Thickening blackness: Tracing the invention of contemporary black identities in France

• Department of History

Lecture by Dr. Sophie Niang in the framework of Black History Month 2026

It has become somewhat axiomatic in Black European Studies that blackness in continental Europe is a thin identity, constituted by a common experience of oppression and exclusion, as opposed to a thick identity encompassing a shared culture, shared histories, and shared reference points. Focusing on France as a case study, this talk will trouble this understanding. Analysing a series of cultural work from the past decade, I argue that black people born and raised in France have engaged in a creative process of producing new black identities, in an open-ended, dialogic and inventive process that challenges hegemonic notions of Frenchness and national belonging on the one hand, and fixed notions of blackness on the other. This process finds echoes and resonances in black communities across continental Europe