Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France by Olivia C. Harrison (review)

Reviewed by: Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France by Olivia C. Harrison Derek Schilling (bio) Olivia C. Harrison. Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France. U of Minnesota P, “Muslim International,” 2023. 263 pages. That the origins of structural racism in contemporary France lie in the longue durée of French empire is indisputable: from the transatlantic slave trade to the heinous Code de l’indigénat of 1881, which for more than a half-century withheld from French imperial subjects the Revolutionary promise of citizenship and equality before the law, to discriminatory housing practices of the Trente Glorieuses redolent of the colonial order, French institutions sowed the seeds of a present-day malaise that is “postcolonial” in name only. In this luminous study of French anti-racism inspired by today’s indigènes de la République, who counter alt-right white Christian claims to exclusive nativeness with the credo “nous sommes ici parce que vous étiez là” (5), Olivia C. Harrison argues that the multidirectional history of French empire and the attendant memory wars can be understood through the lens of indigenous critique. The author understands the latter broadly as “a critical deconstruction of the colonial production of indigeneity” (199n.22) which began with the penetration into the Americas of European powers and the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia in 1492. Attentive to the deep historical practices of empire that “includ[e] colonial settlement, forced displacement, migrant recruitment, family reunification, expulsion, and detainment” (10), Harrison limits her purview to cultural productions of the past fifty years. Anti-racist discourses in the French metropole, she argues, must be grasped relationally, with particular reference to the post-independence Maghreb and to the cause or, better, in Edward Said’s phrase, the “question of Palestine.” In highlighting the Palestinian fedayee as an exemplar of Third World resistance to the neocolonial order, Natives Against Nativism builds on Harrison’s earlier foray into South-South critique, The Transcolonial Maghreb (2016). There, emphasis lay less on claims to, or the ascription of, indigène status (pejorative or meliorative) to groups and individuals, than on the positive identification post-Nakba of Moroccan and Algerian writers and artists with the keffieh-wearing fedayeen. What is novel in Natives Against Nativism is the coupling of this armed figure with another, exogamous figure of indigenous [End Page 1366] resistance: the First Nations warriors who fought to defend ancestral lands from U.S. encroachment. Often reduced to caricature in twentieth-century French popular discourse (as “Indien” or, worse, “Peau-Rouge”), the indigenous American has surfaced in a surprising variety of French intellectual and cultural contexts, serving as a model for what Harrison terms “transindigenous identification,” or the mutual recognition of peoples engaged in anticolonial struggle (26). The six chapters of Natives Against Nativism each comprise a case study of sorts. Featured in them are anti-racist writers, intellectuals, playwrights, film-makers, and grass-roots organizers, all of whom conceived, at one juncture or another, the plight of racialized populations in France issus de la colonisation in relation to the stateless Palestinian and/or to the displaced indigenous American. The refugee camp, like the reservation, becomes a space through which to evaluate colonialism’s profound effects one century after the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided the Levant into British and French spheres of influence, setting the scene for territorial disputes and struggles for statehood that have continued unabated since 1948. Chapter One draws generously on primary-source work by historian Abdellali Hajjat and on the archive of militant Saïd Bouziri to establish the ways in which, a decade prior to the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme of 1983, Palestine served as a “rallying cry” (25) for migrant workers in France. Specifically, Harrison considers the “micropolitics of activism” (35) within the CSRP (Committees in Support of the Palestinian Revolution), and how pro-Palestinian activists envisioned their practice in the wake of Black September 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan ordered strikes on PLO forces and on the Syrian army, producing some 3,500 Palestinian victims (Arafat invoked the figure of 25,000). Harrison charts the trajectory of...