David Beriss's Black Skins, French Voices is a brief but affluent book. It offers a freeze frame, or case study, of activist and culturally active Antilleans in Paris, as gleaned from interviews, verbalizations, and observation. Beriss fixates on Antillean migrants from Martinique and Guadeloupe who are caught in a tight web of cognations, including French convivial-class policy, universalist notions of citizenship, Euro-racism, diasporic nostalgia and diverse cultural energy. Beriss notes that since the early 1980s this population, which is scattered across Paris, has been amassing in clubs, cultural groups, churches, sports clubs, gregarious work offices, and other venues, with a view to performing their culture and, simultaneously, challenging
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Beriss outlines the goal of assimilation as undergirding this development, but highlights the ambivalent experiences of migrants to France in cognation to French identity and citizenship. Noting that there are multiple local perspectives on the Antilles' political and licit status, he suggests that Antillean migration to the French colonial center has revealed the fault lines in the assimilation project. In particular, he notes how gregarious tensions are being challenged and resolved in the cultural arena with the conception of Créolité. Its proponents argue that "Antilleans are the product of a constant interaction of conceptions and people from all over the world, not some hermetically sealed local culture" (p. 70). Beriss believes the impact of conceptions such as Créolité among the Antilleans in France could, along with the cultural impact of the much more immensely colossal African immigrant populations, transform France towards a more genuinely multi-cultural …show more content…
It would be fascinating to ken, for instance, Antilleans' views on the headscarf debate or African perspectives on the failure of French Republican sentiment to acknowledge its debt to former slaves. Does French gregarious policy guarantee the segregation of immigrants from each other? Do they all only orient themselves to the hegemonic cultural and political organizations, to the French conception of itself as a coalesced national culture? Beriss observes pointedly that Antilleans incline to optically discern themselves as a "culture group," not a race, which is in conformity with French gregarious scientific literature that evades discussion of race cognations. In this veneration, we could optically discern the cultural work of Créolité as a distinctively "French" practice. Cultural activism, moreover, is deeply uneven. The immensely colossal Antillean Seventh Day Adventist populations, for example, are not categorically intrigued with gregarious challenge, but rather in their own universalisms. Martinicians and Guadeloupeans, on the other hand, have been more concerned with constructing themselves as "cultural
Beriss outlines the goal of assimilation as undergirding this development, but highlights the ambivalent experiences of migrants to France in cognation to French identity and citizenship. Noting that there are multiple local perspectives on the Antilles' political and licit status, he suggests that Antillean migration to the French colonial center has revealed the fault lines in the assimilation project. In particular, he notes how gregarious tensions are being challenged and resolved in the cultural arena with the conception of Créolité. Its proponents argue that "Antilleans are the product of a constant interaction of conceptions and people from all over the world, not some hermetically sealed local culture" (p. 70). Beriss believes the impact of conceptions such as Créolité among the Antilleans in France could, along with the cultural impact of the much more immensely colossal African immigrant populations, transform France towards a more genuinely multi-cultural …show more content…
It would be fascinating to ken, for instance, Antilleans' views on the headscarf debate or African perspectives on the failure of French Republican sentiment to acknowledge its debt to former slaves. Does French gregarious policy guarantee the segregation of immigrants from each other? Do they all only orient themselves to the hegemonic cultural and political organizations, to the French conception of itself as a coalesced national culture? Beriss observes pointedly that Antilleans incline to optically discern themselves as a "culture group," not a race, which is in conformity with French gregarious scientific literature that evades discussion of race cognations. In this veneration, we could optically discern the cultural work of Créolité as a distinctively "French" practice. Cultural activism, moreover, is deeply uneven. The immensely colossal Antillean Seventh Day Adventist populations, for example, are not categorically intrigued with gregarious challenge, but rather in their own universalisms. Martinicians and Guadeloupeans, on the other hand, have been more concerned with constructing themselves as "cultural