Abstract

How has the work of social scientists’ changed wider understandings of race? In Europe, the years after 1945 can be described as a time of increased epistemological uncertainty about race. Biological racism was disavowed by the international scientific community, but it did not disappear. Social scientists stepped in to explain that race was a socially constructed phenomenon. What emerged was not a consensus but rather new conflicts of interpretation. Different actors competed to define how race operated and what constituted racism, and multiple paradigms emerged to explain this.

This seminar will trace this process through one conflict of interpretation over a racist incident in 1960s France. Anonymous citizens, state actors and social scientists analyzed an ambiguous series of events to coproduce a new understanding of racism as fundamentally diffuse that remains with us today. 

In 1969, Jewish shop owners in Orléans were baselessly accused of kidnapping women in fitting rooms and trafficking them into sexual slavery. This antisemitic agitation rapidly attracted national attention, including by a team of social scientists led by sociologist Edgar Morin. He made these events into the "rumor of Orléans" a famous case-study in disinformation. 

Orléans allowed a number of actors to discuss race in a society which was uncertain about its existence, by drawing on developments in the study of communication and social psychology. This suggests that rather than simply diagnosing 'racism without racists', we should pay closer attention to historicizing the emergence of the theories that made this thinkable, and embed these analyses in the social contexts from which they emerged. 

Bio

Arthur Asseraf is a historian of modern France, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in the history of media, information and colonialism. Born and raised in Paris, he has been based at the University of Cambridge since 2017, and is currently Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at SCAS for the 2023-4 year. He is the author of Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019, winner of the Middle East Studies Book Prize), Le désinformateur (2022) and a coordinator of Colonisations: notre histoire (2023).