Postcolonizing France

This article isolates a few flashpoints in the debating space opened up by the copresence, within a volume, of contributions by Jean-François Bayart, Achille Mbembe, and Ann Laura Stoler. The concepts or notions discussed are useful as core samplings of the multiple layers of the postcolonial argument unfolding within a group of French scholars. At the heart of the postcolonial debate are the very definitions of the “social sciences” and “humanities” and the remapping of the knowledge they contain and produce. These repeated disjunctions among enunciative spaces, the discrepancies among apparently common signifiers rooted in radically differing tropologies, reveal this debate as a crucible of and for postcolonial thought.