Knowing Race: African Youth in France at the End of Empire

After World War II, French and African youth were enlisted as critical agents in the process of transforming France and its African empire into a transcontinental, multiracial democracy. French leaders believed that rising and future generations of French and African young people would have to develop genuine bonds of solidarity for such a radical political undertaking to succeed. This emphasis on interpersonal contact and intercultural exchange became hallmarks of strategies to “manage” diversity in postwar liberal democracies and continues to inform popular conceptions of inclusive pluralism. But then as now, this carried unequal burdens for French and African youth. This unevenness was patently obvious to the few thousand black African students and trainees in metropolitan France in the 1950s. Encounters with everyday racism, from lecture halls and dormitories to cafes or in the street, gave African youth a unique perspective on the very real limits of the promise of postwar pluralism. Their lived experience exposed the disjuncture between rhetorical commitments to democratizing the empire and policies and practices that reproduced colonial relations of power and privilege, and they clearly articulated that disjuncture in student magazines, memoirs, poetry, interviews, and film.

This paper uses these sources to recover the work of francophone African youth as producers of knowledge about race in postwar Europe as they moved between metropole and colony in the twilight of empire. Their reflections on liberal pluralism in the postwar decades anticipate many of the analytical tools of decolonial and critical race theory, and shed new light on what we think we know about race, pluralism, and democracy today.