Race et espace : la ville comme lieu d’étude des représentations raciales

Abstract

This study examines “racial landscapes” in the city center of Bordeaux (France), focusing on the way discourses about race and racism materialize in every day surroundings. Racial landscapes capture the contradictory nature of discourses on race and racism in Europe and in France: omnipresent yet concealed. Focusing on Bordeaux offers insights into the way local and national discourses are interwoven thereby shedding light on the complex relations between discourses on race, the country’s colonial past and the universalist republican framework (Mbembe 2005). This study therefore asks: Which discourses about race and racism are (re)produced and contested in Bordeaux? Visual and critical discourse analyses of photographs (N = 401) taken by the researcher in January and July 2020 were used to access the city as a “semiotic environment” (Amin & Thrift 2002) and discursive terrain. The findings reveal the connection between discourses on race and neoliberalism in areas of the city center where shops and restaurants using carefully marketed markers of exotic otherness abound. Furthermore, two competing discourses on diversity (diversity as cosmopolitanism and diversity as lived plurality) were identified in specific areas of the city center, which further revealed the intersection between race and class and the interplay with larger or older discourses.