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6 - Acting ‘as’ and acting ‘as if’: two approaches to the politics of race and migration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

By
Leah Bassel
Edited by
Karim Murji  and
John Solomos
Leah Bassel
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Karim Murji
Affiliation:
The Open University, Milton Keynes
John Solomos
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

When I was arrested after the police had invaded Saint-Bernard, two events seemed significant to me.

The first is the way I was stripped by policewomen in front of my daughter. It was obvious that their aim was to humiliate me, to break me. So I stripped amid sarcastic comments and questionable jokes. ‘She’s not being that clever anymore, the spokeswoman,’ or ‘You’re not supposed to wear a bra inside out’ (a man wouldn’t have thought of that). But the nature of the mocking, the sarcastic comments and the gibes also said much about the state of mind of the police: ‘Aha! the spokeswoman doesn’t have her mobile phone anymore.’ The mobile phone had become the symbol of the modernity to which, as a foreigner, as an African, as a black woman, as a Negro, I had no right: ‘They’ve hardly come down from the trees, and they already have mobiles in their hands.’

The second one was that I was immediately taken to court, even though I had a perfectly valid leave to stay. It was obviously another attempt to break the symbol represented by an African woman chosen to be the spokeswoman of her comrades in struggle. And for this, they were prepared to commit many illegalities: they did not themselves respect the laws which they praised so much.

During that whole period, we had many identities to reestablish.

– Madjiguène Cissé, The Sans-Papiers

The woman who spoke these words, Madjiguène Cissé, became the symbol of the struggle of the sans papiers – literally migrants ‘without papers’ – for regularisation and for justice in France in the 1990s. In this chapter, I consider the role of racial identity in the political mobilisation of undocumented women in France, the sans papieres – the term papieres, with an -es, is the feminine version of papiers – when, as we see in Cissé’s words, identities are multiple and serve both as a site of challenge and as a resource. I consider two understandings of the role of race in migration politics. In one, interruption of and extraction from existing identities and hierarchies are essential to becoming a political subject and are expressed in the thought of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. In the other, mobilisation occurs within an interlocking matrix of oppression, constituted by race, gender and other identities, as proposed by Patricia Hill Collins.

Type
Chapter
Information
Theories of Race and Ethnicity
Contemporary Debates and Perspectives
 , pp. 94 - 113
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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