This dissertation examines the contradictions of French republican universalism and its exclusionary effects on racialized subjects in contemporary France. While republican ideology insists on equality through sameness, it erases difference and renders the lived experiences of minoritized communities illegible. I argue that affect—emotions such as shame, grief, rage, suffocation, and longing—constitutes what I conceptualize as an affective counter-archive: a form of cultural production that preserves and transmits embodied, emotional knowledge excluded from official or state-sanctioned narratives. Through literature, music, and visual culture, these affective traces function as mediated forms of historical knowledge, making visible experiences of racialization that are disavowed by universalist discourse and formal archival regimes. Drawing on postcolonial and affect theory, the project explores how cultural production registers and resists these exclusions. Across literature, music, and film, artists reclaim denied emotions as forms of knowledge and articulate political agency. Chapter One examines Marie NDiaye’s fiction, where suffocation and estrangement dramatize the affective inheritance of racialized trauma. Chapter Two turns to Louisa Yousfi, David Diop, and Kery James to show how barbarism and monstrosity are reappropriated as resistant identities that unsettle republican norms. Chapter Three analyzes French hip hop—from La Rumeur to Aya Nakamura—as an affective counter-archive that documents grief, pride, and defiance while proposing alternative genealogies of national identity. Chapter Four focuses on rapper Casey, whose embrace of bâtardisme and hybridity articulates a politics of opacity and relational belonging. Chapter Five studies Céline Sciamma’s films, where play and shame become relational affects that complicate gender, race, and representation while imagining new affective possibilities. Across these works, I show that oppression operates not only through political institutions but also through its inscription in the emotional and embodied lives of individuals. By foregrounding affect as a site of knowledge, these cultural texts contest the erasures of republican universalism, making visible the emotional lives of those France refuses to recognize. In doing so, they construct affective counter-archives that disrupt dominant narratives, reveal colonial afterlives, and imagine alternative forms of relation and community. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to ongoing debates about race, identity, and belonging in postcolonial France by demonstrating how affect both reflects and reshapes the boundaries of the political. It argues that a fuller understanding of French identity requires attending to the emotions, bodies, and voices that universalism has historically sought to exclude.