Not Quite Postcolonial Paris: Imperial Voices, a Kiwi Café, and Black Panther

Abstract

This essay explores the tensions of Paris as a not-yet-postcolonial city. It describes the experience of singing in a concert of patriotic music from the Napoleonic era while researching the impact of colonialism on French culture and on French colonial subjects and citizens. The author describes how this experience brought to life the academic literature on French universalism and on the nature of Paris as a colonial metropolis. A particular and personal set of circumstances raised some unexpected ethical questions about performing the past. The piece explores the power and nature of music as a source that can be archival but also subjective and affective. It describes an embodied and entangled experience of Paris as a space shaped by empire. It ends with a reflection inspired by a French tradition of the flâneur, of walking in the city and listening to the very real postcolonial voices that inhabit it.