I was born into a family with Senegalese roots, weaned on the French Republic and raised in the cultures of the Black diaspora: I am, quite simply, Afro-French. As an expert on Black issues in France, I strive to explore and express the Black French experience through my academic research and artistic output.
Almost two years after the first protests and shortly after the 2020 Bastille Day: What to make out of the Yellow Vests and the state of French democracy? What to take away from the recently Macron-initiated citizens’ assemblies? Have the Yellow Vests and other protest shaken the French political establishment?
The takeover of the Bastille by ordinary French women and men represented a massive turning point in the French Revolution, and, while Bastille Day is now typically celebrated with Europe’s largest military parade and other accoutrements of crude nationalism and reactionary state power, the Place de la Bastille remains a major popular square, a meeting point for ordinary people from all over Paris and beyond, as well as a common site of protest and political demonstration.
Raw material extraction, transportation and waste disposal are triggering environmental conflicts worldwide. All types of material throughput in the global economy bear consequences for social justice and sustainability.
The paper, “Digital Trade Rules: A Disastrous New Constitution for the Global Economy, By and for Big Tech,” by Deborah James, provides a detailed look at the efforts of companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft to secure new accords at the World Trade Organization (WTO) that would allow them greater access to, and ownership of, data with minimal restrictions.
The largest corporations in the history of the world – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft – are seeking to use ‘trade’ rules to rig the rules of the global (digital) economy to enable them to collect more data, exercise more control over our lives and their workers, and amass ever more profit.
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