CRYSTAL MARIE FLEMING /// Politics of Blackness, Memorialization of Slavery, and Racial Denials in France

This conversation with Crystal Marie Fleming revolves around her recently published book, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017). Through it, we discuss about the similarities and difference through which anti-blackness operates in the United States and in France, the internal debates to the French Black community (in particular the Caribbean one) as to how memorialize slavery, the various forms of denials France manifests regarding its historical and contemporary forms of colonialism, as well as the way current French political antiracist activism succeeds in influencing the national debate.

Crystal Marie Fleming is a writer, speaker and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. She completed her Ph.D. and A.M. at Harvard University in 2011. Her doctoral thesis won the 2012 Georges Lavau award for the best dissertation on contemporary French politics. Fleming’s book Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Temple University Press, 2017) uses critical race theory to significantly advance scholarship on racism in France and Europe. Drawing on ethnographic observation, archival research and in-depth interviews with activists and descendants of slaves in Paris, she examines how commemorations of enslavement and abolition both challenge and reproduce the racial order. Her public writing explores issues of spirituality, (bi)sexuality, white supremacy and knowledge production and appears most prominently on her blog, social media and venues such as The Huffington Post and Everyday Feminism. Her Twitter handle is: @alwaystheself.

WEBSITE:
– www.crystalfleming.com

REFERENCE BOOK:
– Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, Temple University Press, 2017.