French citizens of Indian descent - Manuela Latchoumaya

Despite long colonial entanglements between France and India, groups of South Asian descent generally and of Indian descent specifically are invisible in mainstream representations of French society and history. In addition to the French State’s official policy of colour-blindness – which denies the relevance of ‘race’ as a category shaping inequalities in France – successive governments have advanced a narrow understanding of post-colonial French society as being ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ (‘Black-white-North African’).

This talk will discuss the ways in which French citizens of Indian descent unsettle both dominant definitions of Frenchness as whiteness and current categories used to discuss ‘race’ in France. It will focus on the experiences of two groups: the children of Indian migrants who came to France in the 1960s from former French colonies (‘Establishments’) in India; and Indo-Guadeloupeans, who acquired French citizenship via the indenture system in French Caribbean overseas territories.

Drawing on interviews with French South Asian activists and individual Franco-Indian and Indo-Guadeloupean participants, the talk will highlight the ways that respondents seek to create a ‘Brown’ French identity that (re)connects France, India and the Caribbean.

Dr Manuela Latchoumaya is a Research Associate at The University of Manchester. This seminar draws on her doctoral thesis which explores the ways in which French citizens of Indian descent create new ways of ‘being French’, contesting official definitions equating Frenchness with whiteness.

This is a hybrid event. Please let us know if you will be attending in person or online when you register.

There is step free access to the room if you are attending in person. Lifts can be busy at times so please give yourself enough time to get to the room once you are in the building.

If you are attending online the zoom link will be sent in the Eventbrite event reminder emails which go out 48 hours before, and 1 hour before the event.

Host or Publisher Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)