A presentation by Noémi Michel, Lecturer in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva

Report by Vanessa Gauthier Vela, The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Anchored in critical race and post-colonial theory and queer of colour critique, Noémi Michel’s talk analysed how black anti-racist critique uses particular conceptions of spatio-temporal mobility showing interrelations between space, memory and race. Her presentation was based on the theories of Frantz Fanon and Fatima El-Tayeb and focused on the Swiss African diaspora and its use of specific anti-racist strategies. She illustrated her argument with the case of the joint mobilisation of 17 associations form the “African diaspora of Switzerland” who wrote in 2015 a public memorandum in which they portrayed African and Black people as actively involved in the history of Switzerland and Europe since Antiquity. Michel used this case to demonstrate that the public narratives about the past are relevant to the present and that claims about the past can be strategically used to make claims in the present.

The speaker argued that anti-racism needs to queer in order to racism’s power to freeze certain subject positions. Michel uses queer of colour analysis and El-Tayeb’s definition of “queering” as a set of practices and political strategies deployed by minorities to respond to the dominant framework (in this sense “queer” is not synonymous with “homosexual”). Drawing on Fanon, she also discussed how racialisation sticks to the Black subject who then becomes frozen in space and time, and how racialised stereotypes are constructed through this freezing operation. Thus, racism freezes power in the past and the present. In the context of Switzerland, the freezing power can be seen simultaneously in the state, images and discourses and can operate on multiple levels such as commercial and humanitarian.

This is why a destabilisation – a rearrangement – is necessary in order to counter racism and unfreeze power. African and Black subjects must use history in the present in order to challenge dominant narratives that associate the African presence with a very recent immigration. By revisiting Switzerland’s history of colonialism, it is also possible to disrupt the country’s narrative of exceptionalism which presents the country as a having been external to colonialism. This externalisation of history, which also leads to the externalisation of power, blocks the possibility to understand the links between past and present racisms. By troubling the temporal border, black antiracist critique creates a special tangling which opens up possibilities for effective anti-racism. In this way, the logic of entangling shifts the dominant narrative and creates a different understanding of time and space.

Hence, even if the group does not call itself queer, in practice it is queering space and time, which is, according to Michel, essential in different claims made in political anti-racist interventions. Noémi Michel’s presentation convincingly demonstrated that claims about the past are linked to the present, and that anti-racism politics can effectively use queering to rearrange the politics of space and time imposed by the dominant order.