Afrofeminist Microhistories and the Making of Modern Black French Identities

Abstract

This article explores recent works by French Afrofeminists that interrogate notions of Frenchness and colorblindness through staking claims to Black diasporic identity. Examining Audrey Celestine's Une famille française (Paris, Éditions Textuel, 2018) and Maboula Soumahoro’s Le Triangle et l’Hexagone (Paris, La Découverte, 2020) in relation to notions of intersectionality, diaspora, and the “Third Space,” the article reveals how these writers construe Black identity formation in the context of modern France through collective family memory and through conceptualizing both womanhood and race in the geographic prism of the French empire, past and present. Celestine’s and Soumahoro’s interwoven narrative style permits them tell intimate stories of family and personal identity while exploring broader phenomena of colonialism, empire, and systemic intersectional racial, gender, and religious discrimination. Ultimately, these writers work to draw the contours of modern Black French identity and to assert it as an essential part of French history and society that neither claims to systemic universalism nor colorblind rhetoric officially promulgated by the state can erase.