Affirmative Exclusion - by Jean-Loup Amselle (Hardcover)

About the Book

Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and...

Book Synopsis

Jean-Loup Amselle explores the issue of multiculturalism by delving into the history of France's confrontation with ethnic difference. Amselle analyzes France's relationship to Egypt, Algeria, and Senegal to show how ideas about difference and assimilation played out in French colonial policies and how these same tensions continue to be problematic as France grapples with cultural pluralism.Amselle's book has timely and wide-ranging implications. Arguing against the "liberal communitarian state" as it exists in the United States, Amselle contends that an overemphasis on difference can lead to what he calls "affirmative exclusion"--the flip side of affirmative action. The recognition of a multiplicity of ethnic groups in France, he asserts, creates an environment that fosters racism. "Despite an outward appearance of generosity, supporters of French-style multiculturalism, by promoting 'affirmative action, ' run the risk of creating as many difficulties as there are 'target groups, ' which they have helped identify and hence produce."Calling on theories of racial difference devised by early anthropologists--most notably, Louis Faidherbe--and on the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Amselle makes historical and sociological sense of the debates over multiculturalism and the violence they engender. Toward a French Multiculturalism proposes directions for the future.

Review Quotes

After decades of work in Africa, Jean-Loup Amselle, one of France's most creative social anthropologists, has developed a strikingly original genealogy of France's contemporary original multiculturalism.... In his championing of a republican renewal, Amselle joins other French anthropologists and sociologists, whose own natural-law origins trump any relativist leanings when they have called for a ban on headscarves in schools and questioned France's recent turn to 'positive discrimination'.... In Amselle's (and others') 'republican turn' we are reminded of the strikingly different political philosophies that underlie our social sciences. When read as a political critique, colonial history, and disciplinary genealogy, Amselle's work wonderfully remarker the landscape of the engage anthropology of contemporary France.

About the Author

Jean-Loup Amselle is Directeur d'etudes a l'ecole des Hautes etudes en Sciences Sociales and the author of many books, including Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Jane Marie Todd is the translator of five books published by Cornell, most recently What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas by Catherine Chalier.