‘History takes its time…’: anti-racist temporalities and historical memory cultures in France, c. 1980–1998

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historical memory cultures have played a crucial role in French anti-racist activism. Anti-racist movements such as the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA) and the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) invoked historical memories of interwar antisemitism, the Holocaust and colonial violence in their fight against racism in the 1980s and 1990s. The content and meaning of these memory cultures underpinned late twentieth-century anti-racism, furnishing activism with a profoundly didactic dimension which explicitly connected the racisms of the past to the racisms of the present. Anti-racist print media – from the LICRA’s monthly newspaper, Le Droit de Vivre, and the MRAP’s publications, Droit et Liberté and Différences – provided important discursive spaces within which these diverse historical memory cultures could be identified, articulated and contested. This in turn created a space for the construction of anti-racist temporalities. The legacies of past antisemitism and Islamophobia ensured that the anti-racist activism of the LICRA and MRAP, in different ways, possessed an intensely temporal dimension. This article considers how anti-racist historical memory cultures were articulated in print media in response to events such as the rue Copernic bombing of October 1980 and the Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots of August 1992. Furthermore, the article will explore how divergent Holocaust and colonial memory cultures began to encounter each other on a more frequent basis in the pages of anti-racist publications during the mid-1990s, reflecting national developments in the memorialization of the Holocaust and (albeit to a lesser extent) France’s colonial past. The relationship between time and anti-racist activism was an intimate one and historical memory played a key mediating role in anti-racist responses to contemporary racism. By focusing primarily on the print media of the LICRA and the MRAP, this article demonstrates how both organizations and key figures such as Jean Pierre-Bloch and Mouloud Aounit viewed contemporary racism through the lens of historical memory, thus demonstrating an intimate relationship between late twentieth-century anti-racist activism in France and historical time.