I’ve had the pleasure of working with Elayne Oliphant (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at New York University) in a number of capacities over the last several years, but ever since I moved to London, what I’ve missed most were the days when I could read something in the news, and with questions only barely beginning to percolate, walk down the hall from the Revealer’s quarters to Elayne’s office to ask her what she thought. She always received these visits graciously, engaging the question and offering insights far sharper and more informed than I had been able to shape myself. It’s that generous thinking and expertise I wanted to call on and share with you this month. As the churn of the news cycle threatened to consume us once and for all, I was immensely grateful that Elayne continued to make time for my queries as they landed on her (inbox) door. 

Kali Handelman: Elayne, there are so many things I would love to talk to you about right now — the pandemic, the election, teaching during a pandemic and election — but I’m going to try to focus this month’s chat on something a little narrower. I want to think with you a bit about “religion and media,” the ever broad and capacious banner under which we have both thought and worked for a while.

First, and most pressingly close to your own research, I want to ask you about what’s been happening in France these last few weeks. In your forthcoming book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, you write about the series of events preceding the October 16, 2020, murder of the French middle school teacher, Samuel Paty. You write about the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, why it published cartoons of Muhammed in 2006, and the response to the killings at the magazine’s office in 2015. Now that France is, once again, embroiled in a public, fraught conversation about Frenchness, secularism, and Islam (at least nominally), I wonder what questions you would invite readers to ask when they read news coverage about France right now? What is especially hard for American readers to understand about the terms and undercurrents of these debates and the discourses within them? I’m particularly interested in whether you could help us understand how these conversations center on Frenchness and how religion does — and doesn’t — figure into how it is defined.

Elayne Oliphant: Kali, it is wonderful to chat with you and thank you for the opportunity to turn our eyes to some unsettling events in France, given how singularly we have been focused on the United States in recent months. The killings of Samuel Paty outside of Paris and three people inside a Catholic cathedral in Nice have exacerbated a number of now fairly long-standing trends. First, the state has expanded its oppression and surveillance of Muslims. Second, there has been a doubling down on the right to offend minority groups as essential to French Republican democracy. Third, voices in the government have worked to tie these violent actors to the left and in particular to academics. I want to focus on these latter two trends, both because they are deeply worrying and because they point us toward thinking about some of the complex relationships between religion and media.

Many in France expressed outrage at the horrific violence of Paty’s killing, which was undeniably disturbing. Many, however, also returned to themes we heard at the time of the Charlie Hebdo killings: that the killer had also attacked the fundamental right of all French people to commit acts of offense against religious images, a right that must be defended at all costs. In France, there is an easily retrievable narrative that suggests these violent acts demonstrate a “savage” (a term that has come back with a vengeance in France recently) misunderstanding of the nature of objects and images, or, as we have come to think of them, religious media. In using this term, I am, of course, not referring to the news media, but to any object, image, or practice that serves as a site of mediation — between humans, between humans and gods, between humans and objects, between the living and the dead. Without attempting to analyze anything about how images of the Prophet Muhammad operate as religious media, I want to highlight how many of those who gathered in the streets to mourn Paty’s death did so in order to insist that modern, “civilized” actors are never unduly tied to objects and images. Such actors understand that such media have no agency and that no harm can be enacted against them, even objects, images, and practices considered sacred. And anyone who objects to the profanation of sacred images must be “savage.” I think we should be asking some questions about this assumption. What objects and images count as sacred? How is that sacrality articulated? Who has legitimate access to these sacred sites of mediation?

One of parallels I saw with the Charlie Hebdo killings was how many people expressed their mourning by occupying public space with signs of the normative majority. The sense that this violence can most effectively be critiqued by emphasizing the irreproachability and sacrality of French public space — a powerful site of mediation itself — by filling this space with the “true” French citizen (even during a pandemic) demonstrates the refusal of some claims to sacrality and the privileged taken-for-grantedness of others.

The cumulative effect of these responses is to deny the possibility that these violent actions are those of a very small group. They are instead taken as an expression of “Islam” broadly speaking. All Muslims are required to submit to the harm done to images of the Prophet, while also being reminded of their lack of legitimate access to the sacred French public sphere. If a public demonstration of the white, tacitly-Christian majority is a necessary response to these acts, then it says something about who can make a legitimate claim to occupy and take up public space.

In addition, I think it is important to remember that more explicitly Christian media play key roles in the affirmation of the morality of French public space. My experience of visiting some of the informal memorials that were installed following the 2015 shootings at the Bataclan is that, like in the U.S., these expressions of mourning had many Christian components. In France, this Christianity is Catholic. Votive candles tended to surround the memorials. And it was in Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral that politicians gathered to mourn those lost. They didn’t just gather in this space, they attended a full mass presided over by the archbishop. And, of course, we only have to remember the passionate response to the fire at Notre-Dame last year to recall the strength of the commitment to having Catholic symbols not simply occupy, but dominate French public space. Obviously, I can in no way address the thinking or intentions of the perpetrator of the violent acts in Nice, but it might be worth asking if, rather than an explicitly anti-Catholic statement, attacking this site was another means of critiquing the exclusions of France’s sacred public sphere more broadly. I was struck on the day when Biden’s victory was announced how church bells rang out throughout Paris, in essence reaffirming this overlap between Catholic and French Republican images, spaces, and sounds.

Notre Dame fire, 2019

In terms of the third trend, which American readers may not have heard as much about, in the weeks that have followed these violent attacks there has been a significant uptick in attacks by those in government against left-wing intellectuals. Like many on the right, they have turned to concepts that were developed to analyze racialized oppression and white privilege in the United States, but that have increasingly moved into French academic critiques. Concepts like “race” and “intersectionality” are, government officials argue, “communalist” and create rigid boundaries between groups, exacerbating Muslim violence. The minister of education has recently suggested a desire to limit academic freedom by requiring academics to conduct research in line with Republican norms, narrowly defined.

I was recently impressed by an interpretation of this response to the Paty killing made by a French political scientist, Samuel Hayat, in Bibliobs. He points in particular to the work has been accomplished by the use of a term that has no basis in reality, “Islamo-gauchisme” (Islamic-leftism). After carefully dismantling the existence of a coherent ideology conveyed by the addition of “ism” to these terms, Hayat explores the connections between how this term is used today and how a parallel term was used in the early 20th century: “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Both of the terms link up left-wing politics and left-wing intellectual work with a religious group deemed dangerous and deeply “other” to the nation. There are a number of fascinating parallels, such as how the terms imply that those on the left might be unwittingly controlled by these dangerous religions, potentially undermining the legitimacy of a leftist critique for those who might otherwise be persuaded by it.

The real insidiousness of both terms, however, lies in the way they take for granted the threatening outsider status of minority religious groups, and open a vast terrain for the expression of already “ambient” Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, respectively. We certainly saw that after Charlie Hebdo, and it is being even further encouraged by the right-wing government today. One powerful distinction between the two contexts that Hayat acknowledges is that there were, in fact, many Jews involved in Communist and Socialist groups of various kinds in the early 20th century; it says something about these movements that they were inclusive of those who were otherwise refused an equal voice in the public sphere. He also points out that it suggests something significantly lacking in left-wing groups today, which have not been nearly so inclusive and can point to very few Muslims among them.

My work leads me to focus on an additional point: the potential Christianity underlying the normative or legitimate voice that opposes these “isms” can both go unsaid and appear desirable. So, the public sphere and public space so long celebrated as the sources of Europe’s “enlightened” status are, in fact, far from neutral. They are themselves a form of religious (or sared) media, and a variety of other religious media remain powerfully present within them, both in terms of the celebrated and unthreatening Catholic media, and in the potentially threatening specter of the signs and actors associated with minority religious groups.

KH: Because your forthcoming book deals so deeply with the topics of banality and privilege, I wonder if you could give us a bit of a primer on how you have, first, defined these terms in your work, and second, how you find them useful for navigating the political questions of our present moment (whether that be the election, the pandemic, or other stories that maybe deserve but are not receiving the same levels of attention)?

EO: It is perhaps another expression of Murphy’s law that one only really comes to understand the terms one is using upon completing a book. I finished the copy-edits on the book over the summer, and so I was rereading my account of banality and privilege in light of the newly powerful expressions of Black Lives Matter protests that emphasized the banality, ubiquity, and perniciousness of white privilege in the U.S. Somewhat unusually for France, anti-racist protests also occurred there in the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd. While there has long been activism by Black anti-racist groups, especially between 1995 and 2005, the refusal to recognize racism in France is long-standing and anyone making a claim on the basis of racial discrimination tends to be dismissed as “racist” by even bringing the concept of “race” into public discourse.

As in the U.S., monuments to French historical figures connected to slavery and colonialism have been vandalized and critiqued during these protests, pointing to how the banality and privilege of white supremacy is expressed and reproduced through the occupation and design of public space. Let me turn to James Baldwin to help clarify what I meant by this. In a passage from “No Name in the Streets,” he described how

The South African coal miner . . . or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history’s arrogant and unjust judgment.

Baldwin highlighted the particularity and the violence of spaces that many privileged, white, and tacitly Christian viewers take for granted as self-evident and unproblematic expressions of “French civilization.” Scholarly accounts of religious media, however, need to do more to address his critique. Innumerable studies of Notre-Dame emphasize the space in terms of what David Graeber referred to as its “density,” or the layers of ritual action and history it appears to make accessible. In order to address the violence that Baldwin identified as inhering in the glorification of these spaces, I argue that we need to approach religious media in a very different vein. Rather than focus exclusively on its density, we need to pay more attention to its banality.

I take the term banal from the work of Hannah Arendt. She used it to describe how that which is otherwise deemed unthinkable comes to appear as self-evident. In secular France, all signs of religion are supposedly forbidden in public life. And yet, on the day of the Notre-Dame fire, President Macron could declare: “we will rebuild this cathedral, all together. Without a doubt, it is a part of the French destiny and the project that we will have for years to come.” How, precisely, is France’s future tied to the rebuilding of the cathedral? At first glance, Macron’s words may seem to respond in the affirmative to a question that, for many, has become rather tired: Is Europe Christian? The issue that interests me is not whether spaces like Notre-Dame or Europe are sufficiently Christian (they are both secular and Christian, and yet neither term is sufficient to capture how they operate), but how they uphold privilege by silencing the violence of the histories that went into their creation. In using the term banal, I aim to address not only how that that which is discursively problematic comes to appear as acceptable, but how the value and resonance of media that, at least in part, work to maintain the boundaries of the dominant group come to appear self-evident.

KH: Lastly, I’ve been struck recently by conversations with colleagues and friends about mask wearing — friends who have told me that they can feel the norms shifting around being a bit more covered in public, and I can’t help but think of the “veil debates” in France. How do these concepts — banality and privilege — help us understand what, on the face of it (forgive the pun please), really does just look like hypocrisy. In other words, how can the state go from telling Muslim women that it is “un-French” to cover their faces, and then tell the entire country that, in fact, they must cover their faces (which, of course, they really must). And that, maybe more interestingly, some non-Muslims are starting to find a feeling of freedom in being more covered in public. Even just typing all of this out, I feel like I’m missing the point, but I wonder if you can help me unpack what I’m missing and why?

EO: It does unquestionably reveal yet again the hypocrisy of the burqa law. But the hypocrisy has always been obvious and, perhaps, part of its point. What I think of as the banality of the privilege of Frenchness is affirmed in this blatant hypocrisy: that which is discursively abhorred becomes not only unproblematic, but the efforts aimed at maintaining the power of the dominant group come to resonate and appear valuable.

Image by Halisia Hubbard

I haven’t read much about finding new freedoms in the wearing of masks, but I’d be fascinated to learn more. Indeed, one of the things that felt so thrilling about the protests over the summer in the U.S. and France was how, coming as they did on the heels of massive shutdowns in which a great deal of what we had taken for granted had been utterly transformed, this might prove to be a moment in which violent norms might finally be shattered. And yet, white supremacy and white privilege have long proved to be powerfully tenacious.

One of the wackier points made in the parliamentary debates about the burqa law in 2010 was the suggestion that French artists were especially known for their portraiture and so the face is incredibly important to French “culture.” (As a very minor point, I think many art historians would suggest that English artists were far more obsessed with the portrait than French artists, but I digress). This is a weird leap of logic, but also something more than only that.

To link up French “culture” with that which is housed in the Louvre and Paris’s many, many museums is another way of insisting upon the whiteness of French “civilization.” There are other ways of viewing museums than as irreproachable straightforward expressions of European civilization. They might also be understood as expressions of the violent expropriation that occurred during the Napoleonic wars and French colonialism. A fascinating case just closed a few weeks ago in France in which a Congolese activist was found guilty of the attempted theft of a museum object. There was no doubt that this activist — Mwazulu Diyabanza — had attempted to remove an object from the Musée Quai Branly. This museum is France’s largest “ethnographic” museum that has been widely critiqued for reproducing racist stereotypes in its largely de-contextualized or weirdly contextualized display of objects that French colonialists, anthropologists, and collectors stole from spaces throughout its 19th century Empire. Diyabanza live streamed the act while explaining that he was simply taking back that which rightly belonged to Africa.

President Macron commissioned a report in 2017 asking how many objects held in France’s museums might have been taken through illegitimate means and what ought to be done with them. The answers to these questions articulated in the 2018 report was 90,000 and that they ought to be returned. The President has claimed he is committed to addressing this issue, but at this point only 27 such returns have been initiated. In taking the action that is clearly not going to be addressed by the government into his own hands, Diyabanza looked forward to the opportunity to bring France’s historical and present-day crimes into the courtroom. In order to effectively silence him, the prosecution reduced the potential punishment from €100,000 and 10 years in prison to a €1000 fine. The judge found him guilty with relative ease, explaining that he hoped to discourage others from following his lead. The hypocrisy that Diyabanza wanted to emphasize was silenced again by the refusal to make space for his critique.

I hope that the experience of living with a face-covering encourages people to stop obsessing about veiling in France, and allows them to see the world and these media in a new light. But there is a great deal of privilege to be upheld by reinforcing certain notions of France and Frenchness and the signaling of the virtue of that privilege through the undeniably contradictory responses to different religious media. Then again, the work of activists is unrelenting and powerful. I just read that Diyabanza has been arrested again for attempting to remove an 18th century Indonesian sculpture from the Louvre.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in London. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Elayne Oliphant is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at NYU. Her first book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2021.