With this contribution, I depart from Michelle V. Rowley’s re-conceptualising of backlash as a “condition of modernity” (Rowley 2020, p.281) and follow the trajectories of the current misogynoir backlash in France. This contribution interweaves French imperial and colonial history with current politics, with a specific focus on the perceived democratic and ecological model status of the French nation. In the French context, fighting against racism has become increasingly risky. As many have shown, anti-racist criticism provokes constructions as “enemies” of the French republic and nation because it scratches the cover that protects French dominant society from seeing the coloniality of its Republic. In this contribution, I show in which ways political and media elites who engage in these constructions of “enemies” not only refer to racist-colonial, but also to sexist (and further denigrating) argumentations. Therefore, I look at the cases of three feminist actors who are engaged against racism, including Mame-Fatou Niang, Rokhaya Diallo, and Fatima Ouassak, and who have faced public denigration because of their activism. I analyse (social) media documents that trace these public disputes in order to find commonalities and differences in argumentations that criticise these activists. This contributes to our knowledge about the specific mechanisms of backlash that anti-racist, feminist actors face in a state that features itself as the cradle of equity, liberty, and fraternity. In doing so, I, furthermore, ask about the role of human-nature relations in the interlocking systems of oppression that fuel this current backlash. By combining reported experiences of backlash to the work of Afrofeminist thinkers, activist, and artists in the Francophone context, I seek to make the case that relations to nature are at the heart of this racist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal global society. And I suggest that especially in times of the climate crisis and of “backlash as crisis management” (Edström et al. 2024), learning from Afrofeminist alternatives to neoliberal human-nature relations can show ways towards resistance and liberation.
