So Foot: Soccer and Multiculturalism in France

Speaker(s): Dominic Thomas (UCLA), Cécile Alduy (Stanford), Fatoumata Seck (Stanford)

 
Please join us for a roundtable discussion with Professors Dominic Thomas (UCLA), Cécile Alduy (Stanford), and Fatoumata Seck (Stanford).
 
From the “Black, Blanc, Beur” team that won the World Cup in 1998 -- and the heart of an entire people -- to the second “Champion” title of 2018 that Emmanuel Macron sought to make his, soccer has played a decisive, and controversial, role in how France represents itself as a “multicultural society.” In times of victory, unity and pride reign. But cracks appear in the façade of the “one and indivisible” nation at the slightest weakness on the field or when team members of foreign origins express anti-racist views in the public sphere. How does French soccer bring to the forefront post-colonial tensions in today's contemporary French society?

Professor Dominic Thomas has written extensively on France’s post-colonial fractures, the question of “race” and multiculturalism across French history and is a keen observer of French politics today. He will be in conversation with Professors Cécile Alduy, a specialist of French political discourse and far right anti-immigration rhetoric, and Fatoumata Seck, a specialist of Francophone Studies, focusing on the literatures and cultures, of Sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas.

Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor and Chair of the Departments of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been CNN European Affairs Commentator since 2017 and author, co-author, editor or co-editor of works on African and European culture and politics, including Black France (2007), Museums in Postcolonial Europe (2010), Francophone sub-Saharan African Literature in Global Contexts (2011), Africa and France (2013), Racial Advocacy in France (2013), Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution (2014), Francophone Afropean Literatures (2014), Afroeuropean Cartographies (2014), The Invention of Race (2014), The Charlie Hebdo events and their aftermath (2016), Vers la guerre des identités (2016), The Colonial Legacy in France (2017), Global France, Global French (2017), Sexe, race et colonies (2018), Sexualités, identités, et corps colonisés (2019), and Visualizing Empire (2021). He edits the Global African Voices series at Indiana University Press that focuses on translations of African literature into English, and has translated works by Aimé Césaire, Sony Labou Tansi, Alain Mabanckou, Emmanuel Dongala, and Abdourahman Waberi.

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