Abdoulaye Gueye: Got Black? When African-Descendants' Associations Challenge French Color-Blindness

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Abdoulaye Gueye, University of Ottawa

Paper ►

Bio: Abdoulaye Gueye is Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa. He is the authors of several books, including Au Nègres de France la patrie non reconnaissante; Oublier l'amère patrie; and De la dépendance vis-à-vis de l'Occident au besoin d'une diaspora africaine: les universités africaines et le défi du développement. He edited several books, including A Stain on our Past: Memory and Slavery; and Figures et expériences diasporiques.

Gueye has been member of "Board of Directors" of the African Studies Association, US from 2000-2003; and editor of the Canadian Journal of African Studies for several years.

Gueye is the recipient of several fellowships, including Institute for Adanced Study's in Princeton, the Hutchins Institute's at Harvard University; the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship; the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie's fellowship; the Foundation de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme's. He has been visiting professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the University of Ghana; the Université Paris Cité, and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Marseilles. He is currently a fellow at Stias.

Topic: This paper examines the social determinants and objectives of African-descended protest movements in 21^stFrance. For decades, research on this population, mostly produced by anthropologists, was concerned with establishing the cultural distance between this demographic and the rest of the French. Black French political mobilization has been of little interest for scholars. At best, social scientists reduced this group’s mobilization to the quest of African undocumented migrants for legal permanent residence, suggesting whereby that African-descended are by definition non-French citizens. Yet, claims for the recognition of their Frenchness have fuelled most of the mobilization of African-descended people in the last 15 years. This paper will deal specifically with this development. I will make two interconnected arguments. The first is that the rise of a black movement in contemporary France results from the transformation of the African descended citizenry as it becomes composed of more native-born and of well-educated individuals.

The second is that the African descended population’s protests are interventions in a realm of norms and signifiers made outside them but assigning them a social identity; the final purpose of this mobilization being to reinvent themselves as “black French” instead of second/third generation African immigrants.

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