What is the Context?

Geographical Context #

The ERC project’s geographical frame is Romance-speaking European countries with a particular focus on France and Spain but taking into account other linguistic regions (e.g., Italy or Portugal) and the Romance-speaking Caribbean and Latin America as well. The project draws from my comprehensive knowledge of Romance languages (fluent in French & Spanish, high reading competence in Portuguese), the diverse linguistic profile necessary to engage in the complex field of African diaspora studies in Europe.

While the African diaspora in the UK is a widely discussed topic, Romance-speaking countries in Europe deal with their African and Afrodescendant populations rather cautiously. Yet, these countries look back to a considerable colonial past that keeps affecting the present. The ongoing exertion of political and economic influence on former colonies as in the case of France (e.g., the critical debate on the Franc Zone in Western/Central Africa or the French military intervention in Mali) is not the only proof of that. Further obvious consequences are past and present migratory flows from the (former) colonies to the (former) metropoles and transnational migratory movements of African and Afrodescendant people between different European countries. These movements give rise to diasporic identities not necessarily based on a common origin or a particular hostland but shaped by the experience of being perceived as Black by others. This perception establishes an artificial homogeneity not echoing the communities’ actual heterogeneity (with respect to ethnicity, gender, class, religion, sexuality, citizenship etc.).

It is an adscription of Blackness critically discussed within the communities but, yet, frequently adopted and re-defined to become visible as a group. Migration and the formation of ‘minority groups’ are, thus, of high importance today and increasingly affect political and social life in Romance-speaking European countries. In this context, we need to ask to what extent the websites echo imagined African and Afrodescendant communities that exist beyond the websites. Key questions the project will reveal answers to are: How do they constitute themselves as a community and what is their respective composition and history? How does a country’s tradition of dealing with ‘minority groups’ influence these groups’ self-images and digital agency? Given that the histories of Europe and its (former) colonies are entangled – France, e.g., keeps clinging to her oversea departments and territories –, this project also considers examples from the Romance-speaking Americas and Caribbean to study transnational similarities and local peculiarities of Afrodiasporic communities’ self-representations in cyberspace. The focus on languages other than English, furthermore, aims to look beyond the internet’s (and European politics’) lingua franca which does not mirror Europe’s actual (linguistic) diversity.

Socialpolitical Context #

Currently, we witness a far-reaching debate on migration from the Global South to Europe following the so-called ‘refugee summer’ in 2015/2016 and the subsequent ascent of right-wing populist movements, leading to a political shift to the right in many European countries. At the same time, Black activism has increased notably in Europe, intensified, in particular, since 2020 given new cases of police violence against African and Afrodescendant people and the activist response from within Afrodiasporic communities (BlackLivesMatter). Correspondingly, a vivid debate on Afrodiasporic groups emerged in many European countries. In France, e.g., scholars (Ndiaye 2008), film makers (Boni-Claverie 2015) or writers (Miano 2020) castigate the ‘colorblindness’ of the French Republic. They point to the systemic discrimination racialized subjects continue to suffer today. While this debate only recently and slowly starts to enter the public sphere, a considerable movement of online activism by African and Afrodescendant individuals and collectives and a myriad of digital platforms have emerged over the last years, stressing the high topicality of this project’s field of research.

In general, the spread of the internet has resulted in an incredible rise of digital content production, and the internet has become part of our daily lives. With that rise, consumers have also become content-producers who participate in online knowledge production. This potential of the digital space is all the more important in the case of ‘minority groups’ such as Afrodiasporic communities whose stories and perspectives tend to be ignored in the public sphere. Its members continue to suffer from exclusion and racism as they are frequently perceived as ‘foreigners’ in European societies in which normative whiteness marginalizes racialized Others – irrespective of their (non-)migration status, length of residence in the host society or citizenship. Yet, while race-thinking represents a very powerful discriminatory regime that highly affects Afrodiasporic communities in Europe, the experience of marginalization is not to be limited to the notion of racialization but intersectionalities are to be considered as well (with respect to gender, religion, class, sexuality etc.).