In order to attempt to propose a first set of responses to the above question, I have finally adopted an approach that is the opposite of that on which the status of sociology as a science is based and which, since Emile Durkheim, has required thinking processes to move from the objectivity of collective "things" to the subjectivity of individual minds and, more specifically, I have chosen to use my own biography to develop this thinking. A decision which is largely based on the conviction that—in accordance with the "constructivist" approach that we all seem to share—what are still coined identities (gender, social class, ethnic, religious, or other), in as individualistic societies as those in which most of us live, have become precarious, circumstantial results originating in antagonistic processes of identification (despite the collective nature of their expressions and their stickiness). As a result, it is not unreasonable to think that, given the complexity of the processes of identification concerned, a biographical approach might have a particular heuristic power facilitating the accurate grasp and in-depth understanding of the various relations that must be presented.

Here are, in brief, the main findings to which my thinking has led me so far.

1. Caught in the "Movement"

To examine the life experience of a person born in southern metropolitan France, from a "black", Guadeloupe-born father and a white mother originating from the Cévennes (southern region in the French Massif Central), who was first raised in the Basse-Terre area in Guadeloupe, then in southern France, and finally in the Paris region, who has constantly been moving back and forth between his two lands of origin ever since, has, in my view, the heuristic potential I have just mentioned. For this approach makes it clear that the processes by which individuals build their personal identity via ethnic, or even "colour", identifications but also via civic and state identifications (one could say the same of identifications of another kind) are closely dependent on the processes involved in what our Manifesto on citizenship calls "Movement". Migratory movements (but also movements between social classes) by parents, and the social and cultural clashes implied, leave children with not only problems which these will have to try to solve via their own identifications as well as the frameworks within which such attempts will have to take place but also with types of solutions (and their very terms) appearing as suitable for such problems. This does not mean that processes of identification are mechanically determined by the processes of the "Movement". The individuals who are the agents controlling such processes remain, in the end, accountable for the way in which they "set to music" the identifications prescribed by these processes (even though they are not equally able, depending on their social rank, to take on a critical stance regarding these prescriptions). As Francis Jeanson put it, reflecting on Sartre’s theory, what matters is not what circumstances determine you to be but what you make out of these determinations. However, to continue with our musical metaphor, if individuals have the final responsibility for the chain of the identification melody, the prescriptions in question represent the harmonic framework of this melody.

The main problem the trace of which the above-mentioned dynamics have left on current processes of identification must lie in—in the case of West Indian migrants (but also, maybe, as far as I know, some Caucasian populations in the former Soviet Union)—discriminations preventing the incorporation, on an equal footing, of these populations into the polity of which they are citizens. What imperial discourses defined, at the very beginning of the colonisation of their country of origin (especially in the case of the West Indies, with the large-scale enslavement of deported Africans), as their "colour" or their "race"¹ has reactivated the contradictions and limits of what a long history of domination, continued in the French Caribbean after the abolition of slavery, has established as "colonial citizenship", as American historian Gary Wilder put it. A type of racism which the official discourses and identifications of which these populations are the object struggle to conceal and against which solutions such as strategies of vernacular assimilation—which used to be dominant in these groups, at least in the case of West Indians—are inadequate in the view of an increasing number of people among those facing such discriminations. In fact, the populations discriminated against seem to put an increasing trust in the claim for recognition of their cultural particularity in order to achieve equal rights for all. Our programme should probably devote a significant part of its efforts, in terms of comparative analysis, to better understanding the turning point of this "new deal" and better evaluate its social and political implications, especially as far as the approach to citizenship is concerned.

2. The dialectical relations between the official and the vernacular

West Indian experiences—such as my own, however singular it might have been in comparison with those of the vast majority of others—emphasise a truth that reaches far beyond these since this is a very common truth. Socially dominated individuals find, to a large extent, in discourses and writings produced or transmitted by the very world that acts a dominating power for them—in this instance, a French world and a world in French—the "armes miraculeuses" (Aimé Césaire), the weapons which they make their own and with which they carry out the identifications they deem necessary. All who are identified or identify themselves as West Indians went, as Guadeloupean poet Guy Tirolien put it, to the "White" school (even though, later on, many of them claimed, as he did, that they did not want to go back to that school!). There, they were taught, for a while, that their ancestors were the Gauls, but they also quickly discovered the precepts of universalistic egalitarianism on which the "French republican model" is allegedly based. Precepts that cannot be politically denied by official identifications—on the contrary—and that those concerned, once they have made them their own and adapted them to their requirements,² will use as means to their emancipation and promotion. And this, as far as some of these persons are concerned, in the different, sometimes successive, forms of political commitments of Christian evangelism, laic republicanism, and proletarian "internationalism" (in its various socialist variants).

The ideals of the 1789 Revolution are known to have had a tremendous impact on the anti-slavery struggles which, in the late 18th and the early 19th century, troubled French colonies in the Caribbean and other territories in the region. And they are also mainly responsible, after being extended and transformed by the above-mentioned political commitments, for the popular struggles which, from the denial and abolition, in 1848, of slavery, led to the transformation, in 1946, of France’s Caribbean colonies into departments of the French Republic. It was, therefore, within the universalising matrix of the claim for equality, rather than within the particularistic quest for sovereignty, that most West Indians started to mature and develop their identifications. This surprises only those who have forgotten the judicious remark by Jean-Paul Sartre about the Jewish Question—but the scope of which can easily be extended to the colonial question—stressing that, at first, individuals’ groups who have to fight particularistic, racist approaches that make them inferiors can but have a passion for the Universal. This is especially true of those whose experience of their particularity is limited to that, negative, of colonial disdain. If, progressively, the claim for a particular "identity" and the respect of this identity has become, in many West Indians’ view,³ their best weapon in their search for equality, this has more to do with the denials they have always met with in this quest than with some realisation that their "identity" has a unique value.⁴ An "identity" the claim for which is not, for that matter, deemed by most of them as contradictory with their claim for equality with all the French within the same polity (but a polity defined more in civic terms than in national terms). Since the claim for equality—which is nothing more than the claim for equality of rights among individuals and not for that of individuals themselves—is not necessarily incompatible with the assertion of particularities, but, on the contrary, it presupposes it when such particularities are depreciated. For depreciating a people or a group’s culture leaves them with no other alternative, if they are to achieve the equality they claim, than to gain recognition of the dignity of their stigmatised identity. As a result, what is often understood as the assertion of a difference is, in fact, in most cases, the claim for equal treatment for all, "the process of giving an ethnic form to an egalitarian request for participation made in the name of difference," as our colleague Fred Constant subtly put it.

Remembering that assertions concerning some particular "identity" are often consequences of a desire for political assimilation, meant to transcend the fact that it has too long been denied and—let us be Hegelian!—the imagined goal of which they thus try to maintain, all the conclusions I have just presented, even though fairly ordinary, have some relevance here in my view. They clearly indicate that official identifications and vernacular identifications, far from radically and mechanically rejecting one another always, may sometimes, by drawing from the same sources, nourish and strengthen each other. And this all the more as these identifications often have "double bases", explicitly proposing what they refuse or, at least, fear implicitly (the political assimilation of the dominated, in the case of official identifications, and more or less radical separation from dominants, in the case of vernacular identifications). These conclusions therefore indicate the existence of dialectical relations between both types of identifications, an indication which was already emphasised, in a broader way, in the article with which Peter Sahlins and James Scott opened, in July 2001, our programme of cooperation but which we may sometimes fail to remember in our particular research.

3. Did you say "compatible"?

To state, as I did, that there is no necessary contradiction in asserting a particularity of "race", colour or culture and, at the same time, claiming equal rights and duties among all members of the polity, whatever their particularities, does not mean that the relation between this assertion and this claim is not problematic. The fact that in the French departments of America (DFAs) the political debate is today at deadlock over the issue of their future status, as well as the increasingly constraining impediments existing there in social life, are proof that it is more and more difficult to harmonise the promotion of local communities' particular interests and respect for the requirements of common citizenship. However, on the one hand, the need to reduce inequalities in these departments makes this promotion necessary whereas, on the other hand, without compliance with the above requirements, common citizenship would lose its meaning and therefore its raison d’être and would finally collapse.

Two of the projects I am currently undertaking—one concerning the development in DFAs of the claim for "local preference" at the hiring level, the other concerning the spreading and political instrumentalisation in the French West Indies and French Guyana of the idea that the wrongs caused by colonisation (especially slavery) should be redressed—give a few indications regarding what could be one of the main causes of the difficulty I have just mentioned. Namely, the double game played by so many West Indian or Guyanese political personalities who display in words, thus winning some popular success, the temptation of more independence, or even separation, from metropolitan France while, in practice, accepting an integration to which they know there is at the moment no alternative and which they consider, mezzo voce, despite everything, as profitable. For this double dealing puts these politicians in a most uneasy situation—they want to be both inside and outside the political system to which they still belong, that is—to put it bluntly—to continue enjoying the rights or benefits which this system provides without having to bear the costs or duties it imposes, to use the set of principles on which it is based when this is useful for their particular interests and to set against them other principles when the first set is not suitable for these interests. As a result, they might be accused of dishonesty or incoherence, a risk against which some hope, in vain, to protect themselves by asserting the legitimacy of an outrageous demand for dispensation: they would like to be exempted from the universal obligation—practical and moral—of coherence on the ground that allegedly there is a right to compensation for the particular wrongs endured during the colonial past (which were indeed many). However, to seek escape from the above-mentioned incoherence by claiming a right to exemption from the very principle—that of citizens’ equality—on which the demand for compensation put forward is based, leads ipso facto to that same incoherence. For this request for compensation is often based on the assertion of a particularity, therefore on a differentialist, de facto separatist thinking, whereas, intended de juro to compensate for what amounted to denied equality, it should comply with an imperative of parity, therefore an integrationist thinking, which—while respectful to those differences that do not offend common values—would submit all members of the "citizens’ community" to rules shared by all. Thus, it should not seek to give birth to some preference (with the risk that such preference might not be really profitable to the main victims of the injustice in compensation for which redress is supposed to be obtained but to others who would step forward as their "rightful representatives" or their "natural" elite) but to establish the equality that was once denied. It should not seek compliance with the requirement for particular and unequal treatment but with the requirement for equal treatment (which does not mean identical treatment) of all citizens. Because it supposes a common normative system to which would be subject those demanding redress as much as those who are supposed to grant it and which would both legitimise the former’s claim and force the latter to recognise it as such.

At a time when, in France, the principle of compatibility between the right to assert particular identities for those asserting them and the universalising need to obtain equal rights for all individuals, whatever their identity, is becoming part of the politically correct discourse, it is high time to admit that this discourse brings its reasoning to an end right before the point where it should start. Namely, right before the introductory question of the conditions of possibility for this compatibility: how and at what cost is this harmony, which is in now way pre-established, possible? It seems to me that our programme, on the basis of its comparative approach, is ideally placed to attempt to answer this most important question, by treading—with boldness or carelessness!—further down the narrow line that separates scientific analysis from political prescription. And this not in the flaming magic of general discourses, where the very contradictions one should address vanish easily, but in the severe rigour of casuistic analyses, especially concerning public policies and institutional reforms that are probably called for by the satisfactory solving of the problems I have tried to bring to light in this contribution.

1.These branders are sometimes accompanied with (or replaced by), in many other cases than West Indians (for example Caucasians), criteria such as religion or culture. But, in the end, regarding our main topic here (the naturalisation of memberships by which some try to justify social and political inequalities), the criterion(s) adopted are not important, despite the particularities attached to racist stigmatisations. [Back to text.]

2. For example, it is interesting to note that the fact that many West Indian migrants adopted and, to a lesser extent, still adopt the ideal of French citizenship reveals a will to win, on the ground of the (former) colonial home country, the fight for decolonisation which has not entirely achieved its goals through the departmental integration of the West Indies into the French Republic, a will that radically opposes approaches by which French official authorities intend to submit the meaning of this citizenship only to the interests governing their policies. [Back to text.]

3. In my personal case, the identification temptation I have just alluded to mainly manifested itself in the choice I made, after graduating from university, to devote my entire professional life to the study of societies in the region of the world my father originated from and, at first, to write a thesis about the colour question in the West Indies as well as in the decision to settle in Martinique, where, responding to a "Tiers-Mondiste" impulse fostered by Frantz Fanon’s analyses, I went to join the teaching and research team which Edouard Glissant was leading at the Institut Martiniquais d’Etudes. This impulse, in fact, had more to do with the fact that, after May 68, my involvement in the French Far Left movement had worn out than with some unlikely conversion to West Indian cultural nationalisms. This may explain why I made my "final" settling ground in Martinique for only a small number of years. [Back to text.]