Abstract
In Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, Crystal Marie Fleming analyzes racial identity among French citizens from the overseas departments, primarily the French Antillean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Fleming focuses on French slave history, a largely silenced chapter of the national collective memory, to advance scholarship on racism, and particularly anti-blackness, in France.
The premise for Resurrecting Slavery occurred in 1998, when France held a series of official commemorative events to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. These commemorations initiated a flurry of awareness-raising campaigns in the form of activist-led public events and media productions in the decade following; it was during this ideal moment that Fleming conducted her fieldwork. Presenting ethnographic research and interviews with both commemoration activists and everyday French Antilleans, Resurrecting Slavery deeply engages French racial construction and slave legacies as they are articulated in elite discourse and diffused across a French minority population. Offering a tight analysis from start to finish, Fleming’s examination of French historical revisionism and national reckoning draws from both theoretical paradigms and respondents’ sentiments to conclude with a call for antiracist pedagogical outreach.
Fleming provides an insightful dialogue with scholarship on race, notably critical race theory, and the study of collective memory. After comprehensively reviewing studies that evidence anti-blackness, she proceeds to engage the reader with rich, extensive ethnographic vignettes and powerful assessments of the French racial situation, such as when activist Françoise Vergès considers the meaning of French abolition for a slave descendant (p. 86), or when activist Serge Romana dismantles the hypocrisy of the French communitarian ethos (p. 124). Particularly poignant are the moments of cognitive dissonance in which her respondents clearly identify experiences of racialization and racism in France yet are compelled to place these experiences within a normative, anticommunitarian discourse; this is brilliantly illustrated in the exchange between audience members and speakers following the screening of The Slaves’ March (pp. 111–112).
Resurrecting Slavery rejects the dominant academic discourse of “cultural racism” in France, which Fleming defines as the belief that “members of minority groups are stigmatized as ‘unassimilable’ due to their perceived cultural differences vis-à-vis the majority population” (p. 33). As an alternative, she composes a three-fold framework for French racism: anti-racialism, asymmetric racialization, and anticommunitarianism. Similar to color-blind ideology, Fleming defines French anti-racialism as the denial of “the biological existence of race and the social reality of racialization”; asymmetric racialization as the racialization of minorities but not also the white majority population; and anticommunitarianism as “the idea that French people should not emphasize their group membership in civil society—that they should subordinate their collective identities to the French national identity” (pp. 37–38).
This framework accurately describes the French racial context. However, there is nothing particularly French about asymmetric racialization; rendering privilege invisible is endemic to how power operates generally. And to advocate for the cultural racism perspective—which is not so much that these populations are deemed unassimilable as that they are compelled to assimilate—I would argue that anti-racialism and anticommunitarianism are inseparable from the nativist chauvinism of French cultural racism. Put differently, the notion that cultural difference is a deficiency of national belonging subordinates minority group identities to a white European status quo—while simultaneously legitimizing discrimination against the former by denying the biological or social dimensions of race and racialization. Related, by conflating the slave and colonial experience (as I elucidate below), Fleming misses how the “civilizing mission,” with its stated goal of assimilating colonized peoples into French social, cultural, economic, and political norms, was a key ideological precursor to contemporary French cultural racism.
As a basic definitional matter, it would have been helpful if Fleming had explained to her American readership the nuances of French understandings of “black” well prior to her ethnographic interventions, perhaps in a fashion similar to the way she explains her own use of terms in endnote five to the Introduction (p. 245). Indeed, it is erroneous to assume that blackness means the same thing across national contexts, especially given the particularity of U.S. hypodescent—a point Fleming belatedly acknowledges with respect to Antillean reactions against the Négritude movement in favor of Creolité and Antillanité (p. 77).
Within Resurrecting Slavery’s strongest contribution lies its greatest flaw: by emphasizing slavery, Fleming’s analysis excludes the experience of a substantial portion of France’s African-descended—that is to say, from formerly enslaved and colonized—populations. At times Fleming oscillates between referencing slavery only, slavery and colonialism, or “colonial slavery,” a term she leaves undefined. Only in her closing pages does she state that “French Caribbeans do not ‘speak for’ all French blacks,” thus conceding the likelihood that “French people from former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa view these issues quite differently” (p. 219).
This is not simply a limitation, as she puts it there. It is in fact core to the book’s argument: African-descended French populations emerged out of the multiple histories of slavery and colonialism. Fleming posits as her major theoretical contribution the idea of “racial temporality,” or, “making claims about the content of the racial past, present, and future, as well as the relationship among racial categories, relations, and processes in these different time periods” (p. 16, emphasis in original). One cannot then collapse distinct experiences of racial domination under a singular rubric of a slave legacy. Her later point about path-dependent, “divergent racial temporalities” (p. 216) would in fact have provided a strong theoretical foundation to entertain such differences.
What results is a sometimes confusing reading of Fleming’s findings, whereby what she poses as a conflict among a shared but contested group identity is in fact a divergence of real historical experiences. For example, she problematizes her respondents’ treatment of the Antilles as an “imaginative anchor to bring meaning to French Atlantic slavery,” while continental Africans are historicized, rather than viewed as “contemporary populations” of this legacy (p. 63). Later, she appears perplexed that unlike those from “overseas France” who are “broadly portrayed as the primary community of memory concerned with slavery . . . French of sub-Saharan African origin are not always explicitly linked to commemorative discourse” (pp. 217–218; see also concluding remarks, pp. 126–127). But why would they be? Slaves were not their ancestors.
Racial categories are overwhelmingly taboo in French political and social scientific discourse. This generates a hostile environment for race scholars—and makes Resurrecting Slavery a most welcome contribution to the field. The weakness of the book perhaps reflects an extrapolation of the American slave experience, and thereby racial construction, onto a more varied historical context. In France, there are significant distinctions between the histories of French racial domination among French Caribbean and sub-Saharan African populations, with real consequences for how they situate themselves in the national imaginary. Moreover, for both groups—unlike for African Americans—there is a “homeland,” either on islands where they constitute a majority population, or on the African continent itself. This changes the stakes of what it means to belong to a greater Africa diaspora.
Resurrecting Slavery superbly examines the slave legacy of overseas French populations and in doing so makes an important contribution to an understudied dimension of French race scholarship. But one must bound this contribution so as not to diminish the totality of the African-descended experience in France.