Critical Race Theory and the Multicultural French Enlightenment

Abstract

F or specialists of the eighteenth century, teaching the history of race is a necessary dimension of our practice. We are experts of the age when the modern conception of race coalesced through (and in service of) enterprises of global economic and military power that were fueled by enslavement, colonization, exploitation, and genocide of peoples designated as other. Antiracist protests of 2020 have brought urgency to examining this history in our classrooms. Yet as I have written elsewhere, there remains extraordinary resistance to and controversy surrounding the concept of race and its study, especially in the French context. 1 For scholar-pedagogues who take up the challenge of teaching race in the eighteenth century, it is essential to work together to share resources for building curricula, methods, courage, and creativity that will foster deep inquiry and learning for students and professors alike. It is in this spirit that I will discuss-though not prescribe-some of my own experiments in teaching race in the eighteenth-century French empire through the lenses of diversity, decolonization, multiculturalism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). While certain scholars object to the use of CRT, deeming it an inapplicable or unwelcome American import into the study of French texts and cultural phenomena, I strongly disagree with this rigid appraisal. CRT not only attends to the historical period in question, but can illuminate structural forms of discrimination that are evident in artistic, social, economic, and political life in the first French empire. It is

The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies

“…Though it may seem far afield, the way eighteenth‐century literary studies imagines what can and can't be said or known about Africa has been invariably shaped by this intellectual and institutional inheritance, which has led to a suspicion of the literary canon, anxieties over the limits of the discipline, and a wariness of reiterating the epistemic oppression of the Enlightenment even when the intent is to dismantle it. We've entered another critical moment in which a growing interest in making the field more “inclusive” has triggered an interrogation of the intellectual colonization that excludes autochthonous knowledge‐making methods from academic conversations (Aljoe, 2012; Allen, 2011; Huang, 2021; Koretsky, 2020; Lubey, 2020; Mallipeddi, 2014; Niccolazo, 2021a, 2021b; Pichichero, 2020; Shanafelt, 2021; Sinanan, 2022; Zuroski, 2020). And the place of “presentism” in this work has once again become a hot button issue in both academia and the media, with some historians and commentators cautioning against the dangers of shaping the story of the past to meet contemporary personal and political needs and others making the case that the past is always written in service to the present—a debate recently fueled, not coincidentally, by an opinion piece expressing reservations about Black Atlantic approaches to African history (Blain, 2022; Sweet, 2022).…”

“…Those who study the Black Atlantic and the afterlife of slavery have done a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to interrogating assumptions about how the written record of modernity can and should be interpreted. However, Christy Pichichero (2022) and Michelle Wright (2015) have cautioned against interpellating global “Blackness” through overly narrow frames—such as a “Middle Passage epistemology” that follows foot in footprint behind a predominately North American progress narrative in order to dismantle it, resulting in an invariably limited story of Black life. It's likewise important to be wary of the impulse to continually frame Africa as a mere extension of Black Atlantic history and culture (Olaloku‐Teriba, 2018; Thomas, 2018).…”