Alec G. Hargreaves

‘Diversity’ policies, integration and internal security: The case of France

The term ‘cultural diversity’ has been widely used in France since the beginning of the 21st century as a standard way of referring to policies aimed at improving the representation of ethnic minorities in the audio-visual media. Frequently invoked, the notion of ‘diversity’ is seldom questioned. While endowed with a powerful incantatory power, it is not without its problems. Its looseness obfuscates the policy objectives pursued in its name, just as its seeming novelty prevents us from seeing those initiatives in a historical perspective. Tracing the genealogy of diversity policies in France, this article demonstrates that they have sought not only to promote the integration of ethnic minorities but also – and no less importantly – to protect internal security.

Introduction: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies

Over the past decade, there has been a sustained reflection – in conferences, journals, monographs, edited collections – on the nature and usefulness of postcolonial studies as a field of enquiry. To cite just a couple of the more prominent recent publications, a special issue of New Formations, “After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies” (Gopal and Lazarus), and the apocalyptically titled dossier in PMLA, “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” (Yaeger), have described a field in crisis, uncertain of its moral, political and intellectual moorings. Yet simultaneously with announcements of its demise, postcolonial studies is being reinvigorated through engagement with academic partners beyond its heartland in English literature departments: postcolonial studies is dead, long live postcolonial studies, so to speak. For, if postcolonialism has increasingly been challenged by the emergence of various other intellectual paradigms, including Atlantic studies, transnationalism and globalization, there have also been numerous attempts to draw more extensively on the postcolonial paradigm and to define more clearly the nature of postcolonial studies in non-English-language contexts, simultaneously borrowing from and challenging the established “norms” of anglophone postcolonial criticism. It is the dual nature of this debate that we seek to trace in the contributions to this special issue on “New Directions in Postcolonial Studies”, which are drawn from a conference that we co-organized (30 November–2 December 2006) on the “Boundaries and Limits of Postcolonialism” at the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University, in conjunction with the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies. As scholars working on “postcolonial” issues within the disciplinary context of French/francophone studies, our perspective is informed both by specific debates amongst scholars working on French-language material and more general debates across various disciplines on the status of postcolonial studies. To approach the postcolonial from a French/francophone studies perspective can be rather fraught, for “francophone” and “postcolonial” studies have often been perceived as rival or even antagonistic academic fields. This antagonism has been particularly evident in France itself – and most notably in French literature departments there – where the postcolonial paradigm has regularly been stigmatized as an excessively simplistic and politically correct “Anglo-Saxon” model that has little to contribute to the analysis of francophone contexts. The pioneering efforts of French scholars such as Jean-Marc Moura and Jacqueline Bardolph in engaging with postcolonial studies have until recently remained marginalized within the French context. Consequently, it is largely scholars of French-language material in the anglophone world who have managed to initiate a dialogue with postcolonial criticism (e.g. Hargreaves and McKinney; Forsdick and Murphy;