Paper short abstract:

Manthia Diawara’s memoir _We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World_ can be read as an intercultural translation of Black African culture. I juxtapose the memoir with his documentary film _Rouch in Reverse_ where Diawara turns the gaze on Eurocentric assumptions on Africa and Africans.

Paper long abstract:

Manthia Diawara's memoir _We Won’t Budge_ opens with an incident of mistaken identity where he is passing for an African American in Paris in the cab ride from the airport to his lodging. The charade of passing for comfort comes to a prompt end when the police stops the taxi on a routine check and Diawara is outed as an African in Paris. The experience inspires Diawara to spend his sabbatical year from NYU writing "a modern-day slave narrative set in Paris." Diawara, also a documentary filmmaker, decides with Salif Keita's protest song “Nous Pas Bouger” in mind "to do a reverse anthropology of the CRS and the Africans in Paris, the French intelligentsia, and its attitude toward multiculturalism." By reverse anthropology, he means to look at Paris as a field for anthropological research, and at Parisians as natives. The journey of self-discovery as a citizen of the world, also Black and African, guides the narrative. Diawara follows up the narrative with a visual journey. In _Rouch in Reverse_ Diawara responds to French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch’s film _Petit à petit_. Diawara uses reverse anthropology, the method he employed to write his “book on African migration in France” and turns the camera on Rouch in his native Paris. The film becomes a commentary on the fluidity of identity but inexorability of racism, in Europe and America.