Resistance to revolutionary love: The struggle to decolonise the republic

This conversation with French-Algerian thinker and activist Houria Bouteldja focuses on her book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. By zooming in on contemporary debates around racism and decolonization in France, this interview focuses on questions of how gender and masculinity, sexuality, class, and race form political relationships within the modern nation-state. In particular, it asks follow-up questions to Bouteldja's epistemology in the chapter “We, Indigenous Women,” the chapter that explicitly focuses on women, gender, and sexuality. And while gender and sexuality are always also inherently public, we follow up on tracing how her book, Les indigènes de la république (the movement of which she was the spokesperson from 2005 to 2020), and she herself have been received in French public debate, including in academia, politics and the media. Within the latter power fields, we address the role of women of color intellectuals and the challenges they pose to current debates and “moral panics” through the optics of popular decolonial movements. Eventually, a conversation unfolds where an ostensible “(too) liberal academia” has been marked by contemporary accusations of “Islamogauchisme” in a wider discourse that portrays Europe as being “in crisis” and what that means for the decolonization of Europe.