La Goutte d'Or : a sensory approach to racism and empire in a Parisian neighbourhood

The historical context of this thesis is the period from 2009 to present day France, focusing on a neighbourhood called La Goutte d’Or, situated in the north of Paris.

As within other multicultural European societies, France suffers from discrimination and racism, deepened in recent years by islamophobia. While the most important political value for the French state is the universalism that guides the rights of its citizens, France still struggles with the narrative, and practice, of an inclusive society. In the past 40 years this has focused on the increasing arrival of immigrants, mostly from former colonial territories, to work in the growing post-war economy.

While France has a long tradition of solidarity with political refugees, the last 20 years represent a failure in the exercise of social cohesion. Racism and discrimination have been and are rarely denounced -within the affected, Black and Maghrebin communities. Political efforts to solve this problem, through official complaints’ mechanisms, have proven unproductive for small acts of racism as have social policies targeting social exclusion.

One of the motives of this thesis is the silenced voice around racism in France. Discrimination and social exclusion are terms often referred to, while “racism” is avoided. The philosophical background of universalism has tainted the purpose of true social inclusion, denying the existence of races; but in turn, denying racism as a stronger form of discrimination.

This means that daily encounters with unspoken racism and racist experiences, or with more explicit racist declarations, are constantly kept in silence, not recognised as valid complaints despite the harm caused on their victims.

This thesis addresses that aspect of racism in a larger scale but in a targeted place. Showcasing the daily life of racist experiences, in the voices of the victims. Also, revealing other facets hidden under the veil of colonial history, and cultural and social manifestations that are related in some way or another to France’s colonial past in Africa.

The choice of La Goutte d’Or responds to its history, to its population, and also to its social representation in the French capital. A neighbourhood relegated for decades due to the presence of working-class sectors and later of immigrant communities, suffering from general racism from the rest of the city.

Coming from a practice of psychoanalytical therapy and having suffered the subtlety of daily racism in Paris, I developed the concept of “soft racism” to work into this research. This concept has helped me to analyse different aspects of racism throughout every chapter of the thesis. I chose to use this concept combined with a sensorial approach, allowing me to understand in a deeper way how racism operates in different manners in our societies. Particularly when it is not mentioned, but still causes harm and distress in its victims.

I concluded that the Senses were the best way to confront a problem that is rarely recognised officially, but that exists and manifests itself through the sensations of seeing, touching, hearing, tasting and smelling -as we will see in the different chapters. The senses also helped me to look into the history of colonialism in France and its former territories in a different light, as the chapters on Touch and Taste will try to demonstrate; focusing on fabrics and foods and their different trajectories of acceptance, relegation or inclusion as imported cultural artifacts, recurrently neglected or discriminated against as symbols of old colonial oppression.

Every sense has helped me to understand and disarm the powerful construct of racist manifestations in daily life, disguised as it is in subtle performances. The cases correspond to my own materials. Having started this project in another institution in France with ethnographical observational work accompanied with interviews, I ultimately decided to keep very few of those interviews and focus more on a sensorial observational ethnography. Visiting the place several times since I retook the project, but also analysing cultural practices, such as walking, cooking or tailoring. I also worked with voices on the Radio, with streaming radio programmes, with the participation neighbourhood residents from two different age levels: youngsters and old women. Literature and media productions have also helped as materials, exposing an understanding other instances of racism, focused on the neighbourhood, such as in the core of E. Zola’s novel about the neighbourhood (L’Assommoir) and the speeches of a former French President. These two materials have been approached through the sense of Smell and its relationship with colonial narratives and experiences.

Finally, I added myself as part of a self-ethnographic experience, in different instances of the thesis, trying to link my experiences in Africa, in France and in the neighbourhood, which helped me to understand the conflict in a deeper way. My position as a researcher corresponds to a transferred locus, where I am a subaltern, from the global South exploring the global North but focusing on problems that imply elements from the global South, such as colonial and power relationships, and racism inside academia. I have also transferred my own experiences of psychoanalytical therapies to broaden the scope of my methodology, to further understand my own condition as an immigrant living in the global North.