2 01

The Return of the Native:

Postcolonial Smoke Screen and the
French Postcolonial Politics of Identity
Sandrine Bertaux
Although many scholars have attempted to avoid lapidary
formulations, much of the postcolonial conversation that takes place in France is
a recongured formulation of old questions, with a taste of dj vu. Even before
having fully landed on French soil, the term postcolonial is anathema to France: it
is associated with a diminished space of discussion, and the debate over its usage
has nationalistic undertones. To paraphrase a famous title, the conversation boils
down to the following question: is postcolonial studies bad for France?
1
It recalls
the for or against veil formulation that discredited all domestic opponents of the
2004 law on lacit as pro- veil. The law made France world famous, one more
time, for its singularity of clinging to universalism despite the fact that, evaluated
in its context, the law was not free of the charge of being part of a gesture toward
multiculturalism.
2
A perusal of the three articles written by Jean- Franois Bayart, Achille
Mbembe, and Ann Laura Stoler reveals that the question we are invited to discuss
has less to do with the impact of postcolonial studies in French scholarship than
with the reason why such scholarship that has gained high visibility in the English-
speaking academic world has long remained marginal or ignored in French aca-
Public Culture 23:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2010-023
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
I thank Mamadou Diouf and Miriam Ticktin, and the editor of this special issue, Janet Roitman,
for their insightful comments and suggestions. All translations from the French are mine.
1. The reference is to Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? in Is Multicul-
turalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
2. See Murat Akan, Lacit and Multiculturalism: The Stasi Report in Context, British Journal
of Sociology 60 (2009): 237 56.
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2 02
demia and why it emerges today in such a controversial fashion. In other words,
what is at issue is the reception of postcolonial studies in France, denoting for
Bayart an academic carnival, revealing for Stoler Frances colonial aphasia,
and representing for Mbembe the way out of its imperial winter.
3

Postcolonial studies and its debates are relevant and disrupting not only
because they challenge the ofcial claim to a French republican model based
on the principles of the indivisibility of the nation and the equality of all citi-
zens before the law, which stem from a legal tradition dating back two hundred
years, but also because postcolonial studies is partly informed by what is known
in U.S. academia as French theory.
4
The term postcolonial relates to both the
return home of recongured, or contested, native theories and the return in pub-
lic space of a native question raging in overseas departments and territories and
in the metropoles underprivileged banlieues (suburbs). What is at issue is what
connects the two.
Just Landed? Forgetting Orientalism
To begin with, it is necessary to dissipate the postcolonial smoke screen that sur-
rounds a French academia presented by some as if it is about to succumb to the
postcolonial charm. Bayart confesses to being a novice to postcolonial studies,
and his interest is precisely aroused by the eruption of the term postcolonial on
the French public scene.
5
The posture of denunciation of those brandishing
the postcolonial torch in France prompts him, he tells us, to write against those
not respecting the neat boundaries of knowledge and politics.
6
Bayart is not the
only one to question the scholarly value of the postcolonial library for being
either devoid of originality and trapped in its original sin of identity or simply
3. Bayarts phrase is also used in the title of his book from which his essay is a shortened ver-
sion. Jean- Franois Bayart, Les tudes postcoloniales: Un carnaval acadmique (Paris: Karthala,
2010); Bayart, Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? in this issue, 72. Ann
Laura Stoler, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France, in this issue, 125; Achille
Mbembe, Provincializing France? in this issue, 87.
4. This self- assertive statement is found in the French ofcial response to ECRIs recommenda-
tions, European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Second Report on France, Adopted
on 10 December 1999 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2000), 23, hudoc.ecri.coe.int/XMLEcri/
ENGLISH/Cycle_02/02_CbC_eng/02 cbc- france- eng.pdf. On French theory see Franois Cusset,
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the
United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); originally pub-
lished as French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle
aux tats- Unis (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2003).
5. Bayart, Les tudes postcoloniales, 6.
6. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 58.
Return of the Native
2 03
discarded as obscure. While the historian Emmanuelle Sibeud criticizes French
historians for their lack of attention to postcolonial studies, she nevertheless attri-
butes the current revival of an anticolonialism of the rear guard in France to the
importation of the most mystifying aspect of postcolonial studies.
7

Admittedly, postcolonial studies is a target that is simultaneously moving and
borderless. But even more so, as Terry Eagleton put it in a humorous statement
in the rst issue of Interventions some ten years ago, there must surely be in
existence somewhere a secret handbook for aspiring postcolonial theorists, whose
second rule reads: begin your essay by calling into question the whole notion of
post colonialism.
8
Thus it is not surprising, as Mbembe notes, that in elaborating
his critique Bayart draws heavily from existing debates within and about postcolo-
nial studies that provide him with ready- made ingredients. He nevertheless main-
tains a French touch throughout his criticism that colonizes his whole argument.
After having established the inuence of French scholars and intellectuals on
postcolonial studies, Bayart concludes that postcolonial studies is superuous:
it stands now for a foreign and univocal import to French scholarship.
9
Bayarts
criticism is predicated on what constitutes French scholarship and French aca-
demia. He is blind not only to the transnationalization of French academia by the
location of French scholars abroad, as Mbembe points out, but also to the PhDs
received by non- French students from French academic institutions. His criticism
seems to suggest what French academia should be.
The yardstick against which Bayart reads postcolonial studies remains the
small Parisian scene that disqualies any criticism suspected of appealing to
identity, a preemptive disqualication that constantly reasserts the universal. His
argument rehearses the one formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant
ten years ago in their article On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. In this
article, they criticize the U.S.- based Afro- American political scientist Michael
Hanchard and Brazilian scholars in close professional relations with U.S. aca-
demics and funding institutions for being the Trojan horse of American imperi-
alism by spreading in Brazil, where they are lacking, racial categories based on
7. Emmanuelle Sibeud, Post- Colonial and Colonial Studies: Enjeux et dbats, Revue dhistoire
moderne et contemporaine 51 (2004), 95.
8. Terry Eagleton, Postcolonialism and Postcolonialism, Interventions: International Jour-
nal of Postcolonial Studies 1 (1998), 24.
9. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 61. It was exactly this kind of misrepresentation that prompted
Miriam Ticktin and me to organize the conference A Postcolonial Approach to France: Immigra-
tion, Citizenship, Empire, held under the auspices of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the
Maison Franaise at Columbia University in 2003.
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the black- and- white divide forged in the context of the United States.
10
Similarly,
by depicting postcolonial studies as strictly conned to identity politics, Bayart
implicitly opposes to it the gure of the universal intellectual. Thus he offers us a
depiction of French academia devoid of power relations based on class, race, and
gender in which sole theoretical disputes have droit de cit to explain why the
graft did not take.
11
Unsurprisingly, he ends up calling on postcolonial studies
to let French academia have its own identity politics.
In contrast to Bayart, both Stoler and Mbembe view the emergence of post-
colonial studies in a positive light. While Mbembe stresses the fermentation of an
imperial winter after the discrediting of anticolonial intellectual gures such as
Frantz Fanon in favor of French intellectuals who ignored the colonial question,
Stoler rmly rejects the pervading memory- hole or ignorance thesis. In Mbembes
account, postcolonial studies represents a way out of the imperial winter, a sort
of cultural renaissance that would put an end to Frances anachronistic position.
Stoler, in contrast, recasts the colonial question by what she terms colonial apha-
sia, or a loss of access and active dissociation.
12
She underlines unchanging
social and political conditions in French banlieues to emphasize the role played
by anglophone postcolonial and subaltern studies in fueling new questions. Race
and colonial talks emerged, she argues, in a situation of noncontainment trig gered
by security discourse resting on postcolonial spatial segregation.
13
Beyond their divergences, all three authors agree on the view that postcolonial
studies has eventually taken root in France, and they situate it with the advent of
the new millennium. Given this mobilization for and against postcolonial studies
in France, and the autonomous vigor it is credited, one would expect to face a ow
of books and numerous scholars referring to postcolonial studies favorably, or at
least acknowledging it. But instead, there are a handful of scholars credited in the
three essays with carrying the postcolonial torch. At the forefront are two publi-
cations that appeared in 2005: Coloniser, exterminer by Olivier Le Cour Grand-
maison, and the edited volume La fracture coloniale, which gathers the work of
some twenty- ve authors.
14
Yet references to the postcolonial library are absent
10. Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant, On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason, Theory, Cul-
ture and Society 16 (1999): 44 46.
11. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 63.
12. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 125.
13. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 127.
14. Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et ltat colonial (Paris:
Fayard, 2005); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture colo-
niale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005).
Return of the Native
2 05
or allusive in these books as well as in some special issues or articles on the sub-
ject of postcolonialism.
15
Furthermore, the boundaries of postcolonial studies are
elusive. Although Mbembe explicitly positions his book published in a series edi-
ted by Bayart, On the Postcolony (2000), away from subaltern and postcolonial
studies, it is Mbembes contribution to La fracture coloniale that set the standard
for the problematization of the postcolonial in France.
16
Besides, Mbembes pre-
sentation of postcolonial studies as debunking a false Western universalism and
as seeking to establish instead, in a quasi-messianic message, a humanity- to-
come freed from the inhumane gure of the colonized and racial difference, in
turn, informs Bayarts presentation of postcolonial studies.
17
Strikingly, as scarce
as the references to postcolonial studies are in this handful of books, so are the
voices of the subalterns. This is not to say that scholarship informed by postcolo-
nial studies does not exist in France, but it is not on the central stage of the debate.
If the translation partly carried out by new and small publishing houses of
the ever- expanding postcolonial library is under way, the anti- postcolonial library
is in full expansion as well.
18
The paradox is that the French audience is intro-
duced to postcolonial studies by its unfriendly critics. Moreover, the mobilization
against postcolonial studies has stronger roots in France, and as such it does bring
to mind an old story.
Michel Foucault occupies a pivotal and contradictory role in the current texts
under consideration, whether to point to a dj vu (e.g., Bayart), or once more to
provide evidence of the neglect of colonialism and existing forms of state racism
by French scholars (e.g., Mbembe), or to underscore a French selective reading
that constantly neglects Foucaults theory of racism (e.g., Stoler). However, the
Foucault link is not new: the (non)reception of Edward Saids Orientalism and the
vivid memory it still aroused in the 1990s is deeply connected to the rejection by
15. For efforts to present postcolonial studies and discuss its relevance to the French context, see
the two special issues Postcolonialisme et immigrations, Contretemps 16 (2006), and Faut- il tre
postcolonial? ed. Laurent Dubreuil, Labyrinthe 24, no. 2 (2006), labyrinthe.revues.org/index1241
.html.
16. Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie. Essai sur limagination politique dans lAfrique con-
temporaine (On the Postcolony) (Paris: Karthala, 2000), 35; Achille Mbembe, La Rpublique et
limpens de la race, in Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire, La fracture coloniale, 139; Pascal Blan-
chard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, Introduction. La fracture coloniale: Une histoire
franaise, in Blanchard et al., La fracture coloniale, 11.
17. Olivier Mongin, Nathalie Lempereur, and Jean- Louis Schlegel, Quest- ce que la pense post-
coloniale? Entretien avec Achille Mbembe, Esprit, no. 330 (2006), special issue, Pour comprendre
la pense postcoloniale, 118; Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 58.
18. For instance, Jean- Loup Amselle, LOccident dcroch: Enqute sur les postcolonialismes
(Paris: Stock, 2008). And the earlier text, with the evocative title, by Jean- Franois Bayart, En nir
avec les tudes postcoloniales, Le dbat, no. 154 (2009): 119 40.
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Foucault one endorsed by Said of the notion that knowledge can exist only
where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only
outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.
19
Only two years after its
publication in English, Orientalism was translated into French by the major Pari-
sian publishing house Le Seuil.
20
However, Saids powerful critique fell at right
away in the Annales, then the most prominent French academic journal in the
discipline of history. Lucette Valensi, a prominent member of its editorial team,
boldly asked, Shall we burn orientalism? (Faut- il brler lorientalisme?).
21

She completely disregarded Saids epistemological critique and, instead, con-
tended that like any other scholarship, orientalist studies is the child of its time
and that, in fact, orientalist scholars whom she freed from the charge of eth-
nocentrism have underwritten the Muslim intellectual Renaissance.
22
Immune
to Eurocentrism, independent from imperialist designs, and, most important, an
empowerment for Muslim intelligentsia, orientalist scholarship could be rein-
stated: if orientalist studies was not to be burned, Orientalism was.
Even more than a decade later, in interviews conducted by Hassan Arfaoui, the
editor in chief of MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientique (MARS:
The Arab World in Scientic Research), debates about Saids Orientalism had
shown no signs of losing their vigor.
23
For instance, Maxime Rodinson, in one
interview, stated that orientalism is today incriminated primarily because of this
devil that is Edward Said and that institutional Marxists, as he qualied him-
self, had long before Said denounced that scholars are conditioned by their milieu,
that is, by the bourgeois society organized [anime] by capitalism.
24
In her
interview, Valensi recalled how Rodinson had once qualied Saids Orientalism
as a kind of jdanovism, meaning a substitution not of bourgeois science with
a proletarian science but rather of a Western science with a science of politi-
cal correctness. Nevertheless, she credited and lamented Saids inuence in the
United States for its contribution to the decline of empirical work and to the rise
19. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books 1995), 27.
20. Edward Said, Lorientalisme: LOrient cr par lOccident, trans. by Catherine Malamoud
(Paris: Seuil, 1980).
21. Lucette Valensi, Lorientalisme aujourdhui, Annales: conomies, socits, civilisations
35 (1980), 416.
22. Valensi, Lorientalisme aujourdhui, 416.
23. The short- lived journal was issued by the Paris- based Arab World Institute and foremost
addressed to a francophone and Arabic- speaking audience.
24. Hassan Arfaoui, Entretien avec Maxime Rodinson, MARS: Le monde arabe dans la
recherche scientique 4 (1994): 33 34.
Return of the Native
2 07
25. Hassan Arfaoui, Entretien avec Lucette Valensi, MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche
scientique 7 (1996 97), 20 21.
26. Hassan Arfaoui and Subhi Hadidi, Entretien avec Edward Said, MARS: Le monde arabe
dans la recherche scientique 4 (1994), 12.
27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27.
28. Gyan Prakash, Writing Post- Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from
Indian Historiography, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990): 383 408; Catherine
Coquery- Vidrovitch, Plaidoyer pour lhistoire du monde dans luniversit franaise, Vingtime
sicle: Revue dhistoire 61 (1999): 111 25.
29. Emmanuelle Saada, Il faut distinguer travail historique et positions militantes, interview
with Philippe Bernard, Le Monde, January 21, 2006.
30. Miriam Ticktin, Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Femi-
nist and Anti- immigrant Rhetoric Meet, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33 (2008):
863 89.
of a criticism of Western discourse. Yet she argued that the decolonization of
North Africa also meant that of social sciences and therefore orientalist studies
was a form of capital bequeathed to the formerly colonized, from which one
part can be used and another abandoned. She stressed the relations of equality
and reciprocity between French and francophone scholars of the Maghreb.
25

In his interview, Said pointed out that while he was one of the rst non- French
scholars to become interested in French scholarship, and specically in Foucaults
work, his interest was not a lasting one, as he found French scholars more and
more provincial.
26
My point is that if the graft did not take, as Bayart suggests, it is a conclusion
reached not after an assessment of the scholarly value of postcolonial studies but
rather after a rejection of Foucaults theoretical approach of power- knowledge
relations.
27
The reluctance to think with Orientalism has not only deprived
France of an important eld of research, namely, post orientalist histories, but
has also contributed to the maintenance of the colonial library as a reference
point for French scholarship and training.
28
And because we are told that, as for
the colonial institutional legacy, little has remained, the current postcolonial
question in France is reduced to the terrain of collective imaginaries, cultural
representations, and identities.
29
After such reductionism, social movements of
undocumented migrants, the struggle of Maghrebi women against postcolonial
bilateral agreements that subjugate them to sharia- inspired personal status, or the
selective and arbitrary granting of asylum status in France favoring orientalist
stories are the kinds of struggles and narratives that are placed in the margins of
the debate.
30

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Which Legacy?
If anything, the mobilization against postcolonial studies indicates that history
is no object to be hijacked in France and that there is a politics of history, resem-
bling identity politics, in which French academia expunged of dissenting
voices plays no marginal role. Stolers evocation of Maurice Papon forcefully
shows the explicit collision between histories that have been hitherto considered
and treated separately in mainstream French scholarship, colonialism and fas-
cism, and how, as Mbembe also points out, they continue to be objects of a dif-
ferential treatment. Yet if Bayarts dismissal of a colonial genealogy of French
contemporary racism raises questions, so does Stolers and Mbembes insistence
on the colonial genealogy as the primary, if not the unique, site for the production
of race. Stoler underlines how studies of contemporary racism had little to say
about colonialism and how race and the colonial discourse that fuels the current
debates in France are at times related, at times disjointed. Mbembe focuses on
the politics of remembrance and analyzes it as an ofcial politics of memory
against the background of the competing memories of the colonized and the set-
tlers replayed in postcolonial France. Both rightly underscore the many ways
French colonies are rendered irrelevant to the making of France; yet it is too hasty
a conclusion to explain with colonial history alone the contemporary treatment
of postcolonial immigrants and their descendants. Can we disregard the history
of fascism and eugenics when bringing in postcolonial studies? What about the
genealogy of race in decolonization?
Stoler contends that sudden knowledge is not at issue because historians
of colonialism had easy access to sources.
31
However, access to archives was at
the core of the Papon case, which unleashed an important set of questions and
responses beyond colonial history. The unveiling of a state politics of memory
to a broad public raised questions about the role of state archivists and historians
in courts and access to archives and eventually the big question of writing his-
tory, all questions not conned to colonial history.
32
Whereas the U.S. historian
of Vichy France Robert O. Paxton testied in Papons trial, the French historian
Henry Rousso rmly contended that the courtroom is no place for historians. The
failure to indict Papon for the 1961 massacre of French Muslims of Algerian
origin was challenged by the independent historian Jean- Luc Einaudi in a pub-
31. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 122, 124.
32. For instance, Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009); originally published as La perversion historiographique:
Une rexion armnienne (Paris: Lignes, 2006).
Return of the Native
2 09
lic denunciation.
33
In the defamation court case Papon engaged against Einaudi,
two state archivists came to testify in order to provide evidence from archives to
which Einaudi had no access. It is against this background of the mise au placard
of those state archivists, a context not reducible to a site of imaginaries or identi-
ties, that a conference bringing together U.S. and French historians and bearing
postcolonial studies in its title was held in Paris in May 2000.
34
Paul Ricoeur, in his 2000 Marc Bloch Lecture, gave this debate an authori-
tative response by arguing for the necessary differentiation of historiography
from memory, and the two from the judiciary.
35
While Ricoeur made no men-
tion of colonial history and instead pointed to the Holocaust, his distinction was
reasserted when, after the publication of the Natives of the Republics manifesto
denouncing the colonial treatment of postcolonial migrants and their descendants
and the 2005 riots that took place a few months later, the sociologist Emmanuelle
Saada opposed the autonomy of history against the distortions of memory.
36
Neither Ricoeur nor Saada felt the need to question how the community of his-
torians is constituted, for each denes the historians craft through objective pro-
fessional practice.
37
In many ways, the debate opposing history to memory is
simply a reformulation of the science versus ideology paradigm pervading French
academia, which views the universal as the site of objectivity while dening the
particular as subjective and ideologically biased, a theme that runs throughout
Bayarts essay as well. Bayarts demonstration that postcolonial critique is blind
to historical dynamics rests on his removal of Frederick Coopers and Stolers
contributions from the postcolonial conversation that emerged in the 1980s, after
which he can safely reclaim their scholarship as todays best weapon against the
introduction of postcolonial studies in France. Bayart reorganizes the terrain
of scholarship that is constitutive of his argument in a way that resembles what
Joan W. Scott described in another French debate as border patrol.
38
When
33. Jean- Luc Einaudi, Octobre 1961: Pour la vrit, enn, Le Monde, May 20, 1998.
34. On May 30 31, 2000, I, along with Matthieu Loitron and Todd Shepard, organized the
conference Postcolonial Studies: Regards croiss France tats-Unis, held in Paris at the cole
des hautes tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), under the auspices of the Laboratoire de dmog-
raphie historique, and chaired by Franoise Gaspard. One of the state archivists was among the
participants.
35. Paul Ricoeur, Lcriture de lhistoire et la reprsentation du pass, Annales: Histoire, sci-
ences sociales 55 (2000): 731 47.
36. Saada, Il faut distinguer.
37. See Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38. See Scotts incisive critical review of Grard Noiriels Sur la crise de lhistoire. Joan W.
Scott, Border Patrol, French Historical Studies 21 (1998): 383 97.
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2 1 0
Cooper and Stoler edited a special issue of American Ethnologist in 1989 with
which they set a new research agenda that would recapture both the metropole
and the colonies within a single analytical eld, it included a wide range of
scholars, some of them from the school of subaltern studies.
39
Their coedited
Tensions of Empire, published some ten years later, continued the previous line
of dialogue with postcolonial studies.
40
And again, half a decade later, they still
continued their serious engagement with postcolonial studies in the conference
titled A Postcolonial Approach to France.
As Stoler recalls, it was Georges Balandiers 1951 colonial situation that
helped her and Cooper reformulate a research agenda that would seek not to take
for granted the colonized/colonizer divide.
41
However, the inspiration they claim
from Balandiers colonial situation depends on its decontextualized reading.
Stoler points to the fact that Balandier did not follow such a research agenda, but
rather than seek a full explanation for why that was the case, she turns only to
his autobiographical account. Contextualizing Balandier unveils another major
French contribution to postcolonial studies and one of the most enduring and
contested terminologies of our contemporary world: Third World. Balandier
wrote his colonial situation at the very moment in which colonial ideology and
domination grounded in the colonized/colonizer divide were undermined by the
extension of citizenship in the French empire, a process that emerged from the
will to maintain French overseas departments and territories. In the 1950s, he
was instrumental in popularizing and turning Third World into a powerful cate-
gory of knowledge foremost dened by its underdevelopment and in need of
development policies. In an interview in 1999, Balandier characterized his 1951
article as a break with a timeless ethnology, but he also stated that the asser-
tion by pro- colonial intellectuals that the civilizing mission is associated with
progress, peace, and education is not wholly wrong, unless one reproduces, in
the reverse, the stereotypes of the Other.
42
It was such a view, of Europe bringing
the backward countries onto the path of civilization, modernity, and development,
39. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Introduction. Tensions of Empire: Colonial
Control and Visions of Rule, special issue, Tensions of Empire, American Ethnologist 16 (1989):
609.
40. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
41. Georges Balandier, La situation coloniale: Approche thorique, Cahiers internationaux de
sociologie 11 (1951): 44 79.
42. Hassan Arfaoui and Robert Santo- Martino, Les mondes de la surmodernit: Entretien avec
Georges Balandier, MARS: Le monde arabe dans la recherche scientique 10 11 (1999), 38, 42.
Return of the Native
2 1 1
43. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004),
58.
44. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of
France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 6.
45. Shepard, Invention of Decolonization, 230.
46. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 125.
47. Mamadou Diouf, ed., Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: Colonialisme, nationalisme et
socits postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala; Amsterdam: South- South Exchange Program for Research
on History of Development [SEPHIS], 1999). See also his contribution to the postcolonial debate in
France. Mamadou Diouf, Les tudes postcoloniales lpreuve des traditions intellectuelles et des
banlieues franaises, Contretemps 16 (2006): 17 30.
48. As stated in the presentation of the collection.
that Fanon contested when he reclaimed and subverted the term Third World by
famously stating in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth that Europe is literally the
creation of the Third World.
43
The colonial legacy is tortuous not only because of the complexities of the
colonial situation, as Bayart maintains, but also because decolonization was
a moment of redenitions, a moment that not only broke with a certain form
of colonialism but also set a future for the metropoles. As Todd Shepard con-
vincingly argues, with the coming of Algerias independence, decolonization was
transformed from a descriptive term into a historical category, an all but inevi-
table stage in the tide of History.
44
To unmix French citizenry in Algeria, he fur-
ther contends, racialized ethnicities were mobilized.
45
Stolers phrase occlusion
of knowledge over colonial history does not account for those new terminolo-
gies and the new historiography that emerged with decolonization.
46
Mbembes
account of Algerias independence as trauma also falls short of capturing these
productive aspects of the intricacy of power and knowledge.
Relocating the Postcolonial in the French State
It took another twenty years after Saids Orientalism to resume the translation
of what was now called postcolonial studies, but, as if to comply with Bayarts
thesis, it was not carried out by French scholars. In 1999 the historian Mamadou
Diouf edited the very rst French translation of some major texts by members
of the subaltern studies group and substantiated it with a detailed introduction.
47

The collections aim was to favor the debate and the conversation South/South,
without the intermediary of historians of the North.
48
Directed primarily at a
francophone public in Africa rather than a French audience, Dioufs introduc-
tion critically reappraised some of the African postcolonial historiographies and
Public Culture
2 1 2
49. Diouf, Introduction. Entre lAfrique et lInde: Sur les questions coloniales et nationales.
Ecriture de lhistoire et recherche historique, Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: 5 35.
50. Bayart, Les tudes postcoloniales, 16.
51. Bayart, Les tudes postcoloniales, 16.
52. Diouf, Introduction. Entre lAfrique et lInde, 19.
53. Michle Tribalat, Faire France. Une enqute sur les immigrs et leurs enfants (Paris: La
Dcouverte, 1995); Michle Tribalat, with Patrick Simon and Benot Riandey, De limmigration
lassimilation: Enqute sur les populations dorigine trangre en France (Paris: La Dcouverte/
Institut National dtudes Dmographiques, 1996).
54. For instance, it is explained that the immigrant who declared both Berber and Arabic as
mother tongues, will be classied as Berber. Tribalat, et al.De limmigration lassimilation, 271.
invited sub- Saharan African scholars to engage with the subaltern scholarship.
49

In addition to the French translation of texts written by Gyan Prakash, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Veena Das, Gya-
nendra Pandey, and Shahid Amin, the volume also included two texts in coun-
terpoint by Nira Wickramasinghe and by Frederick Cooper. Thus the work by
some members of the subaltern studies group was not intended as a tool kit to be
unquestionably endorsed; rather, it was a way to open up a debate. And, indeed,
as Bayart notes elsewhere, it sparked acrimonious debate with the proponents of
afrocentrism in the Dakar- based Conseil pour le dveloppement de la recherche
en sciences sociales en Afrique (CODESRIA), then directed by Mbembe and to
which Diouf was afliated.
50
However, while Bayart evaluated the introduction of
the exploration of the postcolonial problematic as antithetic to scientic nativ-
ism [indignisme scientique], he disregarded it as context specic and irrele-
vant to his thesis that postcolonial studies is foremost a form of identity politics.
51

Why can he not see scientic nativism on his own soil?
In his introduction to the subaltern studies collection, Diouf suggested that the
subaltern analysis of notions of citizenship and community in India could help
tackle the notion of Ivority.
52
Ivoiriens de souche, or those of Ivory stock,
is not a monopoly of some African ethnic struggles;

since 1995, France too had
a category of Franais de souche, or those French of French stock, yet it was
promoted as a scientic category in a state demographic survey aimed at measur-
ing the assimilation of some immigrant groups and their children.
53
In the survey,
French of French stock is presented as the only nonethnic category, the standard
against which cultural attitudes of immigrants and their children, respectively clas-
sied by ethnic belonging and by ethnic origin, are measured. Ethnic assigna-
tion is ascribed through the minority mother tongue and its application differential:
whereas nation and ethnies are matched in the countries north of the Mediter-
ranean Sea, ethnies multiply in the South.
54
The survey superbly demonstrated,
Return of the Native
2 1 3
in the words of Stoler, the colonialism dis- ease of French anthropology.
55
But it
does bring to the fore that the question is less why French anthropologists had little
to say on the 2005 riots than why they had little to say on the surveys categories.
Mbembe credits the lack of ethnic markers in French public statistics to the
so- called French republican model of integration. However, the sociologist Domi-
nique Schnapper, one of the models prominent proponents, lamented the lack of
ethnic markers in public statistics and argued their importance on the grounds
that the migration of Europeans to the United States in the nineteenth century is
not that of black Africans to France in 1980.
56
By positing Frances unease with
globalization as an anachronistic resistance led by a neorevisionist movement,
Mbembe misses the fact that France enacts policies similar to those of other Euro-
pean Union (EU) member states, which cannot amount to a resistance to global-
ization but is, rather, its ip side.
57
Furthermore, his two- waves account of minor-
ity social movements fails to point out that these struggles are not led by the same
social groups and are not temporal sequences: the ongoing struggle of overseas
French citizens and of illegalized migrants are not for symbolic recognition.
58

What Mbembe fails to fully grasp is the scientic claim of truth and objectivity
that constitutes the divide between immigrant and French of French stock.
If the colonized/colonizer divide is admittedly a poor analytical framework
to read the dynamics of the colonial situation, it was nevertheless reective of
a politics inherent to colonial rule. Nicholas B. Dirks identies cultural tech-
nologies of rule as those processes that secure colonial domination by means
other than coercion.
59
If French of French stock failed to be institutionalized
in the census, as some demographers suggested, by the mid- 1990s, French census
classication was radically altered with the introduction of a category of immi-
grant. In fact, the two formed a pair in the rewriting of colonial history. If some
French citizens could be of French stock, it is because other French citizens
were considered immigrants. A French Muslim of Algerian origin, as ofcial
denominations aimed to contrast with those of European stock, is classied as an
immigrant, dened as a person born foreigner abroad, when obviously the
55. Stoler, Colonial Aphasia, 133.
56. Dominique Schnapper, La France de lintgration: Sociologie de la nation en 1990 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1993), 14.
57. Mbembe, Provincializing France, 102. I borrow the ip side from Peter Geschiere. Peter
Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
58. Mbembe, Provincializing France, 102.
59. Nicholas B. Dirks, Foreword in Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge:
The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.
Public Culture
2 1 4
French Muslim Algerians were born French nationals in French departments, and
forced to be so. If they had not been previously dened as such, they would cor-
respond perfectly to the denition of French of French stock, as a person born
in France of two parents themselves born in France.
The institutionalization of the category immigrant succeeds where gov-
ernmental politics failed: it cancels the postcolonial application of the jus soli
provision of French citizenship law according to which Algerian citizens born
in French Algeria procreate, in the postcolonial metropole, French citizens by
birth. Once again, we are much beyond the occlusion of knowledge that Stoler
suggests and, for more than ten years, in an active production of knowledge that
paves the way for a new postcolonial historiography that has little resemblance to
a postcolonial critique. The politics of autochthony underlying such postcolo-
nial revisionism is foremost transnational and cannot be discarded by denounc-
ing bottom- up identity politics or by focusing only on the passage from empire
to nation- state (e.g., Bayart).
60
Much to the contrary: in fact, the new divide of
immigrant and French of French stock was made possible by the collective
granting of a European citizenship that excluded (and created) the so- called third-
country nationals. The declassication of former European immigrants and their
reclassication as European citizens fosters the link between non- European and
immigrant in France as well as in the other EU member states.
Stoler raises a fundamental question when she asks whether the visibility of
the term postcolonial indicates that it is safe for consumption. This novel state-
led postcolonial politics of identity grounds and revives the pervading colonial
imaginary, and not the other way around. The oppositions that informed French
antidiscrimination policies French of French stock and immigrants of Alge-
rian origin or French youth and youth of Algerian origin are not, as the
French anthropologist Didier Fassin suggests, unfortunate wordings.
61
As Stoler
points out, one cannot dissociate the French state from racism. It is not a semantic
issue: these categories are pivotal because they proceed through ascription. If the
term postcolonial can be deployed safely today, it is because it helps position the
French state as the legitimate antiracist actor and the mediator among different
ethnic groups in potential conict.
The term taxonomic state, which Stoler uses to distinguish identity politics
60. On the politics of autochthony, see Geschiere, Perils of Belonging.
61. Didier Fassin, Linvention franaise de la discrimination, Revue franaise de science poli-
tique 52 (2002): 406.
Return of the Native
2 1 5
62. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colo-
nial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 206, 282.
63. For instance, see such use of French of French stock in Laurent Dubois, La Rpublique
Mtisse: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History, Cultural Studies 14 (2000):
15 34. On the European Union, see Enrica Rigo, Citizenship at Europes Borders: Some Reec-
tions on the Post- colonial Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement, Citizenship Stud-
ies 9 (2005): 3 22.
from state politics of identication in the colonial context, aptly applies to the
metropole.
62
The French postcolonial politics of identity is one of identication
and differentiation of the legitimate and the illegitimate in the national order of
things, which paved the way for todays Ministry of Immigration, Integration,
National Identity, and Co- Development. In this context, reclaiming the term
natives (indignes) cannot simply be reduced to a misreading and simplication
of the legacy of the colonial situation without taking note of the state work of
naming and accounting. Indeed, the statistical category of immigrants entails
that their French- born children are classied as children of immigrants. It is
never too late to call on postcolonial studies to challenge a historical narrative in
which French of French stock and opposite categories appear uncritically indis-
pensable even to those positioning themselves within the postcolonial conversa-
tion and to explore the EUs taxonomic states and the impact they have much
beyond the EUs formal borders.
63