H. Adlai Murdoch  (University of Illinois-Urbana)
Making Frenchness Plural: How France Contends with its 'Others'

While it is more or less a given that there are a variety of forms, histories, and discourses of postcoloniality, one might also reasonably claim that postcolonial theory can in principle be applied to a number of different political and cultural contexts, analyzing cultural forms and practices that mediate relations of domination and subordination as they came to exist during the period of modern European colonialism or imperialism, or as they continue to exist in our neocolonial era between races, cultures, or nations. Such theories actively engage with discursive forms and representations grounded in racist perspectives and practices that fueled both commercial and state policies on a more or less global scale. Subsequently, discourses of identity and nationalism came to dominate the Anglophone postcolonial debate, even as such corollaries as diaspora and hybridity became of increasing importance as new patterns of migration and cultural production re-located the analysis and representation of the imperial/colonial relation towards the new literatures being spawned in both metropole and periphery.

By contrast, however, following on the works of early francophone thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and especially Frantz Fanon, who shaped postcolonial theory to a significant degree, much recent French postcolonial discourse (stemming largely from the Francophone world outside France) has been concerned with the anomalous, even paradoxical condition of many former French postcolonial nations, and especially of France's colonies-turned-departments and of migrants from these peripheral territories to the French metropolitan center. As a result, the work of such critics as Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe and Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant challenges the positionalities and perhaps even the relevance of their anglophone precursors' production of discourses of postcolonialism grounded in French poststructuralist theory, especially given its limited engagement with pressing social and political problems. An obvious and rather pointed recent example of the culmination of such post-colonial policies is the recent minority-driven riots in France, where the failure over time of the French political classes to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture engendered in its turn the deep-seated, searing racism with which the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos must contend, caught within a national framework of which they are, after all, legally citizens. From this perspective, as France's universalist self-fashioning is increasingly disturbed by the ethnic and cultural corollaries of migration in a globalizing world, the construction of a contemporary framework for the postcolonial condition increasingly imbricates both metropole and periphery into this ongoing transnational and transcultural exchange.

One key result of this shift in discourses has been the promulgation of the increasingly restrictive Pasqua laws of 1986 and 1993 and their further tightening by the Debré law of 1997, betraying a growing tendency to perceive Frenchness and belonging through the superficialities and stereotypes of race. Indeed, such major new patterns of difference and exclusion within the metropole itself reflect the conjoining of globalization and postcolonialism into a multifaceted paradigm encompassing new ethnocultural structures and discursive norms through which the French nation is now to be described and defined. Given the heightened attention paid to the category of the immigré, particularly since in France the term is used to refer not only to those residents who have migrated from another country, but also to those who might have lived in the metropole for generations with ethnic origins in France's ex-colonies in Africa and the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the previously stable nationalist categories of 'France' and 'Frenchness,' and of the term 'postcolonial' as it applies to the nation and its relationship with its others, must undergo radical and sweeping change.

Given the multivalent resonances of this transnational component to postcolonial analysis, the task of self-representation undertaken by these new communities has engendered increasingly complex theoretical and fictional discourses since the 1980s, exploring and expanding core principles of otherness and in-betweenness that undermine, in their turn, discourses and definitions of identity, belonging, and postcolonial praxis framed in purely nationalist terms. Through an interdisciplinary approach, I propose through contrapuntal readings to tease out the points of contention that undergird the terms that allow these communities to define their Frenchness differently from that of the larger universalist culture of the metropole. If the case for the exceptionalism of the French Caribbean historico-cultural experience elaborated, say, in Le discours antillais is refracted as a fictional retelling in Gisèle Pineau's L'exil selon Julia, then the end result challenges and transforms our conceptualization of France as a nation that has consistently problematized its others, even as its migrant and minority populations form a new Caribbean diaspora whose multiple locations and amorphous boundaries locate its postcoloniality in a new, Francophone transnational space of hybridity and renewal.