Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (review)

In this work Dominic Thomas examines the black “experience” in France—how life in France and in French has been central to the global phenomenon of black cultural identity from colonization through the mass migrations of the postcolonial world. While France (most notably Paris) has arguably helped define blackness, how have blacks influenced definitions of Frenchness? In the context of the 2007 French presidential elections, in which Nicolas Sarkozy won handily on a conservative platform that included a rallying cry for French national identity, cultural exchange of the sort Thomas explores appears questionable.

Yet Black France draws attention to the continual movement, both literal and figurative, between Africa and France, a flow that complicates notions of former métropole and colony. France in Africa and Africa in France are elements of what some analysts refer to as the “postcolony.” For Dominic Thomas, sub-Saharan Francophone writers and literature offer a privileged entrée into our twenty-first-century intercultural world. He asserts that “these writers have transformed Africa into a global territorial signifier, one that exceeds Africa as a ‘place’ in arriving at an alternative understanding and designation of territory as fluid and mobile—but one from which Africa itself is never absent” (22). In doing so Thomas makes a rather large leap from the fiction that forms the basis of his analysis to social, political, and cultural commentary. Those outside the realm of literary criticism may feel that the study overstates the importance or representative quality of literature. It is clear, however, that Francophone African literary and cultural elites have long played a central role in the political realm, as Thomas argued in his first book (Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa [Indiana University Press, 2002]). Some of the authors that Thomas examines, such as Alan Mabanckou, have very recently and publicly called for a new “littérature-monde en français,” a world literature in French, in which France no longer occupies the center, but is rather one of many poles. This indicates a deliberate shift away from past definitions of Francophone literature as well as la Francophonie, the geo-political consortium of many French-speaking nations. Mabanckou and other French writers outside of metropolitan France won distinguished French literary prizes such as the Goncourt, Renaudot, and Femina in the fall of 2006, further confusing the already fuzzy notions of Francophone and French.

Dominic Thomas enters a crowded field explored by the likes of Michel Fabre, Tyler Stovall, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Pascal Blanchard, Eric Deroo, Gilles Manceron, and Odile Cazenave, and like many others he is indebted to the theory of “branchements,” Jean-Loup Amselle’s preferred term for cultural mixing. While offering rather new and innovative interjections, the author is at pains to get beyond Paris Noir, and to reach Black France. The centrality of Marseilles to black, immigrant, or transnational France can be argued, however, as Thomas indicates. The book reads as an assortment of independent but often fascinating cultural vignettes. The chapter on literary explorations of excision and African feminisms is perhaps the most penetrating. It is a courageous attempt to address an embedded and problematic cultural practice through the characters and plots of African fiction. The question of intertextuality versus plagiarism in the Francophone context, studied in chapter 3, is equally compelling. The examination of la sape, a version of African dandyism or dressing to impress, offers fascinating representations of African cultural realities in transnational markets (156–57).

Black France is a short book that will be particularly useful for specialists. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index, very helpful resources for researchers, take up a full third of the text; there are no photographs, which would have been wonderfully illustrative of la sape. The study contains the necessary or unnecessary (depending on your view) dose of jargon. This reader found some of the opaque prose tiresome and the occasional moralistic undertone misplaced (see 132, lines 4...