In a piece published on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website, Julien Suaudeau, lecturer of French and Francophone Studies, and co-author Mame-Fatou Niang of Carnegie Mellon University, argue that France "must be anti-racist through universalism and universalist through anti-racism."
From the article:
"How can we move from this ethnic and Eurocentric, civilising and imposing universalism, from the hypocritical ideology of Ernest Renan, which Césaire denounced, to what Césaire calls true humanism, humanism made to the measure of the world? In other words, how can French universalism reinvent itself as an anti-racist and postcolonial co-production? Asking these questions is not to reject universalism, but rather to question the forms in which it manifests itself and how they relate to reality and material conditions. They push us to understand what these values mean for someone living in the countryside, or in the suburbs of a big city (banlieue), or for a French person whose background is that of an erased and obscured colonial history. In line with the thinking of Jean Jaurès, the universalism emerging from these questions would start from the real and move towards the ideal."
Suaudeau is the coordinator of the non-intensive language sequence in French and the director of the Film Studies Program. He is the author of four novels: Dawa (2014), Le français (2015), Ni le feu ni la foudre (2016), Le sang noir des hommes (2019). His fiction work focuses on contemporary France seen through the lenses of colonial and postcolonial history, immigration, laïcité, terrorism, and socioeconomic inequalities. His books explore the blind spots of the Great French Narrative, in search of repressed voices and counter-accounts.