Resisting Victimhood in Corsica

Abstract

In recent years, the French media have increasingly focused on the incidence of racism against Franco‐Maghrebians in Corsica. On an island which has long been the locus of a minority nationalism organized on an anti‐colonial frame of reference, this new problematic challenges and unsettles fixed binaries of victim/perpetrator, powerful/powerless, majority/minority. While for some, this new development reveals the “underlying xenophobia” of Corsican nationalism, for others, this is just the latest episode in France’s age‐old “defamatory misrepresentation” of the island. Rather than attempt to adjudicate this debate, the article unpicks its discursive regularities. At stake in these complex politics of victimhood are issues of the representative (which instances are typical?) and the commensurable (which comparisons are acceptable?)—both of which are central also to anthropological accounts of victimhood. As a result, this case study raises some issues concerning anthropological comparison.