ABSTRACT
Whereas race is formally written out of the hegemonic cultural and political archive in the French Republic, issues concerning the black condition have reemerged in the dominant public and political spheres since the turn of the millennium. Various self-identified black movements and organisations are currently challenging colonial legacies and their epistemic, political, social, representational, and economic articulations.
How does one manoeuvre through a supposedly “race-less” discourse and space when the act of identifying race as a category of subordination risks the backlash of being disqualified as communitarian against the background of Republicanism as an abstract universal? What kind of collective subjectivation processes take place against the background of spatial–racist and anti-black subordination, and which conceptions of black solidarity are mobilised?
This chapter explores these questions by drawing on findings from long-term critical ethnographic activist research with a predominantly black collective from the outskirts of Paris and through a critical engagement with theoretical conceptions of black solidarity. A form of black solidarity will be discussed that goes beyond identity yet still takes the epistemological frame of the lived experiences of anti-blackness seriously.
