Black America, Black France: The 1980s, Hip Hop, and Colorblindness across the Atlantic

This paper explores the case of a postcolonial France that has become the second largest market for the production and consumption of Hip Hop in the world (behind only the U.S.). Over the course of the 1980s, just as Hip Hop was becoming rooted in France, the country was also becoming home to the largest African-descended population in Europe. In the face of prevailing, assimilationist conceptions of Frenchness, the first large wave of French citizens of African descent (born and raised in the metropole) embraced the (African)American cultural form of Hip Hop as a transnational frame for cultural and political engagement. These postcolonial youth challenged the domesticating project of French nationalism by mobilizing conceptions of blackness and Americanness that allowed them to articulate their own local, racialized subjectivities. The French state and mass media responded with an equally forceful rhetorical distancing of Frenchness from Americanness and American racialism from French colorblindness. This paper examines these kinds of transnational and transatlantic (dis)identifications, arguing that at the heart of growing French racial anxieties was a set of differing visions of the United States and (African)Americanness: for French Hip Hoppers, the U.S. was the birthplace and breeding ground of a cultural movement with which they deeply identified, a site of exceptional creativity, and a principal source of their cultural imaginary (through film, television, and music). On the other hand, for many public officials and much of French society at large, the U.S. represented an example not to be emulated: the embodiment of disastrous urban policy, unbridled capitalism, entrenched racism, and a failed, presumed "American model" of multiculturalism. So, while many French feared the importation of a harmful American multiculturalism, postcolonial youth were empowered by the idea of a cultural form that could articulate their racialized experiences in an otherwise emphatically "colorblind" national context.