ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 presents the crux of the book's critical intervention, drawing on I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956) by Langston Hughes to frame flânerie is an embodied movement of relation (wandering) which is the site for a reflection on racialised and gendered identities (wondering). Proposing the figure black flâneuse as a means of delinking black spatiality from the spectacle of protest, it presents “walking as method” as an analytical framework and relationality as its theoretical intervention. Conceptualising the figure of the black flâneuse from cinematic narrative form through and alongside the gaze of the camera on the bodies of black women. The chapter consists of an analysis of Cecile Emeke's Flâner (2015), the French edition of the Strolling web series, in which she interviews Afrodiasporic subjects in cities across the world; Pascale Obolo's short film, La femme invisible (2010), which stages black women's invisibility in French media space; and Mame-Fatou Niang's documentary Mariannes Noires (2016), which weaves portraits of seven AfroParisian women into the figure of a nameless black women wandering the streets of Paris. Illustrating how black visuality (the gaze) and racialised urban geographies (spatiality) intersect to produce the (mis)recognition of AfroFrench women as “the stranger”, the analysis in this chapter casts the black flâneuse as a figure that surfaces imaginaries that confine blackness “the space of the banned” (the banlieue). It therefore makes a case for reading the spatiality of blackness in AfroFrench narratives, through schema of relational identity, gendered embodiment and black visuality.
