patrol.38When

33. Jean-Luc Einaudi, Octobre 1961: Pour la vrit, enfin,Le Monde, May 20, 1998.34. On May 30 31, 2000, I, along with Matthieu Loitron and Todd Shepard, organized the

conference Postcolonial Studies: Regards croiss Francetats-Unis, held in Paris at the coledes hautes tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), under the auspices of the Laboratoire de dmog-raphie historique, and chaired by Franoise Gaspard. One of the state archivists was among theparticipants.

35. Paul Ricoeur, Lcriture de lhistoire et la reprsentation du pass,Annales: Histoire, sci-ences sociales55 (2000): 731 47.

36. Saada, Il faut distinguer.37. See Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice(Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

38. See Scotts incisive critical review of Grard Noiriels Sur la crise de lhistoire. Joan W.Scott, Border Patrol, French Historical Studies21 (1998): 383 97.


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Cooper and Stoler edited a special issue ofAmerican Ethnologistin 1989 withwhich they set a new research agenda that would recapture both the metropoleand the colonies within a single analytical field, it included a wide range ofscholars, some of them from the school of subaltern studies.39Their coeditedTensions of Empire,published some ten years later, continued the previous lineof dialogue with postcolonial studies.40And again, half a decade later, they stillcontinued their serious engagement with postcolonial studies in the conferencetitled A Postcolonial Approach to France.

As Stoler recalls, it was Georges Balandiers 1951 colonial situation thathelped her and Cooper reformulate a research agenda that would seek not to takefor granted the colonized/colonizer divide.41However, the inspiration they claimfrom Balandiers colonial situation depends on its decontextualized readingStoler points to the fact that Balandier did not follow such a research agenda, butrather than seek a full explanation for why that was the case, she turns only tohis autobiographical account. Contextualizing Balandier unveils another majorFrench contribution to postcolonial studies and one of the most enduring andcontested terminologies of our contemporary world: Third World. Balandierwrote his colonial situation at the very moment in which colonial ideology anddomination grounded in the colonized/colonizer divide were undermined by theextension of citizenship in the French empire, a process that emerged from thewill to maintain French overseas departments and territories. In the 1950s, hewas instrumental in popularizing and turning Third Worldinto a powerful cate-gory of knowledge foremost defined by its underdevelopment and in need ofdevelopment policies. In an interview in 1999, Balandier characterized his 1951

article as a break with a timeless ethnology, but he also stated that the assertion by pro-colonial intellectuals that the civilizing mission is associated withprogress, peace, and education is not wholly wrong, unless one reproduces, inthe reverse, the stereotypes of the Other.42It was such a view, of Europe bringingthe backward countries onto the path of civilization, modernity, and development

39. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Introduction. Tensions of Empire: ColoniaControl and Visions of Rule, special issue, Tensions of Empire,American Ethnologist16 (1989)609.

40. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in aBourgeois World(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

41. Georges Balandier, La situation coloniale: Approche thorique, Cahiers internationaux desociologie11 (1951): 44 79.

42. Hassan Arfaoui and Robert Santo-Martino, Les mondes de la surmodernit: Entretien avecGeorges Balandier,MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique10 11 (1999), 38, 42.


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43. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004),58.

44. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking ofFrance(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 6.

45. Shepard,Invention of Decolonization , 230.46. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 125.47. Mamadou Diouf, ed., Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: Colonialisme, nationalisme et

socits postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala; Amsterdam: South-South Exchange Program for Researchon History of Development [SEPHIS], 1999). See also his contribution to the postcolonial debate inFrance. Mamadou Diouf, Les tudes postcoloniales lpreuve des traditions intellectuelles et desbanlieues franaises, Contretemps16 (2006): 17 30.

48. As stated in the presentation of the collection.

that Fanon contested when he reclaimed and subverted the term Third Worldbyfamously stating in his 1961 Wretched of the Earththat Europe is literally thecreation of the Third World.43

The colonial legacy is tortuous not only because of the complexities of thecolonial situation, as Bayart maintains, but also because decolonization wasa moment of redefinitions, a moment that not only broke with a certain formof colonialism but also set a future for the metropoles. As Todd Shepard con-vincingly argues, with the coming of Algerias independence, decolonization wastransformed from a descriptive term into a historical category, an all but inevi-table stage in the tide of History.44To unmix French citizenry in Algeria, he fur-ther contends, racialized ethnicities were mobilized.45Stolers phrase occlusionof knowledge over colonial history does not account for those new terminolo-gies and the new historiography that emerged with decolonization.46Mbembesaccount of Algerias independence as trauma also falls short of capturing theseproductive aspects of the intricacy of power and knowledge.

Relocating the Postcolonial in the French State

It took another twenty years after Saids Orientalismto resume the translationof what was now called postcolonial studies, but, as if to comply with Bayartsthesis, it was not carried out by French scholars. In 1999 the historian MamadouDiouf edited the very first French translation of some major texts by membersof the subaltern studies group and substantiated it with a detailed introduction.47The collections aim was to favor the debate and the conversation South/South,without the intermediary of historians of the North.48Directed primarily at a

francophone public in Africa rather than a French audience, Dioufs introduc-tion critically reappraised some of the African postcolonial historiographies and


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49. Diouf, Introduction. Entre lAfrique et lInde: Sur les questions coloniales et nationalesEcriture de lhistoire et recherche historique,Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: 5 35.

50. Bayart,Les tudes postcoloniales, 16.51. Bayart,Les tudes postcoloniales, 16.52. Diouf, Introduction. Entre lAfrique et lInde, 19.53. Michle Tribalat, Faire France. Une enqute sur les immigrs et leurs enfants (Paris: La

Dcouverte, 1995); Michle Tribalat, with Patrick Simon and Benot Riandey,De limmigration lassimilation: Enqute sur les populations dorigine trangre en France(Paris: La DcouverteInstitut National dtudes Dmographiques, 1996).

54. For instance, it is explained that the immigrant who declared both Berber and Arabic amother tongues, will be classified as Berber. Tribalat, et al.De limmigration lassimilation,271.

invited sub-Saharan African scholars to engage with the subaltern scholarship.4

In addition to the French translation of texts written by Gyan Prakash, DipeshChakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Veena Das, Gya-nendra Pandey, and Shahid Amin, the volume also included two texts in coun-terpoint by Nira Wickramasinghe and by Frederick Cooper. Thus the work bysome members of the subaltern studies group was not intended as a tool kit to beunquestionably endorsed; rather, it was a way to open up a debate. And, indeedas Bayart notes elsewhere, it sparked acrimonious debate with the proponents ofafrocentrism in the Dakar-based Conseil pour le dveloppement de la rechercheen sciences sociales en Afrique (CODESRIA), then directed by Mbembe and towhich Diouf was affiliated.50However, while Bayart evaluated the introduction othe exploration of the postcolonial problematic as antithetic to scientific nativism [indignisme scientifique], he disregarded it as context specific and irrele-vant to his thesis that postcolonial studies is foremost a form of identity politics.5

Why can he not see scientific nativism on his own soil?In his introduction to the subaltern studies collection, Diouf suggested that the

subaltern analysis of notions of citizenship and community in India could helptackle the notion of Ivority.52Ivoiriens de souche, or those of Ivory stock,is not a monopoly of some African ethnic struggles; since 1995, France too hada category of Franais de souche, or those French of French stock, yet it waspromoted as a scientific category in a state demographic survey aimed at measuring the assimilation of some immigrant groups and their children.53In the surveyFrench of French stock is presented as the only nonethnic category, the standardagainst which cultural attitudes of immigrants and their children, respectively clas

sified by ethnic belonging and by ethnic origin, are measured. Ethnic assignation is ascribed through the minority mother tongue and its application differentialwhereas nation and ethnies are matched in the countries north of the Mediter-ranean Sea, ethnies multiply in the South.54The survey superbly demonstrated


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in the words of Stoler, the colonialism dis-ease of French anthropology.55But itdoes bring to the fore that the question is less why French anthropologists had littleto say on the 2005 riots than why they had little to say on the surveys categories.

Mbembe credits the lack of ethnic markers in French public statistics to theso-called French republican model of integration. However, the sociologist Domi-nique Schnapper, one of the models prominent proponents, lamented the lack ofethnic markers in public statistics and argued their importance on the groundsthat the migration of Europeans to the United States in the nineteenth century isnot that of black Africans to France in 1980.56By positing Frances unease withglobalization as an anachronistic resistance led by a neorevisionist movement,Mbembe misses the fact that France enacts policies similar to those of other Euro-pean Union (EU) member states, which cannot amount to a resistance to global-ization but is, rather, its flip side.57Furthermore, his two-waves account of minor-ity social movements fails to point out that these struggles are not led by the samesocial groups and are not temporal sequences: the ongoing struggle of overseasFrench citizens and of illegalized migrants are not for symbolic recognition. 58What Mbembe fails to fully grasp is the scientific claim of truth and objectivitythat constitutes the divide between immigrant and French of French stock.

If the colonized/colonizer divide is admittedly a poor analytical frameworkto read the dynamics of the colonial situation, it was nevertheless reflective ofa politics inherent to colonial rule. Nicholas B. Dirks identifies cultural tech-nologies of rule as those processes that secure colonial domination by meansother than coercion.59If French of French stock failed to be institutionalizedin the census, as some demographers suggested, by the mid-1990s, French census

classification was radically altered with the introduction of a category of immi-grant. In fact, the two formed a pair in the rewriting of colonial history. If someFrench citizens could be of French stock, it is because other French citizenswere considered immigrants. A French Muslim of Algerian origin, as officialdenominations aimed to contrast with those of European stock, is classified as animmigrant, defined as a person born foreigner abroad, when obviously the

55. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 133.56. Dominique Schnapper,La France de lintgration: Sociologie de la nation en 1990(Paris:

Gallimard, 1993), 14.57. Mbembe, Provincializing France, 102. I borrow the flip side from Peter Geschiere. Peter

Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).58. Mbembe, Provincializing France, 102.59. Nicholas B. Dirks, Foreword in Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge:

The British in India(Pr inceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.


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French Muslim Algerians were born French nationals in French departments, andforced to be so. If they had not been previously defined as such, they would cor-respond perfectly to the definition of French of French stock, as a person bornin France of two parents themselves born in France.

The institutionalization of the category immigrant succeeds where governmental politics failed: it cancels the postcolonial application of the jus solprovision of French citizenship law according to which Algerian citizens bornin French Algeria procreate, in the postcolonial metropole, French citizens bybirth. Once again, we are much beyond the occlusion of knowledge that Stolersuggests and, for more than ten years, in an active production of knowledge thapaves the way for a new postcolonial historiography that has little resemblance toa postcolonial critique. The politics of autochthony underlying such postcolonial revisionism is foremost transnational and cannot be discarded by denounc-ing bottom-up identity politics or by focusing only on the passage from empireto nation-state (e.g., Bayart).60Much to the contrary: in fact, the new divide ofimmigrant and French of French stock was made possible by the collectivegranting of a European citizenship that excluded (and created) the so-called thirdcountry nationals. The declassification of former European immigrants and theireclassification as European citizens fosters the link between non-European andimmigrant in France as well as in the other EU member states.

Stoler raises a fundamental question when she asks whether the visibility othe termpostcolonialindicates that it is safe for consumption. This novel state-led postcolonial politics of identity grounds and revives the pervading coloniaimaginary, and not the other way around. The oppositions that informed French

antidiscrimination policies French of French stock and immigrants of Algerian origin or French youth and youth of Algerian origin are not, as theFrench anthropologist Didier Fassin suggests, unfortunate wordings.61As Stolepoints out, one cannot dissociate the French state from racism. It is not a semanticissue: these categories are pivotal because they proceed through ascription. If thetermpostcolonialcan be deployed safely today, it is because it helps position theFrench state as the legitimate antiracist actor and the mediator among differenethnic groups in potential conflict.

The term taxonomic state, which Stoler uses to distinguish identity politics

60. On the politics of autochthony, see Geschiere, Perils of Belonging.61. Didier Fassin, Linvention franaise de la discrimination, Revue franaise de science poli

tique52 (2002): 406.


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