Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face.
Trade ReviewReviews 'The book inscribes itself in the panoply of texts that aim at bringing France to forcibly exorcise its past...Through a combination of several art forms, Knox re-investigates and broadens thematter in addressing it as a central tension that fluctuates between race, ethnicity, immigration, and national identity.'
Claudy Delné,
French Review'This book’s contributions stand on their own and will shape discussions and debates about race and identity in France and beyond for quite some time.'
Gillian Glaes,
H-FranceTable of ContentsNote on Translations
List of Figures and Note on Companion Website
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Civilized into the Civilizing Mission: The Gaze, Colonization, and Exposition Coloniale Children’s Comics
2 Self-Spectacularization and Looking Back on French History
3 Writing, Literary
Sape, and Reading in Mabanckou’s
Black Bazar4 Looking Back on Afropea’s Origins: Léonora Miano’s
Blues pour Élise as an Afropean Mediascape
5 Anti-White Racism without Races: French Rap, Whiteness, and Disciplinary Institutionalized Spectacularism
Outro. Looking Back, Moving Forward
Notes
Bibliography
Index
