His lecture, entitled The Culture of the Race Subject: Theory and Practices, offered a profound reflection on the ways in which African and diasporic imaginaries are constructed in tension with imposed racial identities.
Thinking the “Race Subject”
Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, and Étienne Balibar, Michel Agier defines the “race subject” as a historical, social, and performative construction. Inherited from slavery, colonization, and apartheid, this category remains active in contemporary societies, marked by new forms of exclusion and racialization (migration, segregation, stigmatization).
The “race subject,” Agier explains, unfolds within a tension: it is both the object of subjugation and the actor of a subjectivation that resists and invents new cultural forms.
Performance as Resistance
A central part of the lecture focused on the role of cultural and artistic performance as a space of resistance. Whether through Afro-Brazilian carnivals (such as Ilê Aiyê in Bahia) or rituals in Guadeloupe, these collective practices generate new narratives, images, and symbols, allowing communities to assert themselves beyond the racial identity imposed on them.
These performances become sites of self-reinvention and of struggles of imagination: they overturn the “living image” fabricated by the colonial gaze in order to produce new figures of the Black and diasporic subject.
Decolonizing Imaginaries
Referring to Fanon and Joseph Tonda, Michel Agier emphasized the importance of breaking free from the “dream of the Other” — those imposed images of Africa and the Black body as objects of domination. Decolonization, he argued, involves creating one’s own language, images, and narratives that escape racist infra-thought.
In this sense, cultural struggles are not secondary: they lie at the heart of social change.
They make it possible to shift perspectives, reinvent belonging, and build alternative political spaces.
A Rich and Engaged Exchange
The lecture concluded with an open discussion with students. Conversations explored the tensions between globalization and the plurality of racial experiences, contemporary resistances to global capitalism, and the role of social sciences research in analyzing power relations.
This event highlighted the vitality of ongoing reflection on race, culture, and social change, while opening new paths to envision a more just and truly decolonized society.