Joëlle Vitiello  (Macalester College)
France in an Impasse: The Colonial and Racial Unthought

In July of 2005, in connection with the Africa Remix exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, scholars from various fields and horizons (such as Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, Simon Njani) gathered for an unusual debate about the status of Postcolonial Studies in France. Stuart Hall in particular remarked that the debate was quite late in coming to France as the best debates about postcolonial studies had already happened twenty-five years ago in other places. He also expressed his disappointment in French intellectual figures such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze among others for not confronting the colonial/post-/and neo-colonial question. Since Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, who addressed directly the colonial and racial paradigms, France as a nation, as well as French intellectuals and media have had a difficult time addressing France's colonial heritage and its place in a post-colonial order. I propose in this paper to use the debate at the Centre Pompidou (which I documented) as a point of departure for a comparative exploration of theorizing about race and colonialism in England, the United States and France. I will explore why since Fanon and Sartre, it has been so difficult to discuss theoretically race and colonialism in France and what discourses (including Francophonie) have arisen in France in the place of this missing discussion. It seems particularly relevant to examine this absence of racial/postcolonial discourses at a time when the French are experiencing a cultural and political crisis precisely as a result of this aporia.