Suspect Citizenship: Race and Racism in Postcolonial France

Suspect Citizenship: Race and Racism in Postcolonial France
Date
Thu May 20th 2021, 1:00 - 2:00pm
Event Sponsor
The Europe Center
Location
Online Seminar
Speaker: Matthias Matthijs

Speaker: Jean Beaman, University of California, Santa Barbara 

Based on past and current ethnographic research in the Parisian metropolitan region, I discuss how racial and ethnic minorities understand and respond to their racialization in a context in which race and ethnicity are not legitimate or acknowledged, and how a suspect citizenship is created. I will discuss how racial and ethnic minorities are “citizen outsiders” as evident of France’s “racial project” (Omi and Winant 1994), which marks distinctions outside of explicit categorization. I explore not only how race marks individuals outside of formal categories, but also how people respond to these distinctions in terms of a racism-related issue, here, police violence and brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. I will also discuss how activists frame their growing social problem given the constraints of French Republican ideology.

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