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The Return of the Native:Postcolonial Smoke Screen and the French Postcolonial Politics of Identity

Sandrine Bertaux

Although many scholars have attempted to avoid lapidary formulations, much of the postcolonial conversation that takes place in France is a reconfigured formulation of old questions, with a taste of déjà vu. Even before having fully landed on French soil, the term postcolonial is anathema to France: it is associated with a diminished space of discussion, and the debate over its usage has nationalistic undertones. To paraphrase a famous title, the conversation boils down to the following question: is postcolonial studies bad for France?1 It recalls the “for or against veil” formulation that discredited all domestic opponents of the 2004 law on laïcité as “pro- veil.” The law made France world famous, one more time, for its singularity of clinging to universalism despite the fact that, evaluated in its context, the law was not free of the charge of being part of a gesture toward multiculturalism.2

A perusal of the three articles written by Jean- François Bayart, Achille Mbembe, and Ann Laura Stoler reveals that the question we are invited to discuss has less to do with the impact of postcolonial studies in French scholarship than with 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 Culture 23:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2010-023 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?” in Is 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, “Laïcité and Multiculturalism: The Stasi Report in Context,” British Journal of Sociology 60 (2009): 237 – 56.

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demia and why it emerges today in such a controversial fashion. In other words, what is at issue is the reception of postcolonial studies in France, denoting for Bayart an “academic carnival,” revealing for Stoler France’s “colonial aphasia,” and representing for Mbembe the way out of its “imperial winter.”3

Postcolonial studies and its debates are relevant and disrupting not only because they challenge the official claim to a “French republican model based on 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 hundred years,” but also because postcolonial studies is partly informed by what is known in U.S. academia as French theory.4 The term postcolonial relates to both the return home of reconfigured, or contested, native theories and the return in pub-lic space of a native question raging in overseas departments and territories and in the metropole’s underprivileged banlieues (suburbs). What is at issue is what connects the two.

Just Landed? Forgetting Orientalism

To begin with, it is necessary to dissipate the postcolonial smoke screen that sur-rounds a French academia presented by some as if it is about to succumb to the postcolonial charm. Bayart confesses to being a novice to postcolonial studies, and his interest is precisely aroused by the eruption of the term postcolonial on the French public scene.5 The “posture of denunciation” of those brandishing the postcolonial torch in France prompts him, he tells us, to write against those not respecting the neat boundaries of knowledge and politics.6 Bayart is not the only 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. Bayart’s phrase is also used in the title of his book from which his essay is a shortened ver-sion. Jean- François Bayart, Les études postcoloniales: Un carnaval académique (Paris: Karthala, 2010); Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition?” in this issue, 72. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” in this issue, 125; Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” in this issue, 87.

4. This self- assertive statement is found in the French official response to ECRI’s recommenda-tions, European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Second Report on France, Adopted on 10 December 1999 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2000), 23, hudoc.ecri.coe.int/XMLEcri/ENGLISH/Cycle_02/02_CbC_eng/02 – cbc- france- eng.pdf. On French theory see François Cusset, French 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 pub-lished as French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États- Unis (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).

5. Bayart, Les études postcoloniales, 6.6. Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies,” 58.

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discarded as obscure. While the historian Emmanuelle Sibeud criticizes French historians 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 the importation of the most “mystifying” aspect of postcolonial studies.7

Admittedly, postcolonial studies is a target that is simultaneously moving and borderless. But even more so, as Terry Eagleton put it in a humorous statement in the first issue of Interventions some ten years ago, “there must surely be in existence somewhere a secret handbook for aspiring postcolonial theorists, whose second rule reads: ‘begin your essay by calling into question the whole notion of post colonialism.’ ”8 Thus it is not surprising, as Mbembe notes, that in elaborating his 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 on postcolonial studies, Bayart concludes that postcolonial studies is “superfluous”: it stands now for a foreign and univocal import to French scholarship.9 Bayart’s criticism is predicated on what constitutes “French scholarship” and “French aca-demia.” He is blind not only to the transnationalization of French academia by the location of French scholars abroad, as Mbembe points out, but also to the PhDs received by non- French students from French academic institutions. His criticism seems to suggest what French academia should be.

The yardstick against which Bayart reads postcolonial studies remains the small Parisian scene that disqualifies any criticism suspected of appealing to identity, a preemptive disqualification that constantly reasserts the universal. His argument rehearses the one formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant ten years ago in their article “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” In this article, they criticize the U.S.- based “Afro- American political scientist” Michael Hanchard 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- Colonial and Colonial Studies: Enjeux et débats,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 51 (2004), 95.

8. Terry Eagleton, “Postcolonialism and ‘Postcolonialism,’ ” Interventions: International Jour-nal of Postcolonial Studies 1 (1998), 24.

9. Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies,” 61. It was exactly this kind of misrepresentation that prompted Miriam 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 the Maison Française at Columbia University in 2003.

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the black- and- white divide forged in the context of the United States.10 Similarly, by depicting postcolonial studies as strictly confined to identity politics, Bayart implicitly opposes to it the figure of the universal intellectual. Thus he offers us a depiction of French academia devoid of power relations based on class, race, and gender in which sole theoretical disputes have droit de cité to explain why the “graft did not take.”11 Unsurprisingly, he ends up calling on postcolonial studies to 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 an “imperial winter” after the discrediting of anticolonial intellectual figures such as Frantz Fanon in favor of French intellectuals who ignored the colonial question, Stoler firmly rejects the pervading memory- hole or ignorance thesis. In Mbembe’s account, postcolonial studies represents a way out of the “imperial winter,” a sort of cultural renaissance that would put an end to France’s anachronistic position. Stoler, in contrast, recasts the colonial question by what she terms “colonial apha-sia,” or a “loss of access and active dissociation.”12 She underlines unchanging social and political conditions in French banlieues to emphasize the role played by anglophone postcolonial and subaltern studies in fueling new questions. Race and colonial talks emerged, she argues, in a situation of noncontainment trig gered by security discourse resting on postcolonial spatial segregation.13

Beyond their divergences, all three authors agree on the view that postcolonial studies has eventually taken root in France, and they situate it with the advent of the new millennium. Given this mobilization for and against postcolonial studies in 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 at least acknowledging it. But instead, there are a handful of scholars credited in the three essays with carrying the postcolonial torch. At the forefront are two publi-cations that appeared in 2005: Coloniser, exterminer by Olivier Le Cour Grand-maison, and the edited volume La fracture coloniale, which gathers the work of some twenty- five authors.14 Yet references to the “postcolonial library” are absent

10. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Cul-ture and Society 16 (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 l’état colonial (Paris:

Fayard, 2005); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture colo-niale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 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.15 Furthermore, the boundaries of postcolonial studies are elusive. Although Mbembe explicitly positions his book published in a series edi-ted by Bayart, On the Postcolony (2000), away from subaltern and postcolonial studies, it is Mbembe’s contribution to La fracture coloniale that set the standard for the problematization of the postcolonial in France.16 Besides, Mbembe’s pre-sentation of postcolonial studies as debunking a false Western universalism and as seeking to establish instead, in a quasi-messianic message, a “humanity- to- come” freed from the inhumane figure of the colonized and racial difference, in turn, informs Bayart’s presentation of postcolonial studies.17 Strikingly, as scarce as the references to postcolonial studies are in this handful of books, so are the voices 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 — of the ever- expanding postcolonial library is under way, the anti- postcolonial library is in full expansion as well.18 The paradox is that the French audience is intro-duced to postcolonial studies by its unfriendly critics. Moreover, the mobilization against postcolonial studies has stronger roots in France, and as such it does bring to mind an old story.

Michel Foucault occupies a pivotal and contradictory role in the current texts under consideration, whether to point to a déjà vu (e.g., Bayart), or once more to provide evidence of the neglect of colonialism and existing forms of state racism by French scholars (e.g., Mbembe), or to underscore a French selective reading that constantly neglects Foucault’s theory of racism (e.g., Stoler). However, the Foucault link is not new: the (non)reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the vivid 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, see the two special issues “Postcolonialisme et immigrations,” Contretemps 16 (2006), and “Faut- il être postcolonial?” ed. Laurent Dubreuil, Labyrinthe 24, no. 2 (2006), labyrinthe.revues.org/index1241 .html.

16. Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique con-temporaine (On the Postcolony) (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 35; Achille Mbembe, “La République et l’impensé 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 histoire française,” in Blanchard et al., La fracture coloniale, 11.

17. Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean- Louis Schlegel, “Qu’est- ce que la pensée post-coloniale? Entretien avec Achille Mbembe,” Esprit, no. 330 (2006), special issue, “Pour comprendre la pensée postcoloniale,” 118; Bayart, “Postcolonial Studies,” 58.

18. For instance, Jean- Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: Enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock, 2008). And the earlier text, with the evocative title, by Jean- François Bayart, “En finir avec les études postcoloniales,” Le débat, no. 154 (2009): 119 – 40.

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Foucault — one endorsed by Said — of the notion that “knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.”19 Only two years after its publication in English, Orientalism was translated into French by the major Pari-sian publishing house Le Seuil.20 However, Said’s powerful critique fell flat right away in the Annales, then the most prominent French academic journal in the discipline of history. Lucette Valensi, a prominent member of its editorial team, boldly asked, “Shall we burn orientalism?” (Faut- il brûler l’orientalisme?).21 She completely disregarded Said’s epistemological critique and, instead, con-tended that like any other scholarship, orientalist studies is the child of its time and that, in fact, orientalist scholars — whom she freed from the charge of eth-nocentrism — have underwritten the Muslim intellectual Renaissance.22 Immune to Eurocentrism, independent from imperialist designs, and, most important, an empowerment for Muslim intelligentsia, orientalist scholarship could be rein-stated: if orientalist studies was not to be burned, Orientalism was.

Even more than a decade later, in interviews conducted by Hassan Arfaoui, the editor in chief of MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique (MARS: The Arab World in Scientific Research), debates about Said’s Orientalism had shown no signs of losing their vigor.23 For instance, Maxime Rodinson, in one interview, stated that “orientalism is today incriminated primarily because of this devil that is Edward Said” and that “institutional Marxists,” as he qualified him-self, had long before Said denounced that scholars are conditioned by their milieu, that is, by “the bourgeois society organized [animée] by capitalism.”24 In her interview, Valensi recalled how Rodinson had once qualified Said’s Orientalism as a kind of “jdanovism,” meaning a substitution not of bourgeois science with a proletarian science but rather of a Western science with a science of “politi-cal correctness.” Nevertheless, she credited and lamented Said’s influence in the United 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, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books 1995), 27.

20. Edward Said, L’orientalisme: L’Orient créé par l’Occident, trans. by Catherine Malamoud (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

21. Lucette Valensi, “L’orientalisme aujourd’hui,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 35 (1980), 416.

22. Valensi, “L’orientalisme aujourd’hui,” 416.23. The short- lived journal was issued by the Paris- based Arab World Institute and foremost

addressed to a francophone and Arabic- speaking audience.24. Hassan Arfaoui, “Entretien avec Maxime Rodinson,” MARS: Le monde arabe dans la

recherche scientifique 4 (1994): 33 – 34.

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25. Hassan Arfaoui, “Entretien avec Lucette Valensi,” MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique 7 (1996 – 97), 20 – 21.

26. Hassan Arfaoui and Subhi Hadidi, “Entretien avec Edward Said,” MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique 4 (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 History 32 (1990): 383 – 408; Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, “Plaidoyer pour l’histoire du monde dans l’université française,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 61 (1999): 111 – 25.

29. Emmanuelle Saada, “Il faut distinguer travail historique et positions militantes,” interview with 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 Society 33 (2008): 863 – 89.

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

My point is that if the “graft did not take,” as Bayart suggests, it is a conclusion reached not after an assessment of the scholarly value of postcolonial studies but rather after a rejection of Foucault’s theoretical approach of “power- knowledge relations.”27 The reluctance to think with Orientalism has not only deprived France of an important field of research, namely, post orientalist histories, but has also contributed to the maintenance of the “colonial library” as a reference point for French scholarship and training.28 And because we are told that, as for the colonial institutional legacy, “little has remained,” the current postcolonial question in France is reduced to the terrain of collective imaginaries, cultural representations, and identities.29 After such reductionism, social movements of undocumented migrants, the struggle of Maghrebi women against postcolonial bilateral agreements that subjugate them to sharia- inspired personal status, or the selective and arbitrary granting of asylum status in France favoring orientalist stories are the kinds of struggles and narratives that are placed in the margins of the debate.30

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Which Legacy?

If anything, the mobilization against postcolonial studies indicates that history is no object to be hijacked in France and that there is a politics of history, resem-bling identity politics, in which “French academia” — expunged of dissenting voices — plays no marginal role. Stoler’s evocation of Maurice Papon forcefully shows the explicit collision between histories that have been hitherto considered and 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 Bayart’s dismissal of a colonial genealogy of French contemporary racism raises questions, so does Stoler’s and Mbembe’s insistence on the colonial genealogy as the primary, if not the unique, site for the production of “race.” Stoler underlines how studies of contemporary racism had little to say about colonialism and how race and the colonial discourse that fuels the current debates in France are at times related, at times disjointed. Mbembe focuses on the politics of remembrance and analyzes it as an official politics of memory against the background of the competing memories of the colonized and the set-tlers replayed in postcolonial France. Both rightly underscore the many ways French colonies are rendered irrelevant to the making of France; yet it is too hasty a conclusion to explain with colonial history alone the contemporary treatment of postcolonial immigrants and their descendants. Can we disregard the history of fascism and eugenics when bringing in postcolonial studies? What about the genealogy of “race” in decolonization?

Stoler contends that “sudden knowledge” is not at issue because historians of colonialism had easy access to sources.31 However, access to archives was at the core of the Papon case, which unleashed an important set of questions and responses beyond colonial history. The unveiling of a state politics of memory to a broad public raised questions about the role of state archivists and historians in courts and access to archives and eventually the big question of writing his-tory, all questions not confined to colonial history.32 Whereas the U.S. historian of Vichy France Robert O. Paxton testified in Papon’s trial, the French historian Henry Rousso firmly contended that the courtroom is no place for historians. The failure to indict Papon for the 1961 massacre of “French Muslims of Algerian origin” 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); originally published as La perversion historiographique: Une réflexion arménienne (Paris: Lignes, 2006).

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lic denunciation.33 In the defamation court case Papon engaged against Einaudi, two state archivists came to testify in order to provide evidence from archives to which Einaudi had no access. It is against this background of the mise au placard of 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 bearing “postcolonial 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 historiography from memory, and the two from the judiciary.35 While Ricoeur made no men-tion of colonial history and instead pointed to the Holocaust, his distinction was reasserted when, after the publication of the Natives of the Republic’s manifesto denouncing the colonial treatment of postcolonial migrants and their descendants and the 2005 riots that took place a few months later, the sociologist Emmanuelle Saada 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 historian’s craft through objective pro-fessional practice.37 In many ways, the debate opposing history to memory is simply a reformulation of the science versus ideology paradigm pervading French academia, which views the universal as the site of objectivity while defining the particular as subjective and ideologically biased, a theme that runs throughout Bayart’s essay as well. Bayart’s demonstration that postcolonial critique is blind to historical dynamics rests on his removal of Frederick Cooper’s and Stoler’s contributions from the postcolonial conversation that emerged in the 1980s, after which he can safely reclaim their scholarship as today’s best weapon against the introduction of postcolonial studies in France. Bayart reorganizes the terrain of scholarship that is constitutive of his argument in a way that resembles what Joan W. Scott described in another French debate as “border patrol.”38 When

33. Jean- Luc Einaudi, “Octobre 1961: Pour la vérité, 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 croisés France– États-Unis,” held in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), under the auspices of the Laboratoire de démog-raphie historique, and chaired by Françoise Gaspard. One of the state archivists was among the participants.

35. Paul Ricoeur, “L’écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du passé,” Annales: Histoire, sci-ences sociales 55 (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 Scott’s incisive critical review of Gérard Noiriel’s Sur la “crise” de l’histoire. Joan W.

Scott, “Border Patrol,” French Historical Studies 21 (1998): 383 – 97.

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Cooper and Stoler edited a special issue of American Ethnologist in 1989 with which they set a new research agenda that would recapture both the metropole and the colonies “within a single analytical field,” it included a wide range of scholars, some of them from the school of subaltern studies.39 Their coedited Tensions of Empire, published some ten years later, continued the previous line of dialogue with postcolonial studies.40 And again, half a decade later, they still continued their serious engagement with postcolonial studies in the conference titled “A Postcolonial Approach to France.”

As Stoler recalls, it was Georges Balandier’s 1951 “colonial situation” that helped her and Cooper reformulate a research agenda that would seek not to take for granted the colonized/colonizer divide.41 However, the inspiration they claim from Balandier’s “colonial situation” depends on its decontextualized reading. Stoler points to the fact that Balandier did not follow such a research agenda, but rather than seek a full explanation for why that was the case, she turns only to his autobiographical account. Contextualizing Balandier unveils another major French contribution to postcolonial studies and one of the most enduring and contested terminologies of our contemporary world: Third World. Balandier wrote his “colonial situation” at the very moment in which colonial ideology and domination grounded in the colonized/colonizer divide were undermined by the extension of citizenship in the French empire, a process that emerged from the will to maintain French overseas departments and territories. In the 1950s, he was instrumental in popularizing and turning Third World into a powerful cate-gory of knowledge foremost defined by its “underdevelopment” and in need of development policies. In an interview in 1999, Balandier characterized his 1951 article as a break with a “timeless ethnology,” but he also stated that the asser-tion by pro- colonial intellectuals that the civilizing mission is associated with progress, peace, and education is not “wholly wrong, unless one reproduces, in the reverse, the stereotypes of the Other.”42 It was such a view, of Europe bringing the backward countries onto the path of civilization, modernity, and development,

39. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., “Introduction. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” special issue, “Tensions of Empire,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 609.

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

41. Georges Balandier, “La situation coloniale: Approche théorique,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951): 44 – 79.

42. Hassan Arfaoui and Robert Santo- Martino, “Les mondes de la surmodernité: Entretien avec Georges Balandier,” MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientifique 10 – 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 of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 6.

45. Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 230.46. Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 125. 47. Mamadou Diouf, ed., L’historiographie indienne en débat: Colonialisme, nationalisme et

sociétés postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala; Amsterdam: South- South Exchange Program for Research on History of Development [SEPHIS], 1999). See also his contribution to the postcolonial debate in France. Mamadou Diouf, “Les études postcoloniales à l’épreuve des traditions intellectuelles et des banlieues françaises,” Contretemps 16 (2006): 17 – 30.

48. As stated in the presentation of the collection.

that Fanon contested when he reclaimed and subverted the term Third World by famously stating in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.”43

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

Relocating the Postcolonial in the French State

It took another twenty years after Said’s Orientalism to resume the translation of what was now called postcolonial studies, but, as if to comply with Bayart’s thesis, it was not carried out by French scholars. In 1999 the historian Mamadou Diouf edited the very first French translation of some major texts by members of the subaltern studies group and substantiated it with a detailed introduction.47 The collection’s aim was “to favor the debate and the conversation South/South, without the intermediary of historians of the North.”48 Directed primarily at a francophone public in Africa rather than a French audience, Diouf’s introduc-tion critically reappraised some of the African postcolonial historiographies and

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49. Diouf, Introduction. “Entre l’Afrique et l’Inde: Sur les questions coloniales et nationales. Ecriture de l’histoire et recherche historique,” L’historiographie indienne en débat: 5 – 35.

50. Bayart, Les études postcoloniales, 16. 51. Bayart, Les études postcoloniales, 16.52. Diouf, Introduction. “Entre l’Afrique et l’Inde,” 19. 53. Michèle Tribalat, Faire France. Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La

Découverte, 1995); Michèle Tribalat, with Patrick Simon and Benoît Riandey, De l’immigration à l’assimilation: Enquête sur les populations d’origine étrangère en France (Paris: La Découverte/ Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 1996).

54. For instance, it is explained that “the immigrant who declared both Berber and Arabic as mother tongues, will be classified as Berber.” Tribalat, et al.De l’immigration à l’assimilation, 271.

invited sub- Saharan African scholars to engage with the subaltern scholarship.49 In addition to the French translation of texts written by Gyan Prakash, Dipesh Chakrabarty, 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 by some members of the subaltern studies group was not intended as a tool kit to be unquestionably endorsed; rather, it was a way to open up a debate. And, indeed, as Bayart notes elsewhere, it sparked acrimonious debate with the proponents of “afrocentrism” in the Dakar- based Conseil pour le développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique (CODESRIA), then directed by Mbembe and to which Diouf was affiliated.50 However, while Bayart evaluated the introduction of “the exploration of the postcolonial problematic” as “antithetic to scientific nativ-ism [indigénisme scientifique],” he disregarded it as context specific and irrele-vant to his thesis that postcolonial studies is foremost a form of identity politics.51 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 help tackle the notion of “Ivority.”52 Ivoiriens de souche, or those of “Ivory stock,” is not a monopoly of some African ethnic struggles; since 1995, France too had a category of Français de souche, or those French of “French stock,” yet it was promoted as a scientific category in a state demographic survey aimed at “measur-ing” the assimilation of some immigrant groups and their children.53 In the survey, “French of French stock” is presented as the only nonethnic category, the standard against which cultural attitudes of immigrants and their children, respectively clas-sified by “ethnic belonging” and by “ethnic origin,” are measured. Ethnic assigna-tion is ascribed through the minority mother tongue and its application differential: whereas nation and “ethnies” are matched in the countries north of the Mediter-ranean Sea, “ethnies” multiply in the South.54 The survey superbly demonstrated,

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in the words of Stoler, the “colonialism dis- ease” of French anthropology.55 But it does bring to the fore that the question is less why French anthropologists had little to say on the 2005 riots than why they had little to say on the survey’s categories.

Mbembe credits the lack of ethnic markers in French public statistics to the so- called French republican model of integration. However, the sociologist Domi-nique Schnapper, one of the model’s prominent proponents, lamented the lack of ethnic markers in public statistics and argued their importance on the grounds that “the migration of Europeans to the United States in the nineteenth century is not that of black Africans to France in 1980.”56 By positing France’s unease with globalization 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.57 Furthermore, his two- waves account of minor-ity social movements fails to point out that these struggles are not led by the same social groups and are not temporal sequences: the ongoing struggle of overseas French citizens and of illegalized migrants are not for “symbolic recognition.”58 What Mbembe fails to fully grasp is the scientific claim of truth and objectivity that constitutes the divide between “immigrant” and “French of French stock.”

If the colonized/colonizer divide is admittedly a poor analytical framework to read the dynamics of the “colonial situation,” it was nevertheless reflective of a politics inherent to colonial rule. Nicholas B. Dirks identifies “cultural tech-nologies of rule” as those processes that secure colonial domination by means other than coercion.59 If “French of French stock” failed to be institutionalized in 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 some French citizens could be of “French stock,” it is because other French citizens were considered “immigrants.” A French Muslim of Algerian origin, as official denominations aimed to contrast with those of European stock, is classified as an “immigrant,” defined as “a person born foreigner abroad,” when obviously the

55. Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia,” 133.56. Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration: 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 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.

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French Muslim Algerians were born French nationals in French departments, and forced 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 born in France of two parents themselves born in France.”

The institutionalization of the category “immigrant” succeeds where gov-ernmental politics failed: it cancels the postcolonial application of the jus soli provision of French citizenship law according to which Algerian citizens born in French Algeria procreate, in the postcolonial metropole, French citizens by birth. Once again, we are much beyond the “occlusion of knowledge” that Stoler suggests and, for more than ten years, in an active production of knowledge that paves the way for a new postcolonial historiography that has little resemblance to a postcolonial critique. The “politics of autochthony” underlying such postcolo-nial revisionism is foremost transnational and cannot be discarded by denounc-ing bottom- up identity politics or by focusing only on the passage from empire to nation- state (e.g., Bayart).60 Much to the contrary: in fact, the new divide of “immigrant” and “French of French stock” was made possible by the collective granting of a European citizenship that excluded (and created) the so- called third- country nationals. The declassification of former European immigrants and their reclassification as European citizens fosters the link between “non- European” and “immigrant” in France as well as in the other EU member states.

Stoler raises a fundamental question when she asks whether the visibility of the term postcolonial indicates that it is safe for consumption. This novel state- led postcolonial politics of identity grounds and revives the pervading colonial imaginary, and not the other way around. The oppositions that informed French antidiscrimination policies — “French of French stock” and “immigrants of Alge-rian origin” or “French youth” and “youth of Algerian origin” — are not, as the French anthropologist Didier Fassin suggests, “unfortunate” wordings.61 As Stoler points out, one cannot dissociate the French state from racism. It is not a semantic issue: these categories are pivotal because they proceed through ascription. If the term postcolonial can be deployed safely today, it is because it helps position the French state as the legitimate antiracist actor and the mediator among different ethnic 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, “L’invention française de la discrimination,” Revue française de science poli-

tique 52 (2002): 406.

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62. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colo-nial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 206, 282.

63. For instance, see such use of “French of French stock” in Laurent Dubois, “La République Métissée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,” Cultural Studies 14 (2000): 15 – 34. On the European Union, see Enrica Rigo, “Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflec-tions on the Post- colonial Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement,” Citizenship Stud-ies 9 (2005): 3 – 22.

from state politics of identification in the colonial context, aptly applies to the metropole.62 The French postcolonial politics of identity is one of identification and differentiation of the legitimate and the illegitimate in the national order of things, which paved the way for today’s Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co- Development. In this context, reclaiming the term natives (indigènes) cannot simply be reduced to a misreading and simplification of the legacy of the colonial situation without taking note of the state work of naming and accounting. Indeed, the statistical category of “immigrants” entails that their French- born children are classified as “children of immigrants.” It is never too late to call on postcolonial studies to challenge a historical narrative in which “French of French stock” and opposite categories appear uncritically indis-pensable even to those positioning themselves within the postcolonial conversa-tion and to explore the EU’s “taxonomic states” and the impact they have much beyond the EU’s formal borders.63