Redemptive politics: racial reasoning in contemporary France

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe recent ‘postcolonial turn’ in France, and the concomitant concern for various forms of identity politics that accompany it, signal a shift of considerable importance within a social order that has historically been built on an ideal of transcending difference. Much of this movement is concentrated in and on the troubled French suburbs that, for the past two decades, have become both the focus and source of considerable anxiety about the state of French society generally and the republican social contract in particular. In this article, Epstein focuses on the paradigms of American racial history and multicultural approaches to difference that constitute a part of this debate. These rhetorical practices allow a discursive space from which to consider racial matters that are otherwise difficult to address in France, at the same time that they position race, in a marked departure from the French republican ideal, as a meaningful basis from which to think through problems of social justice. These phenomena need to be considered within the context of a rapidly shifting global economy that has diffused the potential for social integration promised by the republican social contract, and reflect efforts to locate readily identifiable sources of disenfranchisement when the far less visible reasons for lack of opportunity have moved off-shore.