Representing the Nation

Catherine E. Clark

Paris Liberation: the visual borders of national identities

This paper explores the differing photographic representations of the Liberation of Paris at the end of World War II in France, England, and the United States during the fall of 1944. It looks at how the myth of the Liberation as a populist, unified French victory crossed national borders and how, even as the US and English press celebrated the restoration of the French capital’s freedom they reinterpreted the events and France’s history of revolution.

While the D-Day battles have become the iconic battles of the Liberation of France for the American and English public, the Liberation of Paris remains one of the most important symbolic battles for the French. After four years of occupation by the German army, fighting between members of the French Resistance or FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure) and German soldiers finally broke out in Paris in August 1944. It began with a series of strikes by metro workers and the French Police on August 18 and 19 and ended after allied troops – led by General Leclerc’s 2nd armored division – entered the city and Charles de Gaulle triumphantly paraded down the Champs-Elysées on the 26th. Although Paris’s popular uprising was made possible by the fact that the Allies’ arrival was imminent and the majority of the German forces had already retreated, the myth of the Liberation that developed events during and after this week stressed this as a Franco-French victory. As de Gaulle intoned on the 26, this was “Paris liberated, Paris liberated by itself!”

Despite its secondary status in military terms, the Liberation of Paris was sold across France as the iconic battle of the war, the founding myth of the postwar nation. It was sold as a particularly visual spectacle would be furthered through that fall and winter by the circulation of photographs as a sort of ‘instant history’ in a flood of illustrated publications. With titles such as – Seen during the Liberation of Paris, The Liberation of Paris: the Historic days from August 19 to August 26, 1944 Seen by Photographers, The Liberation of Paris Seen from a Police Station, and Eyes Peeled in Insurgent Paris – these books and pamphlets stressed the events as visual and photographic, while the pictures that illustrated them inscribed them in a longer history of revolution in the capital. French publications marveled at how, as François Mauriac enthused: “for the first time, it was not a question of fratricidal struggle, for the first time, all of the French found themselves on the same side of the barricade” (Mauriac, Paris Libéré, 5.) These publications thus smoothed over the fact that not every French person fought on the same side of the barricade in 1944.

This paper looks at how the prints, photographs, and paintings of Parisian revolution that accompanied British and American accounts further flattened the historical particularities of the Liberation. By manipulating larger historical narratives as this myth crossed national borders in the weeks that followed August 1944, the American and British press, I propose, used this narrative to create their own nations’ mythology of the Liberation of Paris and define France’s place in the postwar world. 

Elodie Nowinski

Fake Parisians For Real New Yorkers: nationality claims in global fashion business

Once upon a time, fashion was called couture and only happened in Paris. Then came London, somehow New York appeared, then Milan, Tokyo and all the other ones, all claiming to be fashion capitals. These city queens of fashion were cohabitating in a flourishing market and were all keeping up with their initial characters: Paris was expansive and chic, London was cool, punk and weird, New York relaxed avant-garde and Tokyo… well, was Tokyo.

But the market went global. I mean, somehow, fashionistas were everyone, including normal people, and mass fashion, fast fashion, high street fashion started to blur the lines in an unthinkable way. Fashion went viral and everyone was contaminated.

But if Paris was still walking the line of couture, global groups bought all the famous houses –except for a very small number –, from the Gucci group to LVMH, Richemont and all the Kerings of the world. And suddenly, New York Brands were walking the runways financed by the same money as Milan’s or London’s. Character differences were getting harder and harder to identify and ready-to-wear was all mixed up with couturiers and designers brands. But loosing character, which is loosing brand identity, is a capital offence in fashion territory. You sell because you are different to the eyes of the consumers.

Once the frenzy of global fashion business and globalized brands was over, marketers suddenly realised that the geographical identity of brands was central and needed to be stressed out in any kind of way to regain the credit attached to historical brands to make them identifiable again on a saturated market.

Then Yves Saint Laurent was rebranded Saint Laurent Paris… Prada re-engraved Milano on all its banners and the rest of the pack seemed to follow that path. Borders – magical one course, marketing magic I mean, were reinstalled in the global fashion business.

But that magic had only one goal, to make brands more distinctive from one another and to sell to foreign and emerging markets more easily.

These marketed borders have nothing to do with a national identity forged by fashion history. Even less so with some national aesthetics linked to the country history. And on top of this, markets from emerging countries were admittedly buying the concept of Paris or New York but were not prevented from inventing their very own borders launching their own national brands. Hence, many questions are to be discussed: How can these returns to national claims in fashion be analysed in terms of aesthetics and in terms of business? How can former non-creative countries develop brands using these national claims as a marketing tool? And finally why fashion culture can only survive by recreating borders even though it is probably the most globalized business in the world?

Amah Edoh

Black skin, white hands, and the cloth of many colors: Designing textiles in Holland for West Africa

The typical reaction when I mention my dissertation topic in the US and Europe is surprise: the cloth my interlocutor had pegged as “African”—wax cloth, also known as “African print” cloth— turns out to not be indigenous to Africa at all, but rather, a 19th-century import from Europe, via Indonesia. The cloth, a mechanically printed imitation of hand-blocked Javanese batiks, was introduced to the west coast of Africa by European traders in the 1870s, and due to both consumer preferences and colonial trade policies, was adopted by local populations and integrated into existing uses for textiles as not only dress, but also currency—specifically, as female wealth (see Steiner 1985; Sylvanus 2007).

Is it printed in Africa? Are the designs African? Are the designers African? Such is typically the ensuing line of questioning. The first and last questions are easiest to answer: Wax cloth is also printed throughout the continent, as of about 50 years ago, and it is also made in China. But Dutch Wax remains the most prized variety in many countries. As for the designers, no, they are not African. Throughout the company’s history, they have primarily been Dutch, with a handful of other Europeans, and, today, one Dutch-trained Central American. The story of the designs’ origins is slightly more complicated. Since the 1870s, tens of thousands of Dutch Wax designs have been printed in the Vlisco factory in southern Holland. Some are copies or derivatives of Indonesian batik designs; others are based on sketches by West African traders, conveyed to the company by representatives of European trading houses like UAC and CFAO; some came from sketches the designers made of African art objects displayed in European museums; others are of a subject of particular interest to the designer; and others yet, “simply” the product of doodling.

What does it mean that the designs printed on this cloth and taken by West Africans and others to be part of West African cultural heritage are created by non-West Africans? In other words, what is the significance of the conditions of Dutch Wax cloth’s production, and of its consumption as a West African cultural object? Does the fact that the designs are created by Europeans have special significance, given the rather tenuous history linking the two regions? Cross-cultural commodities—goods produced in one cultural context for use in another—are far from unusual, and have long been of interest to historians and social scientists (see for example Curtin 1984; Howes 2002; Straight 2002; Plankensteiner 2013). But do the origins of maker and user in the case of Dutch Wax cloth designed in Holland for West African markets hold special significance in a critical analysis of the cloth’s trade? If much of the colonial project was implemented through efforts to shape colonized bodies, what is the significance of the nature of the commodity in question—wax cloth, which is not only used to adorn bodies, but whose designs, in Togo, for instance, can signal social status, taste, womanhood, and even national identity?

My ongoing dissertation fieldwork traces the trajectory of a collection of Dutch Wax cloth through five stages—design, marketing, selling, buying, and using—between Holland, where the cloth is produced, and Togo, where it is highly prized. Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have argued for studying socio-technological phenomena by tracing the actions that bring objects of interest into being. Rather than taking system components—“social forces,” people, and objects—as given and static, this approach not only grants them equal analytical purchase, but also sees each of these elements as continually produced by the webs of relations within the system (see Callon et. al 2002; Latour 2005; Law 2009). Applying this heuristic to the case of the Dutch Wax cloth trade thus helps to elucidate the interactions among designers, users, the cloth itself, historical relationships, and other elements in the makings of the cloth.

Based on six months of ethnographic research in Vlisco’s design studio, my paper for the Borders workshop describes the Design stage in Dutch Wax cloth’s trajectory. I discuss: how designers envision their practice and their relationship to the prospective users of their designs; the significance of the cloth as a West African cultural object in the designers’ process; and how the political, economic, and historical ties between Holland/Europe and Togo/West Africa intervene throughout this process.

Bibliography

Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. "The economy of qualities." Economy and society 31.2 (2002): 194-217.

Curtin, Philip D. Cross-cultural trade in world history. Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Howes, David, ed. Cross-cultural consumption: Global markets, local realities. Routledge, 2002.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press (2005).

Law, John. "Actor network theory and material semiotics." The new Blackwell companion to social theory 1 (2009): 21.

Plankensteiner, Barbara. "African Lace: an industrial fabric connecting Austria and

Nigeria." Anthrovision. Vaneasa Online Journal 1.2 (2013).

Steiner, Christopher B. "Another image of Africa: Toward an ethnohistory of European cloth

marketed in West Africa, 1873-1960." Ethnohistory (1985): 91-110.

Straight, Bilinda. "From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact: The Cross-Cultural Consumption of Mporo Marriage Beads." American Anthropologist 104.1 (2002): 7-21.

Sylvanus, Nina. "The fabric of Africanity Tracing the global threads of authenticity." Anthropological Theory 7.2 (2007): 201-216.

Borders Within the Nations

Paul Schor

External and internal borders in the US census in a historical perspective (1790-1940)

The history of the United States, like that of many countries, has long been written from a strictly national perspective. It has also, at times, been marked by the paradigm of exceptionalism.

This presentation focuses on national norms, specifically population categories produced for the U.S. census, to show how one of the fruits of placing U.S. history in a broader context is to show how technical tools of governance like the census are part and parcel of a national history that is specific rather than exceptional. The transatlantic dimension of this paper is present both in the fact that the theoretical framework of this research owes much to a body of historiography originating in Europe, namely the recent history of the social construction of statistics. In fact, this largely European endeavor could be very helpful for scholars working on the history of state building in the United States. This presentation examines how political decisions and bureaucratic implementation caused the U.S. census to be used as tool to build a national community while also organizing and dividing the nation into separate (and unequal) groups.

The ways in which racial and ethnic categories were constructed, negociated, and imposed through the U.S. census participate in a distinctive national tradition that gives race and ethnicity an unusual importance in the statistical representation of the American population. This specifity was rarely questioned or challenged in the U.S.

Migration of People, Migration of Borders

Lerna Ekmekcioglu

The Republic of Paradox: the “new” Turkey and its step-citizens

Can an Armenian be a Turk? My paper will tell the story of why the answer is “no.” My main intellectual project is to detect the borders –discursive and legal—that differentiate Turk-ness from Armenianness. Operating with the basic assumption that Armenianness and Turkness are social constructions (that there is no “race” or “ethnicity” outside of imagination), my goal is to analyze the historical processes that rendered these identities mutually exclusive.

The two critical and related moments are, first, the 1915 Armenian genocide which had divided people into perpetrators and victims/survivors, and second, the 1923 signing of the Treaty of Lausanne between Turkey and the Allied powers (mainly, the British). The paper will mostly focus on the Treaty of Lausanne, the document by which the international community recognized Turkey as a sovereign state. By this treaty, non-Muslims in Turkey, including the survivors of the wartime massacres, were officially recognized as “minorities.” But it is important to remember that during the peace negotiations in Lausanne, Turkey tried everything not to grant “minority status” to anyone within its borders because the Turkish delegates associated “minority protection” with “outside intervention” and thus saw it as the infringement of their newly-won sovereignty. This was true especially because minority protection was guaranteed by the League of Nations. In fact, Turkey was one of the fifteen countries on which (defeated during World War I, newly established, or significantly expanded) that the Allies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference forced minority protection clauses in exchange for the acknowledgment of the state’s sovereignty. Almost all of these 15 countries resented the “minority clauses” especially because the Great Powers themselves were not bound by such obligations. During the interwar years the minorities situation did not get better not only because of the majority resentment but also because the League turned out to be ineffective in supervising the states bound with minority clauses.

With the Treaty of Lausanne, a reluctant Turkey agreed to guarantee its “non-Moslem nationals” their own family law, schools, and charitable institutions. They could practice their religion and use their languages freely, with no discrimination. Yet when the time came for the drafting of the first constitution in 1924, the Turkish political elite found ways to evade the terms of the Lausanne Treaty. For instance, they consciously left the definition of “Turk-ness” vague so as to bend that definition depending on different political, social, economic, and cultural agendas. This was because Turkey’s political elite aspired to the anti-communautarisme of French Republican citizenship and not the liberal Wilsonian version that contemporary scholars refer to as “multicultural citizenship” or “group-differentiated citizenship,” a version of which dominated the assumptions of the League’s minority regime. The long Ottoman experimentation with creating loyal citizens informed the Turkish conclusion that people should be rewarded with equality when and if they shed their particularistic identities.  But because the Lausanne Treaty gave some people rights to continue their “different” cultures, it meant that some people’s social, religious, ethnic, and other origins remained relevant in the public sphere, a condition that, according to the Turkish leaders, justified their unequal treatment, if not discrimination. But discrimination was only one dimension of the non-Muslim experience in Turkey.

The emergent categories of “Turk” and “Turkish citizen” usually excluded but sometimes included non-Muslims. On one hand, the laws banned minorities from careers in the military and civil bureaucracy, from traveling freely inside the country, and from free association. On the other hand, the new Civil Code of 1926 also applied to the minorities (thus replacing communities’ own family laws), and the new surname law of 1934 allowed—sometimes even required—everyone, including non-Muslims, to take Turkish last names. In 1933, when the Ministry of Education passed new legislation obligating primary school students to recite the “Student’s Pledge” (Andımız) every morning, it did not exempt minority schools. The Student’s Pledge read in full as follows: "I am a Turk, I am righteous, I am hardworking. My principle is to protect my juniors, to respect my elders, and to love my country and my nation better than my own self. My motto is to rise, progress, and go forward. I commit my being to the existence of Turks."

Effectively, then, Turkey forced all Turkish-citizen children to affirm their Turk-ness every day even as it denied some of these children their fundamental citizenship rights on the basis of their non-Turk-ness. This simultaneous estrangement and invitation to belong discloses a paradox: the political elite were attempting to assimilate some groups into a form of Turkness that they had a priori categorized—and legislated—as non-Turk. 

Kyoko Kusakabe

Borderland as friction of terrain: Creating spaces for social reproduction of cross-border women migrant workers in Thailand

As Donnan and Wilson (1999) said, borders define and are defined by people living along the border. In this paper, I argue the significance of international border to define social reproduction of migrant workers. Borders define migrant workers’ relations with the state, market, community and families, and how migrant workers arrange their lives and survival. Based on Katz’s (2001) feminist counter-topographies and Scott’s (2009) concept of “friction of terrain” that people at the margins use to keep state at arm’s lengths, the paper argues how women migrant workers juggle their social reproduction through, beyond, and at the border. It problematizes the differences in how migrant workers are socially constructed in borderland and centerland, how centerland instrumentally splits migrant workers into functions, and how social reproduction is excluded further as they go further away from the border. The paper is based on cases of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand. During 2006 to 2010, we have interviewed 133 (107 women, 26 men) Burmese migrant workers in-depth and conducted a questionnaire survey with 504 workers. The study was conducted in three areas in Thailand: Mae Sot, Three Pagoda Pass and Prapradaeng. The first two are border towns while the last is in the centerland, just south of the capital Bangkok. 

One of the most vivid ways the relations with borders affect migrant workers’ decisions is seen in their childcare arrangement. Those living in Mae Sot have the widest choice of childcare, since they are able to depend on their support system in the Burmese side of the border and further bring them into Thai side more easily than other places. Such arrangement is most difficult in Prapradaeng, where childcare support system is nil even for Thai citizens. It has been seen that childcare arrangements are one of the many different ways migrant workers try to create a “home” for themselves in the place of destination, most of the time by defying and avoiding state regulations and control. For example, they create and replicate Burmese communities in Mae Sot and in pockets of places in centerland, which changes the imagined border that demarcate Thailand and Myanmar from their perspective. In order to survive in the place of destinations, women migrant workers depend much on their own migrant communities. This is a double-edged strategy, since communities and families are both a source of protection and threat for women. They are able to source their support for their reproductive work, finding jobs, safety net during unemployment, but at the same time, most of the sexual assaults that women migrants experience are from their own countrymen, and women migrants are under constant surveillance of their behavior by their fellow Burmese. Women migrant workers transcend international border through their imagined border and further attempts to transform their space in Thailand to make their “home” with a delicate and tense relation with the state, but that does not ensure them freedom from patriarchal control or ease their roles in social reproduction.

Mobility across border under the present economic integration framework allows workers to move easily, but mobility is tied to employment. Mobility of social reproduction across border is systematically discouraged and the only way that migrants are able to maintain some degrees of social reproduction activities for themselves is purely by their own agencies, either by depending on their relatives and friends, or sacrificing their own safety and earnings. Border areas, with its fuzzy governance structure, enable women and men migrant workers to maneuver their social reproduction. But the instrumentality of migrant management policy cuts migrants into functional pieces: as labor power and as consumers. Borderland serves as a terrain to provide asylum for migrants not to be reduced into body parts, and it provides spaces for them to carry out their social reproduction, but with a price to pay and the price is normally paid by women. 

Heather R. Lee

Migration Oriented Businesses and the Spread of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1915-1943

Today, there are more Chinese restaurants than the combined total of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King outlets in the United States. My research tells the story of Chinese restaurants transforming from an ethnic enclave business into one of the largest mass-consumer industries in the United States during an era of pervasive anti-Chinese sentiment. Focusing on New York, which houses the oldest, continuously inhabited Chinatown, this conference paper explains how Chinese immigrants used restaurants to exploit a loophole in exclusionary U.S. immigration policy, which granted restaurant owners the status of merchants and thus the privilege of entering or sponsoring relatives into the United States. On the basis of that loophole, Chinese immigrants built what I call a migration oriented business strategy, through which thousands were able to defy bans on their entry into the United States. Based on archival research and interviews conducted in China, Hong Kong, and New York, my paper explores how, in circumnavigating immigration laws, the Chinese developed a sophisticated system for shuttling labor and capital across the Pacific that accounts for, among other things, the Chinese restaurant industry’s rapid growth in the early twentieth century.

While it barred the entry of Chinese laborers, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its various amendments unintentionally stimulated the formation of ethnic businesses through a system of visa preferences. The Chinese creatively stretched the meaning of visa categories to get around restrictive immigration laws, and shepherded transpacific capital past America’s gatekeepers. This work demonstrates how immigration law and the struggle against it offer a new prism for understanding capital accumulation amongst immigrants and its relationship to the development of a consumer republic. Moreover, by focusing on immigrants’ legal gains, it establishes an alternative relationship of Asians to state development. The Chinese found greater flexibility in federals laws than one might have anticipated during a period in which expanding state power resulted in the loss of legal rights for immigrants. This research illustrates that immigration law sculpted the landscape of economic opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs, funneling their capital resources towards finite migration chances the way, as labor scholars have argued, these same laws created a racialized, immigrant labor pool. This paper is based on qualitative and quantitative research, in which I complement my close readings of archival materials with statistical analyses. 

Transnationalization, Law, and Commodification

Réjane Sénac

Parity and Diversity in Contemporary France: Equality in Questions

My current research puts the French Republic to the test by looking at its promotion of parity, diversity and the controversial discussion on “gender theory” reactivated by the law of May 2013 on same-sex marriage. Within this framework, the challenge of this presentation is to grasp what contemporary uses of parity and diversity say about how topical the equality principle is in 21st Century French society. With this aim in mind, the persistence of inequalities, in particular sexual, racial and social, will not be seen as a mere defect in the implementation of an ideal principle but as an expression of the ambivalence of these principles. Without wishing to embark upon epistemological quarrels, my approach is different from research in political theory, and also in economics and sociology which are often based on “non-ideal theory”. I consider indeed that in order to understand unfairness in the real world, analysis of the principle of justice in action is fundamental. In my perspective, knowledge of what is considered as the best is so required to understand the persistence of inequalities and how aim towards a more egalitarian society. Parity and diversity policies will thus be analyzed as cases studies to understand dilemnas surrounding liberal and republican thought on equality. Do these policies embody the search for biased equality by switching from the political to the ontological, cultural and economic register?

This question sheds light on the reasons why equality remains unobtainable in the French Republic. In particular they invite us to analyse the ambivalence of the French motto, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Those who don’t belong to the republican brotherhood, because of either sexual and/or racial singularity assignation, cannot even begin to look for equality understood as parity of participation by Nancy Fraser and freedom as non-domination by Philip Pettit.

Our hypothesis is that the discursive framing of diversity, as it has emerged in France, challenges the compatibility between three competing frames: republican and liberal equality entrenched in a universalistic tradition; the politics of identity in a multicultural context and a neo-liberal approach embodied by the social investment paradigm. It consists to justify the politics of equality, in particular between the sexes but also between differents cultures, as an investment designed to prevent future social risks such as academic failure, delinquency, urban insecurity and poverty. Similarly to parity, diversity understood as a spur for policy innovation, is not a French exception, but rather a discursive strategy to be understood in the light of challenges posed to European societies by the growing recognition of differences, and of policy transfers from the EU-level used to address multiple inequalities using the same policy paradigm. From this perspective, policy reforms designed to ensure parity and diversity contribute to the establishment of institutional support for ‘conditional equality’, subordinate to the ‘performance’ of difference. Performance is both seen as a mise en scene and estimated as an added value.

In order to test the hypothesis outlined above, we cross-referenced the analysis of academic, economic, institutional and political policy documents on diversity with a qualitative survey carried out at a time when diversity was beginning to show incipient signs that it was being incorporated into institutional thinking (2008-2009). This study consisted in 163 personal interviews with political, institutional, economic, labor-union, religious and NGO leaders, and academics. From a discursive-institutional perspective, we investigated the French republican principle of universalistic equality and the diagnosis of a society divided by multiple types of discrimination. After questioning the link between parity and diversity politics, we analysed whether the accumulation of discrimination criteria could be interpreted as a positive, albeit ambivalent type of intersectionality.  This is because for individuals belonging to groups that are marginalized or discriminated against, it constitutes both an asset to be included in the public or economic arenas, and an obstacle to being fully recognized as a ‘peer’. 

Maxime Forest

Institutionalizing Intersectionality? Blurring boundaries in the realm of EU anti-discrimination policies

This paper addresses the developments of equality and anti-discrimination policies in the EU over the past decade, through the lens of current debates on multiple discriminations and intersecting inequalities.

Grounded into a discursive-sociological approach to the Europeanization of gender & other equality policies (Lombardo, Forest, 2012), and the emerging scholarly literature on the institutionalization of intersectionality in the EU (see: Krizsan, Skjeie, Squires, 2012; IFJP special issue by Kantola and Nouisiainen 2009), it firstly pays attention to the recent, unachieved shift towards a multiple discrimination agenda at the EU level.  In particular, it considers whether this agenda, which started to blossom from the late 2000s onwards, has led to blur the boundaries between different inequality strands – both in terms of collective action and policy making, or resulted in a merely “additive” anti-discrimination approach by which various strands of inequalities are framed separately (as identity grounds) but jointly addressed by policies (through the register of mainstreaming) (Squires, 2007).

Secondly, the paper focuses on the developments of equality and antidiscrimination policies at the domestic level, mainly under the impetus given by EU antidiscrimination policy. While recent attempts to map the institutionalization of intersectionality - in the form of complex anti-discrimination policy instruments and policy framings addressing more than two discrimination grounds at once, have pointed out the “changing nature of European Equality regimes” (Krizsan, Skjeie, Squires, 2012), it argues instead that no truly integrated approaches have been implemented so far in the Member States (MS).

The paper further analyses the patterns of convergence and variation around multiple inequalities, focusing on Europeanization as the main convergence factor, which acquires different levels of relevance, depending on the respective paths of institutionalisation of the equality policies in MS. This path dependency towards domestic political, institutional, and discursive legacies – especially in the fields of gender equality - is addressed as the main variable explaining the existing differences in the institutionalisation of policies tackling multiple inequalities.

Drawing upon the empirical work carried out under QUING (Quality in Gender+ Equality Policies, FP7, 2007-2011), the additional data collected for the comparative chapter on Southern European Countries published in Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires (2012), and for a volume published with Carmen Dominguez and Réjane Sénac (2013), the paper brings evidences from the Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish cases to support the analysis. It concludes by critically discussing the potential of an intersectional focus to effectively support equality and anti-discrimination policies, especially as the Europeanization framework is being challenged in most of the MS.

Imagined Borders, Sexuality, and Religion

David Paternotte

We are all French… And they are the nationalists!

This paper examines the mobilization of national references in same-sex marriage debates in France between 2011 and 2014. Unlike Bruno Perreau, Camille Robcis or Eric Fassin, it does not look at the interactions between the regulation of kinship and the production of the French nation, but analyzes the role of the nation as a central symbolic and discursive repertoire in recent French debates about marriage equality. Indeed, both the nation and national symbols were invoked by all the actors involved. However, these actors were not pursuing the same goals, and they did not use national references to serve the same purposes.

This exercise aims at complexifying recent debates on sexual nationalism. Going beyond Puar’s restrictive and US-centric notion of homonationalism, it highlights the pervasiveness of national references in French debates as well as the complexity of its intersections with sexual politics. Reminding Jane Jenson’s concept of ‘universe of political discourse’ (1989), it confirms the hegemony of the national frame in the French public sphere and its positioning as a crucial site of struggle. All actors share some of its basic assumptions and have to position themselves within that universe, which functions as a political grammar. At the same time, they engage with it in different ways and contribute to transform what is meant by the nation in contemporary France. Research must therefore look at the diverging and conflicting representations of the nation at play in these debates before assuming how they interact with sexual politics. As will be shown, the French case is particularly fascinating as it combines in a single debate several of the definitions suggested in the literature.

After a brief literature review, this paper proceeds in three steps, which are chronologically presented as three acts of the same play. First, I look at the controversies sparked by the 2011 poster of the Marche des Fiertés within LGBT communities. Second, I analyze same-sex marriage debates between 2012 and 2014. Third, I discuss actions launched by Belgian citizens to support French same-sex marriage defenders. These three cases display different connections between nationalism and sexual politics, and invite us to rethink current debates on homonationalism. 

Malick Ghachem

Immigrants, Empire, and Gay Marriage:A Comparison of the American and French Paths to Legalization

The very recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court on gay marriage provide an opportunity to compare the path to legalization of gay marriage in France and the United States. Dating back to the revolutionary era, the two nations have vied more or less directly in a longstanding contest for leadership status in the area of human rights. As of late April 2013, France has legislated gay marriage and adoption as matters of national law (by way of a reform of the Civil Code). Not to be outdone, the United States, acting through judicial rather than legislative channels, has followed suit with the Windsor decision striking down the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. And yet there remains no such thing as a national “right to gay marriage” in the United States. Differences in the French and American traditions of separation of powers, federalism, and of equality are clearly central to these contrasting yet convergent paths.

In order to get a handle on what is a very large and complex task of comparative analysis, this paper proposes to focus on the recognition of same-sex marriages between nationals and foreigners. Under the Windsor decision and its implementation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the American federal government now appears to be committed to equal treatment of heterosexual and same-sex marriages between American and foreign nationals. By contrast, the National Assembly’s 2013 reform of the French Civil Code introduced a remarkable set of conflict of laws provisions. Among the newest additions to the Civil Code, these provisions have a curiously anachronistic character to them that seems to hearken back unmistakably to the French colonial experience. One provision makes the “conditions de fond” of a marriage (a phrase that denotes the rules, unrelated to sexual orientation, governing eligibility for marriage generally) subject to the “personal law” of each spouse – which is to say, the national law of the country of which that spouse is a citizen. Another provision qualifies the apparent limitation on the scope of same-sex marriage for immigrants and foreigners in France by permitting two same-sex persons to contract marriage if, for at least one of them, either her “personal law” or the law of the nation in which she legally resides permits same-sex marriage.

To whom are these provisions meant to apply? One theory is that sans papiers are to be denied the benefits of the legalization of same-sex marriage. That seems true at the level of statutory law, though French judicial doctrine holds otherwise, on the grounds that marriage is a “fundamental right.” Another answer evokes the experience of empire and religion. Under the terms of a May 29, 2013 implementation memo issued by the Garde des Sceaux (Minister of Justice), same- sex marriages between French nationals and the nationals of eleven foreign nations– including Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslav republics – will not be recognized as a matter of France’s treaty commitments with these nations. This contrast with the American experience speaks to the specifics of France’s colonial and immigrant past, and reveals the intersections between sexuality, empire, and national identity that are obscured by moral or institutional readings of rival Franco-American gay marriage narratives.

On the one hand, the notion of a “personal law” has an abstract or universal character to it: that is, the category of personal law exists because, in the contemporary world, people cross borders and establish loving relationships with persons of different nations. But contemporary French multicultural diversity and the rise of France as a nation of global culture are very closely linked to the colonial experience. In particular, the new marriage regulations reflect a will to transpose onto the contemporary French demographic the differential regulation of French and colonial subjects, in places like Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, by either French or Muslim (or Jewish) “personal law.” Religion and religious difference are therefore at the heart of the new conflict of laws rules, as one might expect in an area of law that involves the intersection of sexuality, national borders, and the Catholic sacrament of marriage. In this way, the legalization of same-sex marriage has paradoxically revealed the limitations of “laïcité” as the operative norm or theory of French marriage law.

But if the contemporary same-sex marriage regime has inherited this aspect of “la fracture coloniale,” the dynamics of the new conflicts rules remain ambiguous. For one thing, the definition of a “resortissant” of a foreign country (the term used in the regulations issued by the Garde des Sceaux) is unclear. Second, the motivation for the exclusion of certain foreign “resortissants” from the benefits of same-sex marriage has a double-edged character as an instrument of both domestic and foreign policy. While the treaty commitments seem to embody a kind of religious “exemption” from the application of French universal law (a purportedly mandatory deference towards the governments of former French colonies in which Islam is the dominant religion and where same-sex marriage is illegal), the actual language of these agreements points instead to the protection of French citizens living overseas as the operative impulse. The 1962 Evian accords that concluded the French- Algerian war of independence, for example, provide that French nationals who remained in Algeria after 1962 would retain a French “civil” and “personal” status that Algerian authorities would be required to “respect and apply.” (The 1957 agreement on Tunisian independence contains similar provisions.)

In this way, the new conflicts rules seem designed to shield a preexisting, extraterritorial French heterosexual marriage regime – one that, by virtue of applying outside of France’s present-day boundaries, is itself another legacy of the imperial experience. In theory, that protection could extend to same-sex marriages contracted between French nationals living in foreign nations where same-sex marriage is prohibited. But the treaties in question, which date back to a period before the rise of the same-sex marriage movement, were clearly not adopted with this purpose in mind, nor is it obvious that the 2013 conflicts rules were designed to that effect.

I conclude with a set of observations about the new American same-sex marriage regime in light of the French comparison. On the one hand, the notion of “religious” exemptions from civil laws is a very American thing, a familiar part of free exercise doctrine in the United States since well before the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. On the other hand, the absence of a national marriage law means, by definition, that American same-sex marriage law has no parallel to the French conflicts rules. American law embodies no deference to foreign jurisdictions in which same-sex marriage is illegal. It seems to presume, at least in the aftermath of Windsor, that immigrants to the United States will be able to partake of the benefits of American law irrespective of the former colonial relationships in which their nations of origin happen to be entangled. That presumption, in turn, can itself be seen as an act of a specifically American imperial legal imagination. But it is a vision of empire unencumbered by the particular territorial commitments, fractures, and anxieties that seem to animate the French regime.

Conceptualizing Borders

Benjamin Boudou

The Concept of Hospitality in Political Thought

Hospitality has known a theoretical revival since the 1990s in various fields of research, in order to address both a historical question (why hospitality seems to have disappear from our social vocabulary?), and a theoretical one (is it possible to address contemporary issues of mobility, integration and immigration with this concept?).

Often inspired by Jacques Derrida’s philosophical insight on the contradictory nature of hospitality, scholars tried to consider the moment of welcoming others, crossing boundaries, or giving time and space to strangers as a normative and critical ideal, which should help evaluating real policies through the lens of ethics.

The challenge for political theorists is to rediscover and reconstruct the political purpose of hospitality. In order to do this, they need to get rid of three clichés.

Firstly, the idea that hospitality is a manifestation of generosity; if hospitality may be or have been a matter of beneficence towards strangers, it is first and foremost a power relation. It involves different sorts of rights and claims, a more or less solid hierarchy, possibly some form of violence – symbolic or not.

Secondly, hospitality would be a synonym for openness. In fact, hospitality relations are more complicated: they distribute membership, define border policies, and shape political communities according to a specific balance between openness and closure regarding foreigners. Hospitality can be seen as a boundary apparatus that organizes relations between people wanting to come in and people already in.

Thirdly, many authors tried to define a ‘law of hospitality’. In other words, there would be an essence of hospitality entailing rights and duties that can be known a priori. On the contrary, hospitality is necessary relational, i.e. its meaning is made of various rules evolving with the related entities. Thus, defining hospitality means on the one hand identifying various ‘problematizations’, historically embedded in networks of concepts (what a foreigner, a border, or a political community means is always changing); on the other hand, explaining how the concept helps addressing contemporary issues.

I want to show why understanding hospitality as an ethical standard, a religious duty or an old-fashioned private virtue diverts us from seeing its political purposes. Thus, I will present a short genealogy of the political meanings of hospitality, through the identification of various historical moments or problematizations, and explain what are the features of hospitality that could make sense for contemporary politics. 

Laurence Roulleau-Berger

Rethinking the Question of Migration: multisituated inequalities, individuation and struggle for respect

Chinese migrants today are emblematic figures to analyze the transformation of local and global orders in China and in other countries in the world. Men and women are moving, circulating on different migratory routes, coming back to their native country, village, or city, and leaving again. They are acquiring migratory experiences and their social, ethnic, and gender identities are often tested. In China trials are social and gendered, in European and African countries trials are social, ethnic, and gendered. The geography of Chinese migratory spaces reveals new centralities and new peripheries, which are linked by intracontinental networks in China and transnational, diasporic, ethnic ones in Europe. Chinese migrations reveal new societal narratives in the globalization process. As contemporary societies are getting much more complex, economies are both local and global, more and more multipolar. Spaces of mobility are situated at different local, national and international scales and produce spatio-temporal frameworks. New Chinese migrations also forced us to consider diffracted inequalities and reticular dominations in multiple contexts, in different local and societal space. Given that hierarchies related to a new social economic, political, moral and cultural global order are constructed between these inequalities.

So biographies become more and more diversified, individualized and cosmopolitan, they produce plural identities built not only in different situations but also in multisituated times and spaces. Chinese migrants are constrained to reconfigure their identity in any new situation and are struggling to get social and public recognition in each new context. Chinese migrants are producers of competences in mobilization, reflexivity and resistance as well as being involved in a work of reconfiguration of identities. The Chinese migrants are positioned and position themselves in a diversity of spaces and temporalities. Competence asserts itself in its capacity to mobilize repertories of different roles and to combine individual experiences and resources of different natures in a more or less original way. Chinese migrants, especially the second generation in China and in Europe is demanding more and more respect, are producing new collective resistances’ competences. China’s internal and international migrations provide an international “geography of anger” to quote A. Appaduraï.

The conception of migration according to a constructivist approach therefore means conceiving them in relation to reticular dominations as well as social and mobility competences. In their experience of mobility and in their never-ending endeavor to attribute meaning to what they do, spatially and economically constrained Chinese migrants produce norms and accepted behaviors. As co-producers of the social worlds they inhabit or pass through, they always have at their disposal a greater or lesser capacity for the interpretation and invention of roles in diverse situations, which vary according to social, economic, cultural and symbolic resources.

Citizenship in a Global Era

Patrick Weil

The Paradoxes of Citizenship as Human Right

Citizenship has multiple different definitions, but three are most often distinguished. The first is legal —linking an individual to a nation-state. The second definition is political and civic. In a democracy, adult citizens elect their representatives, while foreign residents and minors participate in civil and political society in other ways. Finally there is the psychological dimension: “the feeling that one belongs, is connected through one’s sense of emotional attachment, identification and loyalty.” In nation-states, this feeling is created by membership in an “imagined community,” constructed from official cultural frames of social belonging within a nation-state. These three dimensions do not always correspond or coincide, but the legal dimension, manifested through passports and national IDs, confers a legal status upon more than 99% of human beings, independently of their sense of belonging or degree of participation. In this article I will deal with this dimension of citizenship, which is synonymous with “nationality” in international law.

Citizenship―the legal link between the individual and the nation-state―has developed its own independent history. In the last twenty-five years, nationality laws have been the subject of polarizing debates. The first set of disputes concerned the content of these laws. Through historical and comparative studies, scholars have emphasized several “structural” oppositions (ascription vs. consent, jus soli vs. jus sanguinis) that reflect different national identities or meanings of citizenship.

The second and more recent set of debates has arisen from a crisis of legitimacy of “nationality.” Nationality is said to have been undermined both by external compe- tition from other affiliations (sub-, trans-, or supranational, ethnic, religious, gender- related, etc.) and by its own inegalitarian qualities.

I have previously shown how old debates over the differences in the content of various states’ nationality laws have become irrelevant. Nationality laws based on jus sanguinis (a French invention) or on jus soli (a tradition maintained by the British) have their own history developed independently of conceptions of national identity. In this paper, I argue that the second set of debates has exaggerated the crisis of citizenship. In fact, far from being dépassé, national-state citizenship has developed a new vitality. Once based, before the American and French Revolutions, on allegiance to vs. protection of the King, and transformed in the nineteenth century into a conditional status based on rights but also on duties, citizenship has recently reached a new stage of its development as an element of an unalienable right.

In the US, courts and governments have secured citizenship, bringing about a new stage in its development: reversing the traditional dependency of the individual on the state, they recognized that sovereignty belongs to citizens. This model was presented by the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 1950s, but originated in a movement of the whole international community which aimed to guarantee the protections of citizenship to all individuals: it reduced statelessness, securing it for 99.8% of human beings; it gave rise to multiple citizenship and, paradoxically, reinforced nation-states as the main providers of the “the right to have rights.” Far from signifying a “post-national” or “disaggregated” form of citizenship, these legal developments, in the context of globalization, consolidate and reinforce national citizenship. In the context of globalization and the development of advanced technology, a new strategic collaboration between the individual and the state has emerged as their interests have converged.

Kendall Thomas

Defending the Dream: Barack Obama and the Politics of Racial Neoliberalism

Like his predecessors, President Barack Obama has used the powers of the U.S. presidency to support and defend the continued dominance of neoliberal politics and political economy as a mode of governmentality at home, and abroad.  However, Mr. Obama’s presidency may be distinguished from the political and economic neoliberalism of previous administrations in the energy and effort he has devoted to extending the reach and power of what might be called cultural neoliberalism.  If neoliberal governance politics seeks to maintain the power and prerogatives of the market-regulated state, neoliberal cultural politics aims to remake the whole of society in the image of the market.  Its agenda (to quote John Berger) is to cultivate popular consent to, and build a cultural consensus around “a view of the world in which everything and everybody” can be reduced to a “calculation of profit” that can be packaged, promoted, and sold, purchased and consumed.

Barack Obama is the first U.S. President in the neoliberal era whose “background,” “politics,” “professed values and ideas” and personal skills have uniquely positioned him to “sell” neoliberal programs and policies (deregulation, privatization, austerity, unemployment, corporate bailouts and the like) to a group of Americans whose lives, families and communities have been disproportionately ravaged and deracinated by the social decimation, cultural deprivation, and economic devastation that has accompanied the rise of the neoliberal corporate-financial market state.  Retooling the “consumer marketing” that put it in the White House—and placing the person and “personal politics” of the President at its center—the Obama organization has “branded” race to package and promote a distinctively racial neoliberalism.  If Ronald Regan was our first Neoliberal President, Barack Obama is our first Black Neoliberal President.

Like the broader neoliberal project it has served to legitimate, the racial neoliberal ideology (and policy) of which Mr. Obama has served as Salesman-in-Chief continues and consolidates the “economization” of American politics and political culture that was begun under Ronald Reagan, but “in a different color.”  Race has always been a foundational feature of capitalism, but racial neoliberalism is “racial capitalism” on steroids.  The neoliberal “brand management” of race under Mr. Obama has “financialized” and “profitized” black civic publics and black political culture in ways that no American president before him could have done.  Indeed, and even more decadently, racial neoliberalism marks, brands and markets blackness itself as a political consumption good (the symbolic connection to the brutal marking and branding under slavery is both ironic and uncanny).

Racial neoliberalism exploits and increases the economic and political market “value” of race in current “ethno-racial” conjuncture.  (Consider the seamless corporate branding of “diversity” that the application of consumer marketing strategy has made possible.)  At the same time it consolidates and extends the political dominance of the financial-market state, racial neoliberalism provides an ideological alibi which simultaneously “hides and strengthens” the economic order that maintains white supremacy and black inequality in the Age of Obama.  In short, Barack Obama’s racial neoliberalism is   a decidedly illiberal neoliberal racism.

In “Branding the Dream:  Barack Obama and the Politics of Racial Neoliberalism,” I explore the impact and implications of Barack Obama’s racial neoliberalism on and for the future of racial democracy in America. I argue that effective resistance to the neoliberal de-democratization of U.S. politics and political culture under the Obama presidency must reject the ideological siren call of the “post racial” and unapologetically place the defense of vulnerable racial publics and racial citizenship a central component of its political analysis and strategy.