Expanding the narrow script of what it means to be Parisian, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art made by Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.

In the global imagination, Paris is the city's glamorous center, ignoring the Muslim residents in its outskirts except in moments of spectacular crisis such as terrorist attacks or riots. But colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son. Spanning the decades from the post–World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital—romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.

This landmark collection by an international group of scholars and public intellectuals represents a major reassessment of French colonial culture and how it continues to inform thinking about history, memory, and identity. This reexamination of French colonial culture, provides the basis for a revised understanding of its cultural, political, and social legacy and its lasting impact on postcolonial immigration, the treatment of ethnic minorities, and national identity.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France.

Decolonizing the Republic is a conscientious discussion of the African diaspora in Paris in the post–World War II period. This book is the first to examine the intersection of black activism and the migration of Caribbeans and Africans to Paris during this era and, as Patrick Manning notes in the foreword, successfully shows how “black Parisians—in their daily labors, weekend celebrations, and periodic protests—opened the way to ‘decolonizing the Republic,’ advancing the respect for their rights as citizens.” Contrasted to earlier works focusing on the black intellectual elite, Decolonizing the Republic maps the formation of a working-class black France. Readers will better comprehend how those peoples of African descent who settled in France and fought to improve their socioeconomic conditions changed the French perception of Caribbean and African identity, laying the foundation for contemporary black activists to deploy a new politics of social inclusion across the demographics of race, class, gender, and nationality. This book complicates conventional understandings of decolonization, and in doing so opens a new and much-needed chapter in the history of the black Atlantic.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Debates about the legacy of colonialism in France are not new, but they have taken on new urgency in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Responding to acts of religious and racial violence in 2005, 2010, and 2015 and beyond, the essays in this volume pit French ideals against government-sponsored revisionist decrees that have exacerbated tensions, complicated the process of establishing and recording national memory, and triggered divisive debates on what it means to identify as French. As they document the checkered legacy of French colonialism, the contributors raise questions about France and the contemporary role of Islam, the banlieues, immigration, race, history, pedagogy, and the future of the Republic. This innovative volume reconsiders the cultural, economic, political, and social realities facing global French citizens today and includes contributions by Achille Mbembe, Benjamin Stora, Françoise Vergès, Alec Hargreaves, Elsa Dorlin, and Alain Mabanckou, among others.

In The Postcolonial Orient, Vasant Kaiwar presents a far-reaching analysis of the political, economic, and ideological cross-currents that have shaped and informed postcolonial studies preceding and following the 1989 moment of world history. The valences of the ‘post’ in postcolonialism are unfolded via some key historical-political postcolonial texts showing, inter alia, that they are replete with elements of Romantic Orientalism and the Oriental Renaissance. Kaiwar mobilises a critical body of classical and contemporary Marxism to demonstrate that far richer understandings of ‘Europe’ not to mention ‘colonialism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘difference’ are possible than with a postcolonialism captive to phenomenological-existentialism and post-structuralism, concluding that a narrative so enriched is indispensable for a transformative non-Eurocentric internationalism.

Addresses the development since the 1950s of a new type of Francophone African novel created by first-generation African authors living in France. This book examines how these authors, men and women, part from mainstream African literature by exploring more personal avenues while retaining a shared interest in the community of African emigrants.

In light of the discrepancy between Britain's and France's postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade after independence, this book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationship during the transfer of power and the early years of independence (1958-1966). It focuses on West Africa, and more specificially the newly independent states of Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire, which rapidly evolved into key players in the postcolonial struggle for Africa. Based on research in fourteen archives in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Postcolonial Security comparatively investigates the establishment of formal defence relations, the disintegration of the Anglo-Nigerian 'special relationship' and the Franco-Ivorian 'neo-colonial collusion', the provision of British and French military assistance to their former colonies and the competition they faced from West Germany and Israel respectively, and the Anglo-American partnership in Nigeria and the Franco-American rivalry in Côte d'Ivoire. It demonstrates that whereas Britain was rapidly and increasingly pushed out of and replaced in the Nigerian security sector by western competitors, France succeeded in retaining its military foothold and pre-eminence in Côte d'Ivoire. Informed by postcolonial approaches, Postcolonial Security argues that while London's Cold War blinkers and Paris's neo-imperial agenda were part of the equation, the postcolonial security relationship was ultimately determined by the Nigerian and Ivorian elites, which in turn responded to their local and regional circumstances against the background of the Cold War in Africa.