The Racial Unconsciousness of the Parisian Public Theatre: Borders and Demotions in Francophone Contemporary Drama

Abstract

This article analyses the impact of France’s colonial heritage on French and Parisian public theatre. Theatrical programming corresponds to an imaginary still structured by a cultural and social construction of race that reflects the past of the “Grande Nation.” Three different plays by Ivorian dramatist Koffi Kwahulé are examined, each depicting situations of demotion experienced by French citizens of foreign origin. I argue that the way French public theatre is structured and administered today mirrors, to a certain extent, real situations of tension reflecting the disparities between the “centres” (symbols of power and homogeneity) and the “peripheries” (socio-economic and cultural spaces of relegation structured by a racial imaginary). I also analyse the concept of the border as a geographic, economic, and sociocultural paradigm, allowing us to understand, in the French and francophone contexts, what unites and divides – or more accurately, how francophone writers and French writers of foreign origin can still be condemned in the twenty-first century to a sort of exile from metropolitan Paris, the capital of a Jacobin state.