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Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. By Dominic Thomas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Pp xv, 305. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.
As Nicolas Sarkozy's France continues to interrogate what it means to be French in queries often vectored through questions of race and national origin, Dominic Thomas's recently published Black France is indeed timely. Drawing on a variety of genres by Francophone African and Diaspora authors (autobiography, the short story, the novel, the testimonial, among others), Thomas's study convincingly uses literature to document the symbiotic and always ambivalent nature of the historical relationship between France and its sub-Saharan African former colonies. Thomas argues that from the 1930s pioneers' works to the realist novels of the 1950s, to more contemporary works of fiction, and from the colonial to postindependence times, famous (and sometimes less famous) African writers have always played a significant role not only in the formation of Black subjectivities, but also in the construction of the hexagon's cultural identity.
At the heart of Black France's project is one major theoretical claim: that those of us who think (about) the relationship between France and Francophone Africa must begin to locate the immigrant experience within the framework of a multiplicity of transversal, transnational, and Diasporic currents that have historically transformed the lives of individual subjects looking to fulfill particular desires. Thomas shows that this experience has also defined new "territories" within the former colonies and the Métropole in which these individual transformations have taken place. In short, Thomas...