"Fear of a Black Planet": Afro-French Youth and the Emergence of a Global Hip Hop Nation, 1982–92

The arrival in France in the early 1980s of the Hip Hop Cultural Movement – a distinctly Afro-diasporic movement, birthed and nurtured in New York's African American and Latino communities – signaled a watershed for Afro-French communities, as well as for the French nation at large.  In a political climate that saw both the rise to popularity of the xenophobic National Front party and the unprecedented mass mediation of controversies around immigration and French national identity, Afro-French youth's embrace of this newest African-American cultural form often took center stage.  When in January of 1984 the world's first nationally and weekly broadcast Hip Hop television show debuted in France, it became the first show in the history of French television to have an Afro-French host.  Within a few years' time, and in large part due to the weekly television show, Hip Hop had established itself as a central organizing force in the everyday life-worlds of many Afro-French youth.  So, when in April 1990 the Black nationalist-inspired American Hip Hop group "Public Enemy" arrived in Paris to perform at the prestigious Zenith concert hall – only days after the release of their album entitled "Fear of a Black Planet" – the media, law enforcement, and much of the French public were in utter panic, fearing the possibility of a race riot.

Drawing on a broad range of archival collections (literary and audio-visual), as well as oral histories, this paper demonstrates how through Afro-French youth's participation in the increasingly transnational cultural movement – sometimes referred to as the "Global Hip Hop Nation" – they began staking claim to a broader Black collective identity and in ways that disrupted prevailing notions of what it meant to be French and of African descent.