Racial Capitalism in French and Francophone Studies

Contributors

The first volume to assess French Cultural Studies in the United States, this multi-author collection includes contributions by some of the major scholarly figures in French and Francophone Studies, including Réda Bensmaïa, Ross Chambers, Lawrence Kritzman, Françoise Lionnet, and Mireille Rosello. It also features exciting work by emerging scholars. A few previously published articles that were central in conceptualizing crucial questions in French and Francophone Studies are reprinted in this collection (Kritzman, Lionnet). The volume as a whole is of the highest quality. The book successfully engages some of the major current issues and points of contention in the field, namely the place of literature vs. Cultural Studies and theory in French Studies curricula in the U.S., the passage from elite studies to an inclusion of marginalized voices, and broader issues concerning the ethical representation of "others." French Cultural Studies highlights the renewal that Cultural Studies has brought to French Studies, as well as the "contributions French theory can make to Cultural Studies" (6).

The first volume to assess French Cultural Studies in the United States, this multi-author collection includes contributions by some of the major scholarly figures in French and Francophone Studies, including Réda Bensmaïa, Ross Chambers, Lawrence Kritzman, Françoise Lionnet, and Mireille Rosello. It also features exciting work by emerging scholars. A few previously published articles that were central in conceptualizing crucial questions in French and Francophone Studies are reprinted in this collection (Kritzman, Lionnet). The volume as a whole is of the highest quality. The book successfully engages some of the major current issues and points of contention in the field, namely the place of literature vs. Cultural Studies and theory in French Studies curricula in the U.S., the passage from elite studies to an inclusion of marginalized voices, and broader issues concerning the ethical representation of "others." French Cultural Studies highlights the renewal that Cultural Studies has brought to French Studies, as well as the "contributions French theory can make to Cultural Studies" (6).

ABSTRACTThis essay takes the call of the 2015 Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century French (and Francophone) (Literary) Studies Colloquium to “trace the evolution of French and Francophone Literary Studies” quite literally in that it compares a sampling of programs over the colloquium's thirty-two-year history in order to analyze some of the signs of change in the field over this period. While the Colloquium is only one gauge of the multiple mutations that have occurred in French Studies over the last three decades, a reading of the shifts in the texts, topics, artists, geographical regions, and critical approaches treated at it, as well as in the types of scholars who have participated in it, can certainly tell us something about the ways in which the meaning of the evolving signifier “Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century French (and Francophone) (Literary) Studies” has changed over time.

Living in the United States’ largest binational city, El Paso, Texas with a population that is 80% Hispanic, I wanted to create a course grounded in French studies but that would also make connections with the Spanish colonial heritage of the Southern hemisphere. Having taken graduate seminars in Francophonie, my experience of French and Francophone Studies in the American Academy tended to focus on the Metropole and its former French colonies, with particular attention on the Maghreb, West Africa, followed by Canada and the Caribbean to a lesser extent. In a geographically unique city straddling two nations and two distinct cultures, I asked: how could I make French more relevant to my students and how might we rethink French Studies? What I discovered is that France’s colonial aspirations and influence permeated Central and South America even beyond France’s disastrous incursion into Mexico in the 1860s. As I researched and investigated French involvement south of the Rio Grande, I discovered various ways in which France informed cultural life not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America. Thus, “The Making of the Other Americas” expands the traditional limits of French Studies in the United States. Instead of discussing a Francophone world often based on imperial conquest and colonization, we consider Francospheres that are based on cultural and intellectual contribution and collaboration. The second goal of this course is to encourage closer consideration of the intertwined histories of France and Latin America as well as to supplement Franco-American history beyond the American Revolution, French and Indian War, and the Louisiana Purchase. Finally, this essay discusses strategies and activities that have been successful taking students through the Francosphere in Latin America and shows the reader that perhaps no other European country had such widespread influence in the making of the Americas––from Montreal to Buenos Aires.

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. By William J. Maxwell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 272 pages. $52.00 (cloth). $18.50 (paper). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. By Cedric J. Robinson, with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. London: Zed Press, 1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. $24.95 (paper). UNTIL THE 1990S, SCHOLARS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AN UNCOMPLICATED narrative of black Marxist history. Conventional wisdom held that the relationship between communism and black struggle was inherently corrupt. Critics of African American cultural arts frequently portrayed the affiliation between "white communists" and black intellectuals as a kind of reenactment of the colonizer-colonized encounter, where black creative workers were expected to submit to a racist agenda. But, in 1989 Cary Nelson's inclusive Repression and Recovery suggested that in modernist period literary study such an account was fraught with difficulty. 1 Looking at the 1930s, Barbara Foley's chapter on "Race, Class, and the 'Negro Question'" in her Radical Representations a few years later challenged decades of received wisdom. 2 The genealogy of the reading, which assumes that blacks were expected to adopt an inferior status in communism, is traceable to historians and critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The views of such scholars exhibited a popular [End Page 367] separatist narrative that reflected the ideology of U.S. black cultural nationalism. 3 In recent years scholars of the Black Renaissance and Great Depression, early to mid-century radicalism and Marxism, black Atlantic studies, and whiteness studies have seen the publication of several valuable recovery projects. Along with Foley, James A. Miller, in Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon's Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, has challenged prevailing views of black-white radical affiliation. 4 George Hutchinson's monumental accomplishment The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, though not attentive to radical commitment, has also confronted predominant notions of the color line between the wars, contending that the portrayal of a division between blacks and whites working in the cultural arts is inconsistent with the material evidence. 5 Now two distinguished publications have arrived, one a persuasively sustained re-visioning of black and white Marxism in the U.S., the other a reprint of an invaluable study of black Marxist history and theory. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars offers a vital reassessment of black American radicalism and proletarianism in the early decades of the twentieth century. And the University of North Carolina Press's reissue of Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition finally makes accessible this early 1980s vision of the origins of Marxist activism and black liberation struggle. Black Marxism is divided into three parts: the history of European capitalism and radicalism, the origins of black radicalism, and black radicalism's relationship to Marxism. The first section examines European socio-economic history, and its chief purpose is to analyze how "racial capitalism" developed. Now a familiar theoretical position, Robinson argues that the rise of industrial capitalism was built on a culture of racial construction. Emergent labor classes and ethnic minorities could be assembled through national identity formations--pitted against one another--to serve the dominant ideology. The Irish peasants' relocation to England during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, for example, occasioned the opportunity for "an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two 'races'": English and Irish (41). Thus "race" as a strategic mechanism for social control led to the immanence of "racialism" in Western civilization. Racialism ordered "the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of [End Page 368] these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences" (66). Radicalism then rose in Europe as a revolt against capitalism but also as a resistance to nationalism, racialism, and racial capitalism. Black Marxism's inquiry into the constructedness of...

Since it was first announced, the purpose of this special issue of the French Review has been to bring together a wide range of viewpoints on the current state and future prospects of French and Francophone studies in the United States. I am glad to report that, no doubt due to the importance of its topic, this issue elicited an exceptionally large number of submissions. This high rate of interest and participation is an encouraging sign for our profession, and an indication of the levels of energy and creativity among our colleagues. I would first like to thank the team at the Service de coopération et d’action culturelle (SCAC), Ambassade de France aux États-Unis, who produced the introductory article, “Le français aux États-Unis: une priorité de l’Ambassade.” I would especially like to thank JeanClaude Duthion, Attaché de coopération éducative, who coordinated and finalized this article, which provides a detailed overview of the various programs, supported by the SCAC, that are designed to promote and enhance the teaching and learning of French in the United States. The SCAC, I should add, generously provided a $2,000 subsidy for this special issue. The “Que faire?” rubric includes ten articles that reflect a wide variety of perspectives on the future of French and Francophone studies in the United States. The “Témoignages” rubric, with seven shorter articles, was designed to encourage participation by colleagues who do not usually publish in the French Review. I am particularly thankful to all those who submitted to this rubric. On this topic as on others, it is important that French teachers at all levels make their voices heard. I will not attempt to summarize or categorize the eighteen articles in this special issue. Each one of them provides stimulating, challenging, and sometimes controversial reading. I will simply point out that, in spite of the significant challenges, budgetary and otherwise, to our field and to the Humanities in general, what most of these articles clearly show is that many programs, practices, and policies do work, that they can be used to maintain and even expand French and Francophone studies in the United States. Among these successful initiatives , in no particular order: dual-degree programs that integrate language-learning with a professional or technical curricular track; encouraging more heritage speakers of Spanish to study and excel in French; enhancing linguistic and cultural studies through service-learning; collaborative efforts between high school teachers and university professors that stimulate interest in French and ultimately increase the number of majors. Some of the viewpoints and suggestions in this issue, far from being met with a wide consensus, will instead lead to debates—and that is as it should be. As was previously announced , readers will have the opportunity to respond to the ideas presented in this special issue. This exceptional “Réponses” rubric, designed for shorter texts, will be published in Vol. 87.3. For the submission deadline and other details, please see the Announcements page (1311). Due to the importance of this special issue’s topic for our profession, it is my hope that the articles published here will lead to wider discussions. Readers are also reminded that the Announcements page includes the call for articles for our 2014 special issue, which will be published in commemoration of the centennial of the First World War, and which will be devoted to the multiple effects and consequences of the 1069 From the Editor’s Desk conflict on French and Francophone literature and culture. Scholars working in numerous fields are encouraged to submit articles: literature, film, bandes dessinées, cultural studies, historical issues. It has been a pleasure to participate in the development of this final issue of Volume 86 of the French Review. In closing, I would like to thank the Assistant Editors of this special issue, Joyce Beckwith (Wilmington High School), John Greene (University of Louisville), and Marie-Christine Koop (University of North Texas), who, with great dedication and professionalism , successfully dealt with a heavy workload and with very tight deadlines. Edward Ousselin, Editor in Chief 1070 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 ...

Our aim in this introduction is to position all the articles that comprise this special issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies within a framework of mobility while highlighting how they each, individually, test and (beyond) certain frames. We are also writing in response to the annual conference of the Australian Society for French Studies, which co-convened in 2015 and at which the articles included here were presented.1 As began writing, as individuals working in collaboration, the tension between our singular and collective identities became visibly metonymic of the work that is generated in, and generates, French Studies. Clearly, one ofus has a deeper understanding ofthe mobilities at play in Francophone Studies; one of us is more interested in the evolution of our disciplinarity, as French lecturers, in light of student mobility and flexible modes of delivery; and one of us cannot in any direction without seeing Baudelaire. And yet in 2015 came together, as every year, with our colleagues from Australia and around the world with a clear sense of what it means - to all of us, despite the nuances of our institutional specificities - to work in French Studies. Thus, decided to remove our individual Is here, however transparent they may be, in order to write this introduction not so much from the perspective of a royal, or even a republican, we but rather from that of the first person mobile.In 2003 HarperCollins published an omnibus edition of three Hercule Poirot novels: The Murder on the Links, The Mystery of the Blue Train and Death in the Clouds. The title given to this marketing was Poirot: The French Collection. The move here is a curious mix of opening out and closing down. Brought together, the three novels take on a stronger, more overt Frenchness, as if this is how best to read them, perhaps at the expense of what might consider other modes of being. And at the same time readers are also called on to think less of the murders than of their setting, which is one (or in fact never just one) of movement - physical, across borders, and linguistic. Poirot speaks in French and at times he is said to interpret, both of which he manages while the text remains in English; while on other occasions (notably in The Murder on the Links) English appears to be the lingua franca of all characters, French, English and Belgian, but it seems (even in the mouths of the English themselves) almost deliberately stilted. All types of links are promoted, then, and murdered by Agatha Christie. The question for French Studies that arises out of this is one of disciplinary setting. For HarperCollins, Poirot's home is the one that he has made for himself, in London: It seems Hercule Poirot can never escape murder. Crimes, motives and killers followed him across the Orient and now they have found him again - but this time much closer to home.2Arguably, the setting of a crime novel is as important, or perhaps more important, than the crimes on which it is (ostensibly) predicated.3 Place is, however, less set (rigidly defined) than one might think: settings are traversed in various modes of transport (Holmes liked a cab, Poirot a taxi and often, especially in and across France, a train, although more recently Sophie Hannah has him take a bus,4 and PIs tend to prefer their car). Readers may well want to settle back with a good book; the text, for its part, is unsettled, and unsettles. Poirot moves to and from home, as if home is in fact a place that inspires motion. We in French Studies might think of Fred Vargas's Commissaire Adamsberg novels, in which Paris is point of departure and return, key to the investigation and solution while only at times the scene of the crime. But why should in French Studies think of and about Vargas rather than Christie? Does her Frenchness make us more at home in our study of her novels? At the 23rd annual conference of the Australian Society for French Studies,5 the theme, French Studies on the Move, engendered debate about French Studies identity, which was described as somehow essentially interdisciplinary. …

Roger Célestin is an associate professor of French and Comparative Literature and co-chair of French Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on Montaigne, Flaubert, Tournier, travel literature, and detective fiction and is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and is co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980-2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2002). Eliane DalMolin is a professor of French and co-chair of French Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980-2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2002). Johann Sadock's publications include articles on the cinema of Kassovitz (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites), Israel Zangwill (Paragraphes), Francophone Jewish writers in Quebec such as Naïm Kattan and Victor Teboul (Paragraphes), the collective memory of Jews from Algeria in relation to French national history (French Contemporary Civilization), Arab and French representations in contemporary Sephardic literature (in Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, University of Nebraska Press). He has also been published in L'infini (Gallimard). He has developed a Web project and made a documentary on young people from minority backgrounds in France.

Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars’ historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology.

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue duree framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.

From the 1947–8 Nakba to the 2023–4 Gaza genocide, the history of Palestine appears to be stuck in a vicious circle of violence from which escape seems increasingly elusive. This leads one to ask, can one ever escape the Zionist circle? The work of Cedric Robinson provides a potential path forward. Since his death in 2016, Robinson’s name has become synonymous with the study of racial capitalism. But while racial capitalism was the background of his work, his chief concern was the Black Radical Tradition. Unlike racial capitalism, this concept has remained under-theorised, but without thoroughly accounting for it, our understanding of racial capitalism remains incomplete at best, misguided at worst. In this article, I turn our attention to the Black Radical Tradition and attempt to define it. As Robinson argued, the Black Radical Tradition is not simply derivative of racial capitalism; it actually precedes it and subverts it. Returning to Palestine, I show how Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition can contribute to our understanding of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and I suggest that at least in some sense, the Palestinians have actually been escaping the Zionist circle all along.

What do we talk about when we talk about French and Francophone Studies? If we could approach French Studies as a Martian anthropologist seeking to understand its rationale but ignorant of its hist...

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlexandre DuboisAlexandre Dubois holds a Ph.D. in French and Francophone Studies from the University of Minnesota. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Regis University. His work is being published in journals such as French Studies, Romance Notes, Parade Sauvage, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, among others.