Racing the Republic

RACING THE REPUBLIC

ETHNICITY AND INEQUALITY IN FRANCE

IN AMERICAN AND WORLD PERSPECTIVE

An international and interdisciplinary conference

at the University of California, Berkeley

7 and 8 September 2007

Organized by

Loïc Wacquant (Sociology, UC-Berkeley), Tyler Stovall (History, UC-Berkeley), and Heddy Riss (Program Director, Center on Institutions and Governance, IGS UC-Berkeley)

Participants

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC-Berkeley. She is the author of Gender in the Hindu Nation (2003) and co-editor of Right-Wing Women across the Globe (2002). She has published numerous articles on gender, sexuality, racializations, religion, postcoloniality, diaspora and spatialities in relation to transnational feminisms, social movements (feminist, queer, anti-racist, and right-wing), and political conflict. Her geographical areas of specialization are India and France.

Elizabeth Colwill is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. Her research and teaching interests include the intersecting histories of gender, revolution, and slavery, with a focus on the French Caribbean.

She is working on a monograph on gender, ritual, and slave emancipation in revolutionary Saint Domingue, recently supported by a fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Her essays have appeared in journals such as French Historical Studies and The Journal of Women’s History as well as in edited volumes on Queen Marie-Antoinette and on the Haitian revolution.

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His specialty is the history of racial ideologies in the United States, South Africa, and Western Europe. His many books include The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), White Supremacy (1981), The Arrogance of Race (1988); Black Liberation, and the Comparative Imagination (1995). His most recent book, Racism: A Short History (2002) has been translated into five languages.

Ramon Grosfoguel is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC-Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Maison des Science de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris. He has published widely on comparative Caribbean migrations to the United States and Western Europe, Latinos in the United States, and on the political-economy of the world-system. His most recent book is Colonial Subjects:Puerto Ricans in Global Perspective (2003).

Veronique Helenon is Assistant Professor of History in the African-New World Studies program, Florida International University. She is a graduate of EHESS-Paris and a past recipient of a Fulbright scholarship in Africana Studies. Her field is the history of the African diaspora with a special emphasis on the French-speaking diaspora. Her research also looks at the Caribbean as well as colonialism and French Hip-Hop.

David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at UC-Berkeley and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity and Postethnic America (2006). His recent papers relevant to this conference include “From Identity to Solidarity,” Daedalus (2006) and “American Ethnoracial History and the Amalgamation Narrative,” Journal of American Ethnic History (2006).

Tabitha Kanogo is Professor of African History in the History Department at UC-Berkeley. She received her doctorate from Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. Her research revolves around the social and political history of colonial Kenya, with a focus on women, politics, and protest, as represented by her book African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900-1950 (2005). Her current research deals with juvenile imprisonment in colonial Kenya.

Riva Kastoryano is research director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) and an affiliate of CERI (Center for international studies of Sciences Po). Her work focuses on relationships between identity and states, on minority/community formation in Western societies, and on nationalism without territory. Her books include La France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés. Négocier l’identité (1997, translated as Negotiating Identities. States and Immigrants in France and Germany, 2002); Staat, Schule, Ethnizität. Politische Sozialisation von Immigratenkindern in vier europäischen Ländern (with W. Schiffauer, G. Baumann, and S. Vertovec, 2002); Nationalismes en mutation en Méditerranée orientale (with A. Dieckhoff, 2002); and Les Codes de la différence. Race, religion et origines en France, en Allemagne et aux Etats-Unis (2005).

Trica Danielle Keaton is Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department and Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has been a visiting scholar at the EHESS-Paris where she was also a Chateaubriand Fellow. She is the author of Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (2006) and co-editor with Darlene Clark Hine and Stephen Small of a forthcoming anthology entitled Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Her current interests include the social construction of “love” and intergroup relations in the Black diaspora.

David L. Kirp is Professor at UC-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. A former journalist and newspaper editor trained in law, his interests range widely across social policy. He has written or edited fifteen books on such topics as public education, race and gender discrimination, affordable housing, AIDS and civil liberties. Among them are Our Town: Race, Housing and the Soul of Suburbia (with J. Dwyer and L. Rosenthal, 1997); Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community (2001), and Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (2003). His latest book, The Sandbox Investment: ThePreschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (2007), emerges from his having spent years crouching in pre-k classrooms across the country.

Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison teaches political science and political philosophy at the University of Evry-Val d’Essone. His work deals with citizenship, nationality, the colonial state, and the politics of racism and violence. He has directed several seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. His recent books include Haine(s). Philosophie et Politique (2002); Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’Etat colonial (2005); and Le retour des camps ? Sangatte, Lampedusa, Guantanamo (with G. Lhuilier et J. Valluy, 2007). He is presently working on a new book entitled The Imperial Republic: Politics and State Racism

John Lie is Class of 1959 Professor and Dean of International and Area Studies at UC-Berkeley. Taking literally C.-W. Mills’s notion of the sociological imagination –to study the intersection of biography, history and social structure– Lie has explored his Korean origins and diasporic trajectories in a trilogy: Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots(with N. Abelmann, 1995), Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (1998), and Multiethnic Japan (2001). His primary intellectual focus is social theory, as articulated in Modern Peoplehood (2004) and in the book he is currently writing, entitled The Consolation of Social Theory.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. As an academic economist, he has published scholarly papers in the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resource economics. As a public intellectual, he has written over 200 essays and reviews for journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad on the issues of racial inequality and social policy. His recent books include Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (2005), and The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002).

Mara Loveman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work examines the historical foundations of the state’s symbolic power, popular resistance to the extension of bureaucratic rule, and conceptual and theoretical issues in the comparative social analysis of race. Her papers have appeared the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She is presently writing two books related to the conference theme. The first, How Puerto Rico Became White, analyzes how U.S. imperial rule reconfigured racial boundaries in early twentieth century Puerto Rico. The second, entitled From Mestizaje to Multiculturalism: Race, Nation and the Census in Latin America, examines the practice and politics of ethnoracial classification in South American censuses from 1750 to 2005.

Rachel F. Moran is the Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of UC-Berkeley’s Law School. She is a past Chair of the Chicano/Latino Policy Project and current Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change. Her work deals with affirmative action, desegregation, and bilingual education. Moran is the author of Interracial Intimacy (2001) and co-author of the fourth edition of Educational Policy and the Law (with M. Yudof, D. Kirp, and B. Levin, 2002). Her recent articles include “The Elusive Nature of Discrimination” (2003) and “Whatever Happened to Racism?” (2005).

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is Professor in the Departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for Race and Gender at UC-Berkeley. Her teaching and research interests center on transdisciplinary methods, the political economy of households, the intersection of race and gender, immigration, and citizenship.She is the author of Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (1986); Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (1993); and Unequal Freedom, How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizen and Labor (2004).

Pap Ndiaye is an Associate Professor of History and a member of the Centre d’études américaines at the EHESS-Paris. His interest are in American history, business and technology, as well as discourses and practices of racial discrimination in the United States and France. His is the author of Nylon and Bombs. Du Pont and the March of Modern America (2001, English translation 2007). Ndiaye has recently published “Pour une histoire des populations noires de France : préalables théoriques” (2005) and “Questions de couleur : histoire, idéologie et pratiques du colorisme,” in De la question sociale à la question raciale (2006). His book La Condition noire. Essai sur la minorité noire de France will be published this fall.

Melissa Nobles is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Her teaching and research interests are in the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics and issues of retrospective justice. Her book Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (2000) examines the political origins and consequences of racial categorization in demographic censuses in the United States and Brazil. Her forthcoming book The Politics of Official Apologies offers a comparative analysis of the political uses of official apologies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It explores why minority groups demand such apologies and why governments give them (or not).

Evelyne Ribert is Researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CETSAH-CNRS) in Paris, where she obtained her doctorate from the EHESS. Her research interests center on national membership, citizenship, identification and family, especially among migrants. Her publications deal with the meaning of national membership for French youths of immigrant backgrounds and the consequences of social mobility on familial relations between generations. She is the author of Liberté, égalité, carte d’identité. Lles jeunes issus de l’immigration et l’appartenance nationale(2006).

Emmanuelle Saada is a sociologist and historian at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs of the EHESS-Paris, and teaches in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. Her main area of research is the historical sociology of colonization, with particular interest in law, citizenship and race. She is the author of numerous articles on colonial law, culture and politics as well as the history of the social sciences in France. Her dissertation, which examines the legal status of racially mixed children in the French Empire, was published in 2007 as Les Enfants de la colonie. Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté.

Daniel Sabbagh is Senior Research Scholar at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI-Sciences Po) in Paris. His work is in comparative politics, international relations, and racial categorization and discrimination. At CERI, Sabbagh leads a research group on antidiscrimination policies active since 2001. He is co-chair of the steering committee of the French-American Foundation program on “Equality of Opportunity in Education and Employment,” and he has worked as a consultant for the United Nations Development Program. His book L’Égalité par le droit. Les paradoxes de la discrimination positive aux États-Unis (2003) received the Prix François Furet and is translated (in an updated and abridged edition) as Equality and Transparency: A Strategic Perspective on Affirmative Action in American Law (2007). He is co-editor (with P. Simon) of the symposium on “Affirmative Action” published by the UNESCO in the International Social Science Journal (2005). His current research is on affirmative action policies in a comparative perspective.

Paul Silverstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Reed College and Chair of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. His research has focused on the postcolonial predicament of Algerian France and on the links between ethnic, religious, and urban movements that connect North Africa to France. He is author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (2004) and co-editor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (2006).

John D. Skrentny is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-San Diego. A recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, he is the author of The Minority Rights Revolution (2002) and The Ironies of Affirmative Action (1996). His articles have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the American Journal of Sociology and Theory and Society. He is currently working on one project on civil rights in the contemporary United States and another on immigration policy in Europe and Asia.

Sandra Susan Smith is Assistant professor of Sociology at the UC-Berkeley. Her research interests include urban poverty, joblessness, race and ethnicity, social networks and social capital, and intra-group processes. Her papers have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Racial and Ethnic Studies, Social Science Research, and The Sociological Quaterly. In her new book, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (2007), Smith advances enduring debates about black joblessness by highlighting the role of interpersonal distrust dynamics between low-income black job-holders and their job-seeking relations that complicate cooperation during the process of finding work. Her current work further interrogates racial and ethnic differences in trust dynamics and explores the social psychological, cultural, and structural factors that generate these differences.