Jean-Marc Moura  (Université de Lille III)
The changing context of French postcolonialism studies: New approaches and new limits

My paper will propose to observe how the debates on French colonial past and on multiculturalism in France have been recently reformulated within and beyond French intellectual discourse. Various political attempts to reassert French colonial past -loi Taubira du 21 mai 2001, rapport du Comité pour la mémoire de l'esclavage remis au Premier ministre le 12 avril 2005, "Manifeste des indigènes de la République", loi du 23 février 2005 concerning « le rôle positif » de la présence française outre-mer.--, intellectual reactions to books dealing with colonial history (Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau : Les Traites négrières. Essai d'histoire globale) or multiculturalism (books by Gaston Kelman) have generated heated polemics but also new conceptions of French postcolonialism. I would like to describe some of these important transformations. I would suggest that these intellectual and political changes are an opportunity for the development of Francophone postcolonial studies. They allow new approaches of French colonial and postcolonial history (Pétré-Grenouilleau) and of its representations in essays (Kelman) or in fiction (K.Effoui, A.Waberi) but they bring probably also new limits to the intellectual debates. I would like to describe this new horizon of French postcolonial thought.