Michel Agier, Racisme et culture. Explorations transnationales [Racism and culture: Transnational Explorations], Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2025
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- Michel Agier, Racisme et culture. Explorations transnationales, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2025 [fr]
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The Current Condition of Racism in a Globalized World
1In this exploration of the cultural roots of racism in all its shapes and forms, Michel Agier makes an obvious observation. In an increasingly mixed world, racism remains paradoxically persistent and topical. It continues to shape subjectivities and takes on structural forms within social systems that inferiorize people distinguished by the color of their skin. This racism reproduces itself systemically, and no public policy seems capable of curbing it. The author bases this observation on his deep knowledge of Brazil and Africa, as well as on extensive contacts with migrants from the countries of the Global South. The hostility they experience is widespread, and it reveals the fear both Europeans and “Americans” harbor of being invaded by peoples they once dominated, and who now feel under siege. We are thus witnessing the rise of xenophobic nationalist parties around the world, associated with identity-based tensions. At the same time, everyday racism seems to have declined since the 1980s, with greater openness to others and a growing tolerance for diversity.
2Nevertheless, the cultural legacy of colonization endures and perpetuates the gaze that constructed the inferior colonial subject. Michel Agier draws illustrations from literature to describe how this imaginary perception developed, selecting two ambiguous works among the many possible examples: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which, despite its philosophical depth, bears traces of anti-Black racism, and Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which exhibits unapologetic, everyday racism, while simultaneously expressing disgust for the colonial city, mixed with resentment toward his compatriots. This city is probably Douala, where Michel Agier lived several years after Céline’s account, when it still bore the marks of colonialism in its segregated neighborhoods. The racism Céline describes is not necessarily tied to Western colonial history, since it notably addresses anti-Black racism in Tunisia. There, the recent measures introduced by the President overlap with an older racist foundation rooted in the history of slavery, that was reactivated by the arrival of new migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
3In each situation, there is evidence of structural racism, based on tangible and intangible mechanisms that are beyond the control, or even the awareness, of those involved, and which reproduces racial domination through the unequal distribution of positions and opportunities (job market segmentation, access to education, etc.). This inequality seems to be limited to a sociology of social classes, where the original interconnection with racist determinants has disappeared. However, it reveals an underlying racist “infra-thought,” “hidden in the unconscious” while reflecting “the intellectual poverty of the racist argument.” It is further camouflaged by the different terms regularly used to replace the overly connoted term “race,” while denying its hidden meaning: ethnic group, ethnicity, culture, origin, diversity, immigrant population, suburban youth, and Muslim. This is how a form of racism—well-targeted and easily recognizable—but without a named race, can repeatedly emerge on the global stage.
4Among these global manifestations, Agier examines the “Africa of the French suburbs” and reflects on the events of autumn 2005 and the persistent theme of police violence. He establishes a historical and anthropological link between the “natives” of the colonial era, the immigrants from the former empire, and French citizens of immigrant origin, who—in spite of French republican principles—are still suspected of being foreign and disloyal. At the same time, a new style of unapologetic speech has appeared, as evidenced by Sarkozy’s speech in Dakar and new expressions such as “identity on paper” [identité de papier], “native French” [français de souche], etc. But France is not alone in this respect, as demonstrated by the lynching of a Congolese migrant in 2022 on a beach in Rio de Janeiro, while none of the people present reacted, and more generally by the way African and Haitian migrants are treated in Brazil, not to mention police crimes in the United States against Black men.
Towards a Theory of Race
5This overview of the current situation of racism raises the underlying question of the use of the concept of race and the reality to which it refers. For Agier, the problem is easily solved: while races do not actually exist, racism does exist, and it in turn gives existence to the “race of racism,” even if it is based on an imaginary truth. What is real is the Black condition, the fact that individuals are considered Black and experience the consequences of it in daily life and in their social destinies.
- 1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race et culture”, Revue internationale des sciences sociales, UNESCO, Decembe (...)
6To explore this theoretical dimension in greater depth, Agier proposes a theoretical framework in three phases, starting with Claude Lévi-Strauss, moving on to Stuart Hall, and concluding with Sartre and Fanon. From Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Race and Culture,1 he highlights the bridge the book builds with genetics, which opens the door to a possible and fruitful collaboration between ethnologists and geneticists. Contrary to the idea that culture is biologically determined, the opposite is true: the cultural forms adopted by individuals here and there determine the pace of biological evolution and the direction it takes. Thus, race is one function of culture among others. Going beyond Lévi-Strauss’s writings and drawing on recent genomic research, notably on ancient DNA, which confirms that mixing, hybridization and crossbreeding date far back, he concludes that today’s genetic combinations are multiple, infinite, and increasingly unique. They correspond to races only through the artifice of classifications applied to an uninterrupted continuum of endless genetic re-compositions. However, this attempt at clarification does not resolve the problem of racism. Agier then returns to the premise, borrowed from Colette Guillaumin, that racism is an ideology, a premise that implies the social existence of race, based on a biological “mark” associated with otherness and relations of domination. This ideology crystallizes pre-existing inequalities by presenting them as “natural,” as illustrated by the end of the slave system and the beginning of global racialization during the era of European imperialism. Racism thereby became an object of inquiry for the social sciences which aimed to understand the race produced by racism, and how it was lived by the people and groups defined by it. This implied grounding research in the ethnography of race relations.
- 2 Stuart Hall, Race, ethnicité, nation. Le triangle fatal, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019.
7The second phase of Agier’s theoretical exploration focuses on the contribution of Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born sociologist and specialist in British cultural studies.2 When invited to reflect on a global scale, Hall observes that a process of multi-culturation and hybridization is at work, that runs completely counter to national cultural identities, supposedly pure and original. This is giving rise to a new culturalist and nationalist version of racism, where questions of cultural belonging seem to be coded language for race and color. However, Hall also recognizes the “bodily” evidence of race, which is its experiential basis, and which infiltrates the anti-racist argument through references to heredity, filiation and even “blood.” Departing somewhat from Hall, Agier believes that race can be “reconstructed” or “re-assembled” through the historical and political work of culture, which achieves a “transfiguration” of race.
- 3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.), Pluto Press, 2008.
- 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir”, preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (...)
8The third phase of the theoretical framework returns to the past and alludes to the heated dialogue between Sartre and Fanon. It refers to Sartre’s 1948 essays in Black Orpheus (Orphée noir), in which he claims that négritude is the second and necessary phase of a dialectical relationship, after the first phase of white supremacy, but that it is not the outcome nor the end, since the ultimate goal should be the end of race. Fanon did not reject this universalist goal (“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man,” he wrote), but he criticized Sartre for neglecting the idea of self-awareness, which alone, far from any idea of essence, makes action possible.3 Hence the idea of “double consciousness,” adopted by Agier, which is the sign of a tension between the ascribed identity and the subject who emancipates himself from it, a tension also found in the words of an early author like W.E.B. Du Bois, or more recently, Paul Gilroy. To escape from race thus constructed, the subject of race splits into two persons: one is the racialized person, while the other is the subject who responds, resists, and reinvents itself, becoming an acting subject who fights against the objectified subject.4
- 5 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. About this nove (...)
9Beyond these references, Agier focuses on the race of colorist racism using the metaphor taken from sorcery: race as a curse. He draws this idea from Richard Powers’ novel The Time of Our Singing,5 which follows the destiny of three mixed-race siblings (born to a German Jewish father and an African American mother) and remarkably portrays the arbitrariness of racial ascriptions imposed on the characters’ personal choices. The tension between their intimate and social condition is reflected in these choices and is a curse insofar as the social world is imposed on them based on their color and appearance, which supposedly represent all the personal characteristics that form the social basis of the concept of race. These characteristics are then destined to be genetically transmitted through filiation, and therefore through successive generations. The link between the intimate biological condition and the racialized social one represents an unbearable ascription for those who are identified as subjects of race.
- 6 Gilberto Freyre, Maîtres et esclaves. La formation de la société brésilienne, (R. Bastide, Trans.), (...)
10These are the standard themes of colorist racism in post-slavery societies, and they can notably be found in the Caribbean obsession with the different degrees of miscegenation, as seen in its purest form in what was formerly Saint-Domingue; but also in the American one-drop rule, as well as in colorist racism in Brazil, with its prolific terminology for describing color nuances. As regards the specific case of Brazil, Agier clearly shows the reversal that occurred in the history of its race relations. While the country’s history had long been characterized by miscegenation (with the central role played, from the 1930s onward, by Gilberto Freyre who praised it), which gave rise to the political idea of racial democracy, exemplified by UNESCO in the early 1950s, the concept was later used by the dictatorship, and is now strongly criticized and considered a fallacious myth. This can be seen in the rise of the Afro movement in the 1980s—hostile to miscegenation—in the introduction of racial quotas, and in the new representations of history (notably the recognition of quilombos, territories where fugitive slaves could take refuge and which today give access to land rights, etc.).6
11Colorist racism is based on the bodily evidence of phenotype. Awareness of the possible discrepancy between physical appearance and the hereditary dimension of race raises the issue of “passing” (the tendency to pass as white) which has given rise to a wealth of literature, both in fiction and in the social sciences. From whichever side this “passing” is observed, it plunges individuals into ambivalence and discomfort, into an unstable equilibrium where representations of race and gender are constraints that weigh heavily on their existence, subjecting them to contradictory choices. Some will want to confirm the erasure of their color and origin, considering their heritage to be a personal matter and affirming their desire to live in a post-racial world, while others, on the contrary, after gaining a new awareness of racism, seek, and engage in, ways of combating it. Mixed-race individuals are also faced with this choice and oscillate between the two options, often depending on the generation to which they belong. In Brazil, for example, a growing tendency to “become Black” can be observed, with varying positions adopted depending on the context.
The Cultural Implications of Resistance to Racism
12When conceptually pairing racism and culture, Agier primarily focuses on the cultural implications of responses to racism, notably performances in public spaces that “transfigure” race, including the most radical ones, such as those that impose racial segregation. He begins his book with one of these performances by the Ilê Aiyê movement in Bahia, whose carnival parades are forbidden to white people. For him, whoever observes this movement must respect this rebalancing, which is the only way to understand its meaning. For Agier, racial non-diversity even seems to be a condition for the performance’s success. The fact that it was controversial from the very first year and still is fifty years later confirms its effectiveness. According to him, this radicalism should not be separated from the blatant racism in social relations in Bahia, despite the cordial appearance of daily interactions. The aim of these performances is to eliminate the negrophobic ways of doing and thinking expressed through this cordial racism. It is a refusal to be the Blacks of Brazilian society’s racism (“I’m not your Negro,” in the words of James Baldwin).
13Thus, in response to the very real spatial segregation in the city, a large number of percussion groups have emerged, with Yoruba or Bantu names and African-inspired aesthetics (particularly in terms of clothing), that express a desire to live in an African way both internally and externally, and a newfound pride, a “Black pride.” This cultural imagination of a return to Africa that takes the form of a quest for origins seems to be focused on the past, as observed by the thirst for memory, genealogy, and even the imaginary of blood. Vovô, for example, the founder of Ilê Aiyê, posted his DNA results on his profile. (It is interesting to note the popularity of DNA testing among people of African descent as a compensation for the genealogical void they experience, but also as a sign of a certain biologization of identity.) However, this return to Africa also brings to life an imagined future that is already here and real.
14This is what leads Agier to the observation of a “transfiguration” of race through culture. Contrary to its domination effects, race can express revolt, the rejection of ascribed identity, and individual existence. It can open new paths toward liberation in the imagination, political subjectivities, and utopias. These paths converge in the act of cultural creation. The street arts, for example, are a rich object of study for anthropologists, whatever their field. They offer a way to observe at close quarters the intertwined dynamics of meaning and function, which establish a very concrete link between art and politics. For the participants, the aim is to build a new self-image by mocking the gaze of white people, and to allow this image to be accepted both in the carnival space and in memory, with reference to Maroon communities such as the Quilombo of Palmarès. This, incidentally, leads to a different conception of Africa, a global, utopian Africa, far removed from the African continent. Instead of the old discourses of integration and assimilation promoted by the anti-racist movements of previous decades, the intent is to defend a confrontational position that seeks to have a Black territoriality recognized within Brazilian society, to establish a spiritualization of militant practices through Candomblé, and to promote a different history based on re-Africanization, closer to ideas of resistance than to those of syncretism and miscegenation.
- 7 Flore Pavy, Voukoum. Esprits rebelles du carnaval guadeloupéen, Paris, Éditions de la MSH, 2025.
15The same aspirations that combine cultural struggle and spiritual quest can be found in other areas, such as Guadeloupe, as described by Flore Pavy in her study of the mas rituals specific to carnival gwoup-a-po (such as Akiyo, Voukoum, etc.), which are part of the Mouvman Kiltirel Gwadloup, a movement that reappropriates African traditions on a transnational scale.7 Beyond the alternatives offered to the “Black Americas,” ranging from deculturation in the crushing system of cultural destruction that was slavery (in line with Frazier’s thinking) to the preservation of Africanisms (in line with Herskovits’ thinking), to reculturation through the process of creolization (where a population forcibly transplanted changes “into something else,” according to Édouard Glissant), Agier believes that the African utopia is no longer anchored in a single, permanent territory, and that its spaces are now less geographical than symbolic in a world where everything is delocalized, deterritorialized, and hybridized. Thus, there must be a re-creation of the self in response to the racial gaze. Every “Black experience” must be a “remix.”
The Analyst’s Position
16Is it intellectually and morally uncomfortable to investigate a phenomenon that we detest? But how can we fight racism if we refuse to make it a real subject of investigation, even if the category of race remains morally reprehensible? Identified throughout his research as a white European man, Agier accepts his position as a racialized investigator, recognizing the personal advantage of being white (and not experiencing racial relations under the burden of race), but also an epistemological disadvantage, since something is missing from his understanding of the world.
17This position does not prevent him from hoping for a rise of universality based on his own experience, that of a white European man dealing with otherness, and the prospect of a non-racial future. But his position remains uncomfortable, and this was confirmed when he was called out for being racist by a Black student when he mentioned at a conference, out of scientific integrity, that based on his field data the Blacks of the Afro movement in Bahia were culturally the most mixed-race of all Brazilians! He acknowledges that an identity-based interpretation is very prevalent among activists in the Black cultural movement, and that this interpretation seems to be opposed to the study of cultural dynamics that he defends by placing himself outside this identity conflict, which is very Brazilian but can in fact be found in many other contexts.
- 8 Leonora Miano, Afropea, Utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste, Paris, Grasset, 2020.
18Could such an interpretation of identity truly be part of the legacy of Jorge Amado’s creolized universe and his praise of miscegenation? And can Agier ignore the controversies that arose when affirmative action programs were introduced in university admissions, which continue to divide the academic community, particularly among anthropologists? The same applies to the problematic nature of the mythologized Africa (an “image floating in a vacuum,” wrote Roger Bastide) that circulates within the Afro-descendant diaspora, as illustrated by an anecdote Agier recounts of a Congolese lawyer exiled in Brazil. She told him that it was in Brazil that she discovered racism, revived by the migration of Africans. When Agier told her about Black organizations and Afro cultural movements that were restoring respect for, and pride in, Black people, she replied that these Afro movements did not want people like her, that their Africa had nothing to do with the real Africa. “When they speak, I don’t understand anything,” she said. Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano’s idea of “not being Black” could probably be understood in the same way.8
19Reading Agier’s book, one undoubtedly senses an excess of optimism (even though he first associates race with a curse) when he defends the idea of the transfiguration of race as a means for emancipation: who can guarantee that racial distinctions will not remain permanently entrenched in the future, contradicting his expectation of a race-free society? Is there no risk of falling back into the racial curse? Despite the pertinence of his arguments, the generous nature of his approach, and the empathetic tone of a book that wins over readers, he perhaps does not sufficiently account for the dimension of separation that race introduces—whichever way one looks at it—beyond its effects of domination and oppression. His perspective is nevertheless valuable in exploring all possible avenues in the face of the current reactionary offensive, in a world where anti-Enlightenment reactions are taking hold globally and are marked by the return of unapologetic racism with supremacist overtones.
Notes
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race et culture”, Revue internationale des sciences sociales, UNESCO, December 1971. Reprinted in the collection of articles Le regard éloigné, Paris, Plon, 1983. Reissued, together with Race et Histoire, by Albin Michel in 2002.
2 Stuart Hall, Race, ethnicité, nation. Le triangle fatal, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019.
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.), Pluto Press, 2008.
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir”, preface to the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1948 (Paris, PUF).
5 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. About this novel, see: Emmanuel Parent, “Derrière le voile. L'impossible résolution musicale des antagonismes raciaux aux États-Unis”, L’Homme, 182, 2007, p. 81-88.
6 Gilberto Freyre, Maîtres et esclaves. La formation de la société brésilienne, (R. Bastide, Trans.), preface by Lucien Febvre, Paris, Gallimard, 1952. Original title: Casa grande e Senzala, 1933.
7 Flore Pavy, Voukoum. Esprits rebelles du carnaval guadeloupéen, Paris, Éditions de la MSH, 2025.
8 Leonora Miano, Afropea, Utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste, Paris, Grasset, 2020.
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Jean-Luc Bonniol, « Michel Agier, Racisme et culture. Explorations transnationales [Racism and culture: Transnational Explorations], Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2025 », Appartenances & Altérités [En ligne], 7 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2025, consulté le 12 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alterites/2385 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/156lz
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