Coinciding with the recent debate around French national identity is the salience of certain ethnic or religious minorities, such as Roma or Muslim, in public discourse. Yet the ‘discovery’ of such groups has the potential to conceal the enduring presence they may have maintained in French society over decades, or, indeed, centuries. This colloquium will reflect on the conditions that bring certain minorities into, and out of, focus. It will ask how France’s minorities negotiate their intermittent (in)visibility through literary and cinematic representations and consider how the latter are linked to relations of power. How are minorities constructed in different discursive fields and forms of representation? When and under what conditions do minoritised subjects become visible or invisible, and how is this process mediated by aesthetic strategies? Can a group’s successful ‘assimilation’ into the dominant culture be consistent with minority status and what role does memory play in maintaining that status? What, then, is a French majority, and how does it define its cultural hegemony as a counterpoint to minority groups? Keynote speaker: Pap Ndiaye (EHESS), author of La Condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (Calmann-Lévy, 2008).