In his 2012 song ‘Lettre à la République’, Kery James focuses on the historical relationship between France and its ethnic minority populations. As his lyrics poignantly argue, contemporary identity politics in France have not arisen out of a void but are rather situated in a long colonial history. James does not hesitate to bring up some of the most troubling moments in France's colonial empire, from the placement of colonial soldiers on the front lines during the world wars, to torture in Algeria or the exploitation of colonial laborers. As he notes, ‘Difficile de se sentir français sans le syndrome de Stockholm’ and asks, ‘Comment aimer un pays qui refuse de nous respecter?’ In a music video featuring the figure of Marianne holding automatic rifles and handcuffs, he clearly communicates his frustration with the exclusion he has observed throughout his life in France.

‘Lettre à la République’ is a remarkable song in the way that it explicitly ties debates over Frenchness to France's colonial empire, and it singles out France's colonial policies that facilitated the arrival of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa (as James asks, ‘Demandez aux tirailleurs sénégalais et aux harkis / qui a profité de qui?’). It is in part this relationship – between legacies of historical migration patterns from the French colonial empire and the outspoken and active presence of the descendants of postcolonial immigrants in French society today – that interests us in this volume. Here we propose a new term, ‘post-migratory postcolonial’, in the hope of moving away from previous labels that have risked becoming geographically and culturally reductive. We consider the combined status of post-migratory postcolonial populations, namely descendants of immigrants from geographic regions formerly colonized by France (including but not limited to North and sub-Saharan Africa as well as French Indochina). Perhaps most crucially, our analytical emphasis hinges on the idea that these populations are all French; they may have familial pasts with links to other regions of the world but, as these cultural practitioners all claim, they are French and expect to be seen as such.