Photo: Mariam, Bleu Blanc Rouge by Alexis PESKINE.

This course explores the lives and times of a variety of people who self-identify and are identified as “Black” or “Noir,” people for whom France has been (and continues to be) a site of exile, immigration, and a contested home. How have understandings of “blackness,” “race,” and belonging diverged and converged for people of African descent throughout France’s changing political history? How has the Black diaspora in France impacted French ideas of nation, identity and citizenship? We examine these questions through literature and film from the 19th and early 20th centuries, with some colonial and postcolonial interventions.