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

Dominic Thomas' recent book marks a moment when scholarship about the legacy of multiculturalism in France has finally come of age, not merely as part of the shifting terrain of lived reality, but in the study of French literature across disciplines in the Anglophone world. The simultaneous reinforcement and dislocation of France as the center for French African literary production is one of the important themes of the book. Or, as Thomas describes it himself, Black France serves as a vanishing point for a more inclusive understanding of Africa's "transcontinental" history "positioning blackness as less about color and more about historical experience." Dislodging the colonial humanist triad of race, culture, and geography, and re-imagining it through a fluid analysis of contemporary francophone African writing is critical to Thomas' privileging of transnationalism as a means of understanding the tensions between race and immigration politics. For Thomas, transnationalism becomes the operative metaphor for cultural circulation and lived experience newly materialized through forms of literary production in French.

A series of important works focused on black literary production in France serves as a launching point in Thomas' reconceptualization of blackness, beyond the influence of black American writers in France, developmental notions of African literature, the Négritude movement, or even Afro-Parisianism. In his preface, Thomas extols the work of Blanchard, Deroo and Manceron's Le Paris noir, Michel Fabre's From Harlem to Paris, Alec Hargreaves' Voices of the North African Community in France, Abiola Irele's The African Imagination, Bennetta Jules-Rosette's Black Paris, Christopher Miller's Nationalists and Nomads, and Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir, as well as important recent work by Manthia Diawara, Brent Edward Hayes, and Mireille Rosello as essential to a movement toward reconsidering questions of blackness and identity within contemporary France. Thomas takes up the vocabulary of flows, currents, intersections, and relations of disjuncture in the vocabulary of Arjun Appadurai, Achille Mbembe, Saskia Sassen, and Rebecca Saunders to examine a series of novels and literary figures that include Calixte Beyala, Daniel Biyaoula, Fatou Diomé, Emmanuel Dongala, Fatou Keita, Alain Mabanckou, Henriette Siwa-Akofa, and Sony Labou Tansi.

An emerging "decentered and deterritorialized apparatus" of empire that Thomas describes has meant new configurations for lived experience and literary production that express newly emerging transnational alignments. In fact, the francophone African writing that Thomas examines with fluidity and stylistic legerdemain begins with a repositioning of vocabulary in debates about what comprises contemporary French literary production. Beginning with the term mondialisation as a more meaningful way of articulating black Frenchness, he describes a series of colonial reversals such that postcolonial francophone literary production claims France properly as its home, but a France that has been reappropriated. In fact, the experience of immigration, as expressed through Emmanuel Dongala's evocative pairing of "négritude" with "migritude" points to a significant development in contemporary France as a "third space" of literary production.

The seven chapters of the book are organized chronologically, beginning with an exploration of transnationalism in contemporary France, while passing through a critical thematic discussion of blackness through cultural capital formations, global mediations, the rhetorical reservoir of slavery narratives, and Afro-Parisianism and Afro-feminisms. However, to my mind, his discussion in these preceding chapters culminates in a brilliant discussion of La sape and transnational fashion. This chapter, entitled "Fashion Matters," is not only a remarkable display of literary scholarship, but demonstrates how African fashion, history, literary production and critical thinking are a series of interrelated writing practices. This chapter not only demonstrates why contemporary writing in France matters but illustrates how it is an expression of contemporary French identity. It explores a new kind of blackness as integral to the nature of the disjunctive experience of the urban diaspora. Thomas' exposition on Alain Mabanckou's Bleu-Blanc-Rouge into an exploration of La sape through Mabanckou's protagonist Massala-Massala, or Marcel Bonaventure as the character renames himself, becomes an avatar for a new way of conceiving Frenchness, socially unmoored and yet distinctly...