Black Parisians in Merry Colors: Queerness and Creolization in the Popular Comedies of Lucien Jean-Baptiste

The chapter analyses the work of Martinican-born French actor, screenwriter and film director Lucien Jean-Baptiste through the lenses of creoleness, creolisation and queerness. In his popular comedies about Antilleans living in the Paris area, Jean-Baptiste consistently addresses issues of race, prejudice and discrimination. But unlike many so-called ethnic comedies that thrive on stereotypes and essentialist understandings of ‘ethnic communities’, Jean-Baptiste’s approach is based on creoleness and, not least, Édouard Glissant’s relational understanding of creolisation as dynamic cultural exchanges that affect everybody, minority as well as majority cultures, in unforeseeable ways, but do not result in a loss of their respective characteristics. To this Jean-Baptiste adds a joyful and carnivalesque queerness through which he seeks to deconstruct the normativity inherent in perceived ethnic and cultural barriers, thereby humorously bringing to light the tacit and often seemingly innocuous preconceived notions that underlie everyday discriminatory practices vis-à-vis minorities.