Commemorating Police Racism Violence’s Victims: A Comparative Case-Study of Memorial Practices in French Anti-Police Violence Movements
The comparative analysis explores how mnemonic practices circulate in protest contexts and become part of collective action repertoires. From a relational perspective, the study investigates memorial practices linked to police violence within a competitive memorial space. The circulation of these practices across activist, political, and media fields—particularly at different levels of the state (municipal, regional, national)—is essential, as collective memory is co-constructed (Bouzama, 2019).
Attention is also given to the role of activists as memory activists or entrepreneurs (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2023). This analysis, focused on the associative and collective levels, explores interactions between individuals, social actors, and public institutions. A key question is whether past mobilizations are shared by all activists or specific to certain groups. The aim is to understand who mobilizes these references within the movement against police violence, based on their position in activist spaces and factors like gender and class. Existing research highlights gendered power dynamics within activism, even though women often lead the fight against police violence in France. The paper also considers race and class to examine the trajectories of activists, particularly descendants of immigrants and those from working-class neighborhoods.
In conclusion, this paper addresses how the memory of victims of state racism and violence is commemorated and how counter hegemonic narratives are constructed in the French context.
References:
Bouzama, Magali. « Ce Que Faire Mémoire Veut Dire ». In Faire Mémoire. Regard Croisé Sur Les Mobilisations Mémorielles. L’Harmattan, 2019.
Gutman, Yifat, et Jenny Wüstenberg. The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.