Journal Marronnages: Race and social sciences
Why Marronnages?
A spectre haunts the 21st century: the spectre of race. This issue has long been a major social and political challenge to the human history and continues to do so at the beginning of this century, in the guise of various racial regimes, shaped by precise historical, cultural and geographical contexts. The logics and markers of racialisation which affect minoritised groups can indeed vary according to time and space: skin colour (e.g., anti-Black racism, colourism), religion (e.g., anti-Semitism, Islamophobia), ethnicity (e.g., anti-Asian, anti-Gypsyism), nationality (e.g., anti-Italian or anti-Portuguese racisms in Switzerland, France, or Belgium), and so forth. At the same time, the construction of a racial boundary also defines the contours of whiteness, which attributes a superior social status to other groups. Whichever racial regimes are analysed, they are difficult to separate from other forms of domination as they intersect with class, gender, age, disability, and/or sexuality.
The racial question has become particularly urgent since the beginning of the 21st century with regard to at least two historical trends. On the one hand, as opposed to the widespread notion of ‘post-racial’ societies, racial boundaries have tended to harden in reaction to the transformations of global capitalism, climate change, and the growth of far-right movements and authoritarian political regimes. This hardening manifests itself in particular through the spreading of racist speech; restrictive racialised migration policies; generalized police brutality; and increasingly invasive techniques of identification, surveillance, and control of minoritised groups. These global phenomena can even result in internment and forced labour policies, mass violence, situations of ethnic cleansing, and statelessness favouring the forced relocation of populations.
On the other hand, one can observe a truly global anti-racism movement against racial hierarchies of any kind. In the wake of the anti-colonialist and anti-racist movements of previous centuries, there is a renewed awareness of the social, structural and historical roots of the reproduction of racism in contemporary societies. This anti-racist movement puts forward strong social and political demands for official recognition of colonial violence, a transformation of public spaces that glorify colonisation (statues, street names, etc.), the return of western museum pieces to former colonies, reparations for colonial history and the transatlantic slave trade, an end to the racial inequalities that structure public or private institutions and, ultimately, the invention of truly egalitarian and inclusive societies. The academic world, itself structured by racial inequalities at the national level and through the international division of scientific labour, is comprised in this protest movement. For example, the #RhodesMustFall or #ShutDownStem mobilisations express the desire to ‘decolonise’ the university from an epistemological and methodological point of view, to fight against racial inequalities within universities both in the Global South and in the Global North and to provide the institutional means (posts, teaching, funding, etc.) to carry out research on the racial question.
These initiatives have resulted in long-standing anger, aspirations and organisational efforts scattered around the world. Our era is witnessing a growing convergence of rejections – of varying intensity depending on the context – of racist domination (in its multiple forms) and of Western hegemony in the production of discourses, knowledge, and representations of human experience, which are irreducibly heterogeneous. In response, scattered attempts at resistance seek to build upon one another, joining epistemologies produced around the world so as to ‘de-Westernize’ intellectual sensibilities and aesthetic imaginations.
It is out of this critical juncture that the Marronages project has been borne, out of the linking of voices from the South and the North, as well as the awareness and relevance of past experiences. In the English-speaking academic world, there is a tradition of spaces for specialists’ scientific discussions of the racial question, with prestigious journals such as Race & Class (1959), Journal of Black Studies (1970), Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies (1971), Ethnic & Racial Studies (1978), Ethnicities (2001), Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2015), ReOrient, The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies (2015), Critical Romani Studies (2018), etc.
In contrast, the French-speaking academic world has no scientific journals dedicated to the racial question, with the exception of Ethnies (1971-1972), Sexe et race (1985) and Canadian Ethnic Studies, created in 1969. Marronnages thus seeks in its own way to revive an old French-speaking intellectual history of ‘leaving the state of minority’ initiated in the 19th and 20th centuries by certain intellectuals from the French empire. Indeed, La Revue des colonies (founded in the 1830s around the Martiniquais abolitionist Cyrille Bissette), La Revue du Monde noir (co-founded by Paulette Nardal in 1931), Tropiques (created in 1941 by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussi, and René Ménil) and Présence africaine (founded in 1947 by the Senegalese Alioune Diop) have been historical places of debate for anti-racist critical thought, bringing together poets, writers and academics from all disciplines. Rather than using the Blackness as the standard for analysing the racial question, these references recall the historical importance (marked by the geography of European slave and colonisation) of a crucial intellectual translation in a French-speaking context – in this case, the French empire. However, this critical intellectual tradition has yet to be translated into the creation of contemporary French-speaking academic social science journals. This is of Marronnages’ stated ambition.
In a world where the polyphony of voices critical of injustice, inequality and racial domination is struggling to make itself heard, even though this world is arguably more interconnected than at any previous period in history, Marronnages seeks to offer an academic embodiment of the longstanding traditions of critical thinking around these questions. The conceptual and historical metaphor of marronage is significant. A term that harkens back to ‘maroons’, the enslaved who escaped their condition and created autonomous societies and other forms resistance with creativity and ingenuity, marronnage more generally refers to ungoverned and ungovernable spaces, which can be found in a wide range of geographic spaces beyond the circum-Caribbean out of which the term first emerged (for instance, bled-es-siba in the Maghreb). While claiming the need for a scientific journal based on the tools of social sciences, this metaphor also speaks of the ambitious escape from the normative injunctions (in academic debates or disciplinary boundaries) that enslave consciousness and thought. In opposition to such injunctions which stifle the intellectual imagination, Marronnages intends to translate into scientific knowledge what writer Édouard Glissant, describing the inventiveness of runaway slaves, has called ‘a creative marronnage’.
What is Marronnages?
Marronnages positions itself as a French-speaking social science journal devoted to the analysis of race, racism and ethnicity in the contemporary world. It aims to provide an interdisciplinary academic forum for original research at the crossroads of sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics and management, geography, social theory, gender studies, legal sciences, environmental sciences and social psychology.
Marronnages promotes the publication of original research work from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Inspired by the footsteps of runaway slaves, the journal invites critiques of different forms of power and domination (economic, sexist, racist, heterosexual, etc.) as well as the imagination of concrete emancipatory alternatives. In the face of epistemic nationalisms, the journal promotes off-centre epistemological choices, concerned with minoritised points of view (feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, cultural studies, critical theories of race, disability studies, sexuality studies, etc.) and highlighting the non-subjects, dead angles, and unspoken aspects of the racial question. In the face of methodological nationalisms, the journal promotes quantitative and qualitative methodologies (e.g., ethnography, interviews, archives, statistics, legal norms) and a comparative approach that takes into consideration the unequal conditions of knowledge production and demonstrates genuine reflexivity. Academic spaces are subject to power relations that contribute to the invisibility or exploitation without recognition of past and present research produced by minoritised academics, whether they have emigrated from the Global South or whether they were born and/or studied in the Global North. For example, their past and present research is not always recognized via citations and references. The journal thus wishes to grant visibility to, and open a space for, discussions around the ‘presence of the Global South’ in the French-speaking academic world.
Open-access journal
Marronnages is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.