Title: In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire
Author: Louisa Yousfi
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2025 (English version)
Since its French publication in 2022, Louisa Yousfi’s In Defence of Barbarism has been translated into Basque, Spanish, Italian and now English. That this slim volume of just 112 pages – at first glance focused on the specific coloniality of contemporary French society – unexpectedly encountered such success abroad is a testament to the text’s appeal.
In Defence of Barbarism departs from a provocation by the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine: ‘I feel I’ve got too many things to say that I’m better off not being too cultivated… I need to remain a barbarian.’ What ‘remaining a barbarian’ might mean (for a non-white political subject who is never clearly defined) is the prime concern of Yousfi’s essay. To answer this question, she brings together disparate cultural references: Chester Himes’s 1956 crime novel The End of a Primitive, the aftermaths of 9/11, the journalist Mehdi Meklat and his diabolical alter ego Marcelin Deschamps (both the essay’s most francocentric and its most dated reference), the rappers Booba and the rap duo PNL, comprised of siblings Ademos and NOS. Weaving its arguments through these various sites, the essay endeavours to define barbarism and its emancipatory political potential.
Incandescent prose
Yousfi’s incandescent prose, her deft, striking sentences are engrossing – remaining so in Andy Bliss’s translation. Sentences such as ‘The French language becomes one of the spoils of war,’ written about Yacine, jump out from the page and stick to the reader’s mind. The defiant manner in which she constructs her argument captures the attention, perhaps most strikingly in Chapter 3, ‘’The impossible community of tears’, a meditation on the violence of empire, grief, un-grievability and the ethical conflicts preventing ‘us’ and ‘them’ from communing in mourning. Describing 9/11 as the west encountering itself, she writes, ‘Why should we cry now, having failed to cry earlier for all the others? So many deaths have gone unmourned, so commonplace have they become, that the Empire has drained us of our tears, and the tank is still empty when it demands that we sympathise with its misfortunes.’
This idea of an impossible community of tears resonates in new ways in the current moment, amidst Israel’s most recent genocidal incursion into Gaza, and the accompanying, conflicting narratives of grief and revenge used to justify and condemn. This chapter is one of the strongest. If elsewhere the essay’s blurry definition of the barbarian as a political subject can work against the overall argument, here its expansiveness bears real affective potential. Yousfi takes seriously the idea of 9/11 as a defining event both for the west and for its internal and external Others, and the way that it functions, partly, through the politics of emotions. Doing so, she seeks to understand what these hegemonic discourses around feelings do to our emotional lives, arguing that the oppressed’s inner struggles around feelings (of grief, of rage) are of true political relevance.
In Defence of Barbarism is not an academic text; its shortcomings do not take away from the striking appeal of its argument
Yousfi also excels in her analysis of rap as the definitive barbarian art form in contemporary France. While her assessment of individual rappers remains at times unconvincing, her wider considerations are striking. As significant and groundbreaking as Booba’s career has been, from his early days as part of the Lunatic duo, to his dazzling solo trajectory in the 2000s and early 2010s, it seems difficult to argue for his ‘radical’ potential in 2022, as Yousfi does. By then, his artistic relevance had already faded, leaving room for his more fascistic tendencies to take centre stage, from his support for far-right politician Eric Zemmour to his penchant for cyber-harassing young female journalists.
Yousfi is interested in the idea that Booba’s fictional persona shows him ‘becoming what he should have been – without the original tragedy, when the west came crashing into native territories’. But Booba’s provocations seem to coalesce into fascistic impulses, which Yousfi doesn’t reckon with, making her argument slightly unsatisfactory. Where she truly shines, however, is in her writing about rap more generally. Considering contemporary rap’s radically anti-hierarchical songwriting practices, its unabashed capitalist tendencies allied to its desire to reckon with the violence of coloniality, she writes that ‘rap emerges from the turbulent chaos of the age and makes a point of trying to remain at the centre of it all’. Rap here becomes a contemporary myth, ‘a kaleidoscope that sources its light from all the disparate cultural domains of a society and transforms them… into compatible and equivalent elements of a remarkably coherent whole’. Through Yousfi’s lens, we come to understand rap as articulating the dominant structures of feeling of the condition of racialised postcolonial citizens in France.
Serious shortcomings
Alongside these moments of brilliance, though, there remain serious shortcomings in this essay. Enraptured with the romance of her own argument, Yousfi doesn’t shy away from straw-men arguments and paranoid readings. These weaknesses are captured in two central issues: a lack of rigorous definition of the political subject at the heart of her essay (the titular barbarian), and a refusal to engage seriously with the wealth of contemporary literature on similar topics. The desire to englobe all non-whites, all historic victims or sworn enemies of empire into the ethos of barbarism through the use of a collective ‘we’ is appealing, but it remains unrealised. Indeed, if Yousfi invokes French blacks and Arabs into the ‘us’ she writes of, she only engages with African American writings on blackness. She writes specifically about the pitfalls of French integrationism, but her considerations on empire focus on America. The essay is strongest at its most specific and suffers from this lack of rigour in defining its subject or subjects.
There is no dearth of references in Yousfi’s text, most literary or philosophical, but they often fail to nourish the argument. Aside from the works she directly draws from (The Invisible Man, Death of a Primitive, Beloved, PNL and Booba’s songs), Yousfi cites very sparingly when theorising, enabling her straw manning. Only one living non-white French author (Houria Bouteldja) is actually quoted. In Chapter 2, her reading of Himes is pitted against an anonymous and undefined ‘gaggle of sociologists’ asserting that the barbarians’ violence, ‘our “regression into savagery” is down to the failure of integration’.
By contrast, Yousfi argues that this violence results from ‘the Empire’: ‘Asserting that the regression into savagery is a process of integration [is] to state that our monsters are engendered not by too little contact with you but too much.’ I don’t know which sociologists Yousfi is referring to in this chapter – she does not cite a single one. Although some may have made this argument, only an extremely bad faith reading of most sociological theories of violence and race in contemporary France could be summed up by the idea that violence is the result of a lack of integration. In fact, sociological arguments made by Sarah Mazouz, Éric Fassin, Mame-Fatou Niang or Audrey Célestine, to cite but a few, tend to be very similar to Yousfi’s: integration is a myth, a violent process of oppression and erasure, therefore it produces violence.
Straw-manning
Yousfi’s straw-manning and refusal to engage with contemporary writers culminates in the final chapter, in which she addresses her fellow ‘non-white female writers’. Indeed, as she writes, ‘The only barbarians described here are men, and men described by a woman to boot.’ This, she argues, is because her fellow non-white women writers have been readily embraced by the French literary establishment, and have embraced a redemptive literary endeavour, interested in washing away the shame and stigma of our post-colonial condition. Yousfi believes this is needed but, she tempers, ‘In seeking to promote our own virtues we’ve rendered ourselves inoffensive – not augmented but insipid.’
Once more, she fails to identify the authors she is writing about, making it impossible to examine her argument. Thinking of recent works by French women of colour, from Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing (2017) to Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey/Africana the Name (2020), to name only two, I fail to see how they provide ‘clean and tidy’ narratives looking to convince the dominants of ‘how courageous and beautiful we are’. Indeed, these works reckon with complexity and historical messiness. I’d be willing for Yousfi to convince me otherwise, but this would require her to engage seriously on the page with any of the authors whose spectres she invokes to build her argument.
Nonetheless her concluding call to action remains intriguing: that in the barbarian ethos of rap, writers might find the tools to radically write against empire. In Defence of Barbarism is not an academic text; its shortcomings do not take away from the striking appeal of its argument. Its defiant tone and uncompromising approach force the reader to interrogate their own convictions, to think in depth about that which unsettles them. For people interested in contemporary French politics, or in possibilities for emancipatory aesthetics, Yousfi provides, if not definitive answers, fruitful provocations.
