The Black Paris project: the production and reception of a counter-hegemonic tourism narrative in postcolonial Paris

Abstract

ABSTRACTTourism in Paris embodies the contradictions of contemporary France, which struggles to think critically about its own postcolonial era. The invisibilization of colonial and anticolonial traces in the production of Parisian tourism narratives, the heightened otherness of Black communities in the tourist offer and the complex institutional heritagization of the colonial past illustrate the challenges in thinking about racial difference. By articulating two bodies of work, one dealing with racialization processes in French society, and the other with the geography and anthropology of tourism, this article examines the modalities in which a counter-hegemonic narrative of Parisian and French identity is produced and received based on the analysis of a tourism project, Le Paris Noir, or Black Paris. The article casts light on the symbolic violence that occurs through the internalization of the invisibilization of Black geographies and the challenges in breaking with France's powerful assimilationist legacy among racialized minorities. The Black Paris project serves as a laboratory to observe the effects of the racial denial mechanisms occurring in French society, and the resistance to them, taking the form of a decolonial praxis. The article emphasizes the role of social technologies in shaping the relational narrative of a transatlantic Blackness.