This chapter explores the possibilities and limits of translating race through a comparative reading of two recent plays by the French-Algerian playwright Mohamed Rouabhi: Vive la France and All Power to the People! It argues that the divergent reception of these plays – Republican outrage about Rouabhi’s play on French colonialism, liberal praise of his representation of racism in the USA – is based on a profound misunderstanding of the ways in which Rouabhi translates race on the French stage. If the reception of Vive la France speaks to a longstanding reluctance to acknowledge the experience of racialization and the memory of colonization, it also inadvertently reveals the political stakes of staging American Blackness in France. This chapter mines transcolonial performance for its transformative possibilities and performative insurgencies, and argues that theatrical performance makes possible a mode of translation that brings the original back into circulation in a comparative, relational, and transitive sense.