Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

 by Stefan Kipfer, Antipode, 2011 (Click here to download this paper in pdf.)

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.

The Left and Racial Domination in France: An Interview with Sadri Khiari (PIR)

by Daniele Obono, The Decolonial Translation Group 

Sadri Khiari, a Tunisian activist exiled in France since early 2003, is one of the founding members of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR) of which he is currently one of its principal leaders. He has published, among others, Pour une politique de la racaille. Immigré-e-s, indigènes et jeunes de banlieue (Éditions Textuel, Paris, 2006) and La contre-révolution coloniale en France: de de Gaulle à Sarkozy (Éditions La Fabrique, Paris, 2009).1 The MIR (which in January 2010 became the PIR, as it transformed into a party) was born following a call in January of 2005, titled "We Are the Indigenous of the Republic,"2 signed by thousands of people and associations. Since then, the MIR has sought to unite and organize descendants of colonial migrants in popular suburbs3 in France as militants in its ranks, with the prospect of constructing an instrument of autonomous political struggle on the basis of a problematic articulated by questions of racism, colonialism, and imperialism.The spokesperson of the PIR is Houria Bouteldja.