How “Europe” matters to Black Lives in France | Emily Marker-from BLM in Europe, a conference at Rutgers-New Brunswick

We will be posting a series of talks from Black Lives Matter in Europe, a conference organized by Belinda Davis  and the Center for European Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

There have been a slew of events this fall on Black Lives Matter in Europe. In this talk, Emily Marker considers a few ways that “Europe” matters to Black Lives in France. She reviews how the emerging transnational field of Black European Studies challenges French academic norms about what constitutes legitimate forms of knowledge, opening up new possibilities for Black Studies and racialized and minoritized scholars in France. Professor Marker also offers some preliminary reflections about the resonance of an explicitly transnational “Afropean” identity in France and Europe more broadly.

Emily Marker is Assistant Professor of European and Global History at Rutgers-Camden. Her first book, Black France, White Europe: Decolonizing Belonging in the Postwar Era, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. She has published in French Politics, Culture & Society, Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, and The American Historical Review. Since 2018, she has been co-editing a series of special issues of H-France Salon on race and racism in both France and the field of French/Francophone Studies. She is a member of Rutgers’ Center for African Studies, the Graduate History Faculty at Rutgers-New Brunswick, and the Governing Council of the Western Society for French History.