I’ve just found out I’ve received a Pro Futura Scientia fellowship @SCAS_Uppsala from the Swedish Riksbank to conduct research on the history of race in France since the 1960s.

This project has been bouncing around my head for years but now seems like... a good time! 1/5 https://twitter.com/scas_uppsala/status/1272801176417951744

My research will look into how we speak and do not speak about race, when the state denies that race is real. It looks at the reconfiguration of racial categories in the aftermath of World War II and decolonisation from the ground up through people’s speech. 2/5

In those years, race became a rumor - something that was always done by other people. Years that opened with the phrase ‘I am not racist but...’ Years to say certain things as jokes but not in public. 3/5

I want to move beyond the idea that France is unique because we do/don’t speak about race and I also want to move beyond seeing race only as an intellectual, legal or discursive category. 4/5

Instead, I will be looking at how it worked locally by focusing on the South of France and the resettlement of people from North Africa, looking at the emergence of a metropolitan racism between the arrival of the pied noirs and the first electoral successes of the FN 5/5

Part of the fellowship involves spending one year in Uppsala, where Foucault spent a few formative years writing a ‘Histoire de la folie’, so I am absolutely not humbled to announce that my look there will be this:

Oh and if you work on the Middle East and/or the 19th century and you think you’ve gotten rid of me... think again. You think I took those manuscript workshops for nothing?

It’s 2020: we’re writing European history with North African methods, reverse epistemic colonialism