by Norman Ajari
Source: Carlos Delgado, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
To think of the contemporary situation of Africana philosophy in France amounts to reflecting upon its institutional nonexistence and the historical reasons for this status quo. By “institutional nonexistence” I do not mean that there is no research at all that could be labeled as “Africana Philosophy.” I rather mean that no French academic institution explicitly aims to support teaching and research in that field and that the vast majority of professional philosophers even lack the idea that non-European thought have something valuable to add to the philosophy curricula. In philosophical terms, one could say that there is an Africana philosophy “in itself,” but no Africana philosophy “for itself.”
This state of affairs may appear surprising given that major figures of global Black thought are deeply connected to the history of the French colonial empire. Let us mention the Haitian Anténor Firmin, the Martinicans Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant, the Senegalese Léopold Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop, among many others.
Nevertheless, throughout the last five decades, this rich intellectual tradition very rarely appeared to French academic philosophers as something worthy of inquiry or interest. In the same vein, the question of race is philosophically under researched in France. Even if there are exceptions, such as Étienne Balibar’s long time commitment with critical race theory and Magali Bessone’s invigorating book on the concept of race (from an analytical perspective) entitled Sans distinction de race? (2013), studying race is usually seen as the sociologists’ preserve.
Obviously, the persistence of a colonial discourse on Black people’s lack of intellectual aptitude as well as the prevalence of a republican color-blind ideology explains a large part of French philosophers’ suspicion toward Africana philosophy. But we also have to pay attention to a plurality of situational causes. For instance, intellectual questioning on racism, colonialism, and imperialism was a casualty of the anti-Marxist intellectual trend of the 1980s. According to the new standards of liberal political philosophy, it was vital to exhibit a pristine image of Western democracies, compared to failed socialist regimes. Black thinkers were relegated to the now depreciated category of “third-worldism” and excluded from the space of rational discussion.
For instance, in 1995, due to political pressure, the French government removed Aimé Césaire’s works from the national high school exit exam’s programs, arguing that the radical critical tone and arguments of his Discourse on colonialism (1950) were unfit for the academic standards.
Despite these pitfalls, we recently witnessed a renewed interest in Africana philosophy by French academia in which Frantz Fanon is a figurehead. A significant step was the publication of Matthieu Renault’s monograph Frantz Fanon: De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (2011), which was followed by numerous articles and book chapters by various scholars.
Additionally, in the wake of Fanon’s writings on trauma and continued French research on Derridean “hauntology,” French-Algerian philosopher Seloua Luste Boulbina explored in Le Singe de Kafka (2008) and L’Afrique et ses fantômes (2015) the epistemological, aesthetic, and existential consequences of the recurring colonial past.
Another important segment of French Africana philosophy addresses the African continent. Significant works have been written by Nadia Yala Kisukidi and Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux on contemporary African philosophy. They restore a crucial dialogue with the French-speaking African world, reminding us that twentieth-century quarrels around Négritude and African philosophy carried a lot of creative insights on the universal and the particular as well as enlightening concepts in philosophies of culture and history. For this purpose, intellectual figures such as Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe and Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne are pivotal. Even if they are neither French in the sense of being born in or residing and working in France, their books are originally published by influential Parisian publishing houses and strongly impact the research.
Post-war French feminist thought has a long tradition of commitment with Africana philosophers such as Césaire and Fanon. Materialist (white) feminists such as Colette Guillaumin and Christine Delphy are representative of a twofold interest in Black thought. On the one hand, they decisively contributed to the development of a French critical race theory, describing processes of naturalization at stake in racist epistemologies and regimes of power. On the other hand, they drew inspiration from Black philosophers in order to conceive the “theoretical effects of the wrath of the oppressed” (Guillaumin), among which white women took the lion’s share.
The issue this post-war feminist tradition forces us to address is the following: How has material feminist’s analogizing with the histories of slavery and colonization contributed to erasing the contributions of Black philosophers from the French philosophical canon?
That form of feminist digestion of Fanon’s books made the framework of his thought available without any reference either to Fanon himself or to the radical revolutionary aspects of his political project. Black concepts and theories were assumed, but Black thinkers and social subjects were concealed.
In contrast, recent work in epistemology and political philosophy from feminist philosophers of color such as Elsa Dorlin and Hourya Betouhami, rigorously engaging with Africana philosophy, tends to correct this mistake. Their path-breaking work, visibly inspired by Fanon, Foucault, and Black feminist thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, and many others, deals with how multidimensional violence shapes political subjectivities. They conceive both existential and organic philosophical frameworks which draw concepts from the bodily exposure to brutality and the muscular potentials of incarnated agency. Nevertheless, the prevailing feminist analogizing paradigm, according to which race, class, and gender can be understood through the same set of concept and theories, remains globally unchallenged.
Considering both the improvements and the obstacles, the evolution of the field in France in the near future is unpredictable. Even if Africana philosophy raises the students’ interest, it is handicapped by a lot of philosophy faculty members’ skepticism toward its methodological seriousness. Some have also expressed concern about African philosophy being a vehicle for “Anglo-Saxon like identity politics.” These reactions are overall a sign that the “Black question” still generates unease among French intellectuals.
Philosophy departments in France thus rarely hire Black philosophers. They are even more reluctant to hire young scholars of color in the fields of Africana philosophy, critical race theory, decolonial thought and related matters. Such scholars are in limbo, or in the zone of nonbeing, writing articles and books that most of our white colleagues are afraid to read.
Symptomatically, the history of the French language does not provide us an equivalent formulation of the English word “Blackness.” “Négritude” is indelibly linked to the mid-twentieth century Black avant-garde movement, and “Noirceur” is exactly synonymous with darkness and murkiness. So, the overwhelming challenge for Africana philosophy in France is to invent a way of talking about Blackness in the heart of a hostile environment. Not to create it ex nihilo, but to recollect it and inhabit the rich and intense intellectual and political history whose acknowledgment we have been deprived of for too long.
Norman Ajari holds a PhD in philosophy from Toulouse University (France). His research interests include critical race theory, Africana philosophy and 20th century continental philosophy. His first book, La Dignité ou la mort. Éthique et politique de la race (“Dignity or Death: Ethics and Politics of Race”), Paris: La Découverte), will be published in February 2019. He is also an executive board member of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.
