Listening for the Non-Dits of a Post-Racial Utopia in Stories of Kinship and Intimacy

This article explores what is said and not said (the non-dit) about race in contemporary France via three case studies that trace silences and elisions as regards race from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. The first case is a 1930 book about African Americans written by Magdeleine Paz. The second case looks at interracial fears regarding sex work in West Africa after World War II. The third case is the 2012 guerrilla film Rengaine, which like a fairy-tale warns viewers about the utopic-dystopic anxieties and hopes contained in conversations about race. Each case reveals different dimensions of the tensions provoked by the idea of a post-racial utopia.