User:Oroonoka/Silyane Larcher

Silyane Larcher is a French philosopher and political scientist, graduate of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French acronym EHESS), research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and researcher at the Interdisciplinary Social Studies Research Institute (IRIS) at EHESS. As a specialist in colonial and postcolonial studies, she specializes in the tensions and contradictions that exist between republican universalism, the (post)colonial situation, and the construction of racial identity in the French West Indies. She is studying political sociology and Afro-feminism in France, which will be the topic of her next book. From 2021 to 2022, she was a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Biography
Silyane Larcher was born and raised in Martinique. Her father, a lawyer and a far-left, anticolonial political activist, advocated for the promotion of Martinican Creole language. Larcher's mother, a midwife, became a union representative before serving in elected office, first at the municipal level in Fort-de-France and later at the Regional Council of Martinique. As a university student, Larcher found herself "attracted" by academic philosophy. When she defended her doctoral dissertation in 2011, her graduate advisor was Pierre Rosanvallon of the Collège de France, a specialist in the history of citizenship and democracy in France. After having taught political science and the history of political science in Martinique at the University of the Antilles and French Guiana, Larcher was recruited to CRNS in 2015, where she was assigned to the Migration and Society Research Unit at Paris Diderot University.

Published works
Larcher's 2014 book L'Autre citoyen, adapted from her dissertation, argues against the concept of an abstract, unitary, and universalist French citizenship. She instead sees citizenship as having been articulated around certain norms of skin color and culture. France applied an exceptional legal regime to emancipated slaves in the Caribbean starting in 1848, featuring laws inapplicable outside the metropole, a situation which tended to deny the equality of the citizenship extended to ex-slaves. In the French newspaper Le Monde, Julie Clarini wrote regarding L'Autre citoyen, "By unrelentingly working to reveal, with rigor and clarity, the concepts that were deployed to decrease a very severe tension around concepts of universality, L'Autre citoyen also shines a light on the ambiguities surrounding an idea of assimilation that promises an equality that proves endlessly conditional and delayed." Etienne Balibar writes in his preface, "The history revealed in this book is not merely one of laws and statues meticulously described and analyzed. It is a history of struggles, of balances of power, of violence. The violence comes first from slavery, an absolute dehumanization, and later from the unequal social order and attempts to defend it—this violence became part of the law itself. Yet the violence can also be seen in emancipation, and in that regard it is liberating."

In 2018, Larcher co-edited the book Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality (University of Nebraska Press), about black French women's struggles for equality since the abolition of slavery in 1848.

Awards

 * 2012: Dissertation prize from the French Institute of the Americas (fr)