Reading is bread for Sugarcane, and trust me-we like to eat. This month we are reading the book Black France/France Noir.In Black France / France Noire, scholars, activists, and novelists from France and the United States address the untenable paradox at the heart of French society. France’s constitutional and legal discourses do not recognize race as a meaningful category. Yet the lived realities of race and racism are ever-present in the nation’s supposedly race-blind society. The vaunted universalist principles of the French Republic are far from realized. Any claim of color-blindness is belied by experiences of anti-black racism, which render blackness a real and consequential historical, social, and political formation. Contributors to this collection of essays demonstrate that blackness in France is less an identity than a response to and rejection of anti-black racism. Black France / France Noire is a distinctive and important contribution to the increasingly public debates on diversity, race, racialization, and multicultural intolerance in French society and beyond. Black France/France Noir contains literary contribution by Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Allison Blakely, Jennifer Anne Boittin, Marcus Bruce, Fred Constant, Mamadou Diouf, Arlette Frund, Michel Giraud, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Trica Danielle Keaton, Jake Lamar, Patrick Lozès, Alain Mabanckou, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall, Christiane Taubira, Dominic Thomas, Gary Wilder. Written by Trica Danielle Keaton is Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion and a coeditor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora.
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French and of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women and Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, also published by Duke University Press.
Tyler Stovall is Professor of French history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and a coeditor of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, also published by Duke University Press. Purchase your copy here .
