Introduction

The introduction outlines the key concepts that inform the analysis of gender and black spatiality in this study. Framing the 2005 banlieue protests as a turning point for the visibility of blackness in contemporary France, it contextualises the spatial exclusion of racialised and ethnicised subjects in this space. It therefore examines the mobilisation of anti-immigrant rhetoric by Nicholas Sarkozy in his ascent to the French presidency (2007–2012), racialised urban policing during his time as Minister of Interior (2002–2004, 2005–2007) and the paradoxical political ascendency of women of colour during this period. Adopting the approach of critical black geographies, it questions the idea of an emergent new “black question”, this chapter makes a case for the study of strategies that maintain racialised hierarchies and displace blackness outside of French and European spaces. Framing the study as a dialogue between the political memoires of “spectacular” black women such as Rama Yade-Zimet and Christiane Taubira, and narratives of the everyday, the introduction makes a case for the political valency of reading black spatiality through AfroFrench women's narratives.