Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

Introduction

Introduction Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne Ten of the fourteen essays in this volume were first published as a special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies. Bearing the title “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic,” the special issue appeared in December 2005. As the issue was going to press, a wave of riots broke out in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, a largely Arab and African working-class neighborhood. Sparked by the death of two teenage boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted after climbing into a power substation as they allegedly hid from police, the riots broke out on the night of October 27, 2005. Two days earlier, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy had incited rage with his public statement that crime-ridden suburban neighborhoods were full of “scum” and should be “cleaned with a power hose.”1 Two nights later, on October 27, the streets of such neighborhoods were instead bathed in fire. Rioters overturned and set fire to parked cars, while marches and demonstrations spread through the northeastern suburbs of Paris. With Sarkozy pledging “zero tolerance,” the unrest spread throughout urban France during the month of November; the government declared a state of emergency , establishing curfews and forbidding public gatherings. Fueled by the prevalent anti-Muslim sentiment of post–9/11 Europe, the “crise des banlieues” of late 2005 was cited as a breakdown not only of French public order but of its assimilationist national ideology. In 1998 the multiracial French national football team had won the World Cup to chants of “Beur! Blanc! Noir!” (Berber, White, Black), but in 2005 the suburban riots and their political aftershocks seemed a foreclosure on the myth of an egalitarian France. One writer for the socialist newspaper Libération, for instance, referred to the burning cars of Clichy-sous-Bois as fires that symbolized the failure of “the French style of integration,” which was burning at the stake (bûcher).2 Was the event to be the harbinger of new forms of insurrection or even new revolutionary movements? So claimed an anonymous 2007 pamphlet, The Coming Insurrection, which cited other recent protests in Mexico and Greece as further evidence of pan-European unrest (such events have since found their refrain in the U.K. riots of 2011). Or did the French suburban crisis have more to do with a rightward shift in French immigration politics, as well 2 Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne as an increasingly disenfranchised population of urban immigrants from France’s former colonies, long since priced out of the urban villages of the central Paris arrondissements? Such unrest—as alive in 2013 as it was during the winter when “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic” first appeared—seemed at odds with the issue’s more celebratory vision of Paris as a site for intellectual ferment. Yet even the most fortuitous of the intellectual exchanges examined in the pages of this volume are often marked with the intensity of such explosive outbursts of collective violence, deep civic unrest, and contentious political upheaval throughout the long twentieth century. A strong measure of how far the crise des banlieues resonated throughout the Francophone world came in December 2005, when the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, along with other public and political figures, refused to meet with Nicolas Sarkozy on a planned state visit to the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Césaire’s refusal responded not only to Sarkozy’s role in the suburban riots but especially to his efforts to introduce a law that would require French schools to teach the “positive role” of colonization. Césaire’s gesture of refusal was formalized, in turn, in a manifesto written by the Caribbean novelists Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau in September 2007. Entitled When the Walls Fall Down: An Outlaw National Identity? (Quand les murs tombent: L’identité nationale hors-la-loi?), the tract calls for a collective refusal of the “walls” of immigration policy, nationalism, and essentialist notions of identity alike, which increasingly threaten to disrupt the very possibility of human relations. This series of events confirms the continued, though transformed , importance of Paris as a site of diasporic convergence. Through the lens of the French capital we can witness simultaneously the persistent forging of relations—whether artistic, literary, intellectual, political, amorous, or polemical—as well as the conditions that threaten such relations. It is to this end that the essays collected here study the travels to...