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Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and assimilation played out in French colonial policies and how these same tensions continue to be problematic as France grapples with cultural pluralism.Amselle's book has timely and wide-ranging implications. Arguing against the "liberal communitarian state" as it exists in the United States, Amselle contends that an overemphasis on difference can lead to what he calls "affirmative exclusion"-the flip side of affirmative action. The recognition of a multiplicity of ethnic groups in France, he asserts, creates an environment that fosters racism. "Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting 'affirmative action,' run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are 'target groups,' which they have helped identify and hence produce." Calling on theories of racial difference devised by early anthropologists-most notably, Louis Faidherbe-and on the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Amselle makes historical and sociological sense of the debates over multiculturalism and the violence they engender. Toward a French Multiculturalism proposes directions for the future.
Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and assimilation played out in French colonial policies and how these same tensions continue to be problematic as France grapples with cultural pluralism.Amselle's book has timely and wide-ranging implications. Arguing against the "liberal communitarian state" as it exists in the United States, Amselle contends that an overemphasis on difference can lead to what he calls "affirmative exclusion"-the flip side of affirmative action. The recognition of a multiplicity of ethnic groups in France, he asserts, creates an environment that fosters racism. "Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting 'affirmative action,' run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are 'target groups,' which they have helped identify and hence produce." Calling on theories of racial difference devised by early anthropologists-most notably, Louis Faidherbe-and on the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Amselle makes historical and sociological sense of the debates over multiculturalism and the violence they engender. Toward a French Multiculturalism proposes directions for the future.
Jean-Loup Amselle is Directeur d'etudes a l'ecole des Hautes etudes en Sciences Sociales and the author of many books, including Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Jane Marie Todd is the translator of five books published by Cornell, most recently What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas by Catherine Chalier.
"After decades of work in Africa, Jean-Loup Amselle, one of France's most creative social anthropologists, has developed a strikingly original genealogy of France's contemporary original multiculturalism... In his championing of a republican renewal, Amselle joins other French anthropologists and sociologists, whose own natural-law origins trump any relativist leanings when they have called for a ban on headscarves in schools and questioned France's recent turn to 'positive discrimination'... In Amselle's (and others') 'republican turn' we are reminded of the strikingly different political philosophies that underlie our social sciences. When read as a political critique, colonial history, and disciplinary genealogy, Amselle's work wonderfully remarker the landscape of the engage anthropology of contemporary France."-John R. Bowen, Washington University, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 10, no. 3, September 2004 "Jean-Loup Amselle, one of the leading anthropologists of francophone Africa and an internationally known commentator on the current 'immigration' crisis in France, has written a versatile book that provides a concrete consideration of colonial policymaking from the French Revolution onwards. The book explores, in the colonies themselves, how French racial categories, universalist ambitions to regenerate humankind in France's image, and eventually a concept of respect for difference were deployed. There are very few books that connect the current developments in France regarding issues of identity to the experience of colonization. Amselle's book makes these connections, not by mere assumption, but through explicit examination."-Alice Conklin, University of Rochester "Affirmative Exclusion is a provocative, well-documented, and highly readable book. Amselle argues that French national identity or history rests on apparently contradictory principles of universalism and relativism: a commitment, for example, both to natural rights and to the rights of peoples; to the assimilation of all citizens in a single national culture and to the management of difference by the nation-state. This book offers an extraordinarily stimulating encounter with an unfamiliar set of premises about cultural diversity, identity politics, and human rights and is exceptionally important in the American context for its power to unsettle and illuminate our own modes of thought more forcefully than any study directly treating the U.S. is likely to do."-Susan Carol Rogers, New York University
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