Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment

Abstract

Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment Christy Pichichero (bio) For specialists of the eighteenth century, teaching the history of race is a necessary dimension of our practice. We are experts of the age when the modern conception of race coalesced through (and in service of) enterprises of global economic and military power that were fueled by enslavement, colonization, exploitation, and genocide of peoples designated as other. Antiracist protests of 2020 have brought urgency to examining this history in our classrooms. Yet as I have written elsewhere, there remains extraordinary resistance to and controversy surrounding the concept of race and its study, especially in the French context.1 For scholar-pedagogues who take up the challenge of teaching race in the eighteenth century, it is essential to work together to share resources for building curricula, methods, courage, and creativity that will foster deep inquiry and learning for students and professors alike. It is in this spirit that I will discuss—though not prescribe—some of my own experiments in teaching race in the eighteenth-century French empire through the lenses of diversity, decolonization, multiculturalism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). While certain scholars object to the use of CRT, deeming it an inapplicable or unwelcome American import into the study of French texts and cultural phenomena, I strongly disagree with this rigid appraisal. CRT not only attends to the historical period in question, but can illuminate structural forms of discrimination that are evident in artistic, social, economic, and political life in the first French empire. It is [End Page 137] my hope that sharing these approaches will serve as a point of departure that encourages others to tap into these resources as well as their own innovative minds to open up novel and productive avenues for teaching race in the eighteenth-century in the twenty-first century classroom. The notions and praxes of diversity and decolonization have become central frameworks for teaching race. The former embraces compositional and epistemic multiplicity by incorporating works from authors of different identities, geographies, and genres. In this regard, there is a wealth of sources in French and in translation with which to engage. Scholarship abounds on women authors, and collections of documents and articles regarding gender, homosexuality, Jewish history, and race in early modern France offer excellent sources for undergraduate and introductory graduate study.2 While we have not yet discovered an individual like Olaudah Equiano in the French imperial setting, a vast array of documents from Saint-Domingue—for example, political pamphlets written by free colored planter Julien Raymond in favor of free-colored rights and, of course, Toussaint Louverture's writings—lead to many productive discussions about race, politics, gender, and sexuality, in addition to colony-metropole dynamics in terms of laws, information, power, and economics. Assembling interdisciplinary reading lists that include and interrogate the power structures behind archival sources, many of which are available online, is critical for bringing minoritized voices and experiences into courses on the French Enlightenment. As these and related sources convey, the era of the first French empire and, specifically, the eighteenth century was not solely a period of nascent white supremacy and specious universalism based upon blind, tacit, or purposeful white (Christian, heterosexual, socially elite) male privilege. It was also a period in which issues of social difference and justice began to take shape and profound questions about society started to emerge. Can we all live together? Should we all live together? If so, how? In order to explore the implications of this diversity and burgeoning social awareness, I have turned to the idea of multiculturalism and developed a course on the multicultural French Enlightenment. Unsurprisingly, one must eschew a commodifying, superficial, or passive view of multiculturalism. Instead, I deploy the term as indicating an active process of seeking to understand and respond to perceived differences.3 Writers of the French Enlightenment and Atlantic Revolutions grappled with a number of geographies and social categories, including gender, social class, religion, race, and, to some extent, sexuality (as a set of practices, as opposed to an identity). If institutions of the Bourbon monarchy had little room or motivation regarding social change, the French and Haitian Revolutions offered opportunities...