Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and NationAlgerian migration to France began at the end of the 19th century, but in recent years France's Algerian community has been the focus of a shifting public debate encompassing issues of unemployment, multiculturalism, Islam, and terrorism. In this finely crafted historical and anthropological study, Paul A. Silverstein examines a wide range of social and cultural forms -- from immigration policy, colonial governance, and urban planning to corporate advertising, sports, literary narratives, and songs -- for what they reveal about postcolonial Algerian subjectivities. Investigating the connection between anti-immigrant racism and the rise of Islamist and Berberist ideologies among the "second generation" ("Beurs"), he argues that the appropriation of these cultural-political projects by Algerians in France represents a critique of notions of European or Mediterranean unity and elucidates the mechanisms by which the Algerian civil war has been transferred onto French soil. |
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... Beur FM —a Paris - based radio station dedicated to North African news and music— through my university office's high - speed data connection , imagining that I am participating in some ritual communion with the thousands of other ...
... Beur FM —a Paris - based radio station dedicated to North African news and music— through my university office's high - speed data connection , imagining that I am participating in some ritual communion with the thousands of other ...
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activists Algeria and France Algerian civil Algerian civil war Algerian immigrant Algiers Amazigh ambivalence Arab axxam banlieue Berber cultural Berber language Berber Spring Berberist Beur FM Beur Movement Beur writing bidonville Boudjellal Bourdieu Brahim cités citizenship colonial conflict constituted construction contemporary cultural associations difference discourse economic emigrants ethnic Europe European Fethi France's Franco-Algerian French French nation French nation-state global groups headscarf historical housing projects identity immi integration internal Islam Islamist Kabyle Kabyle villages Kabylia Kettane laïcité larger Likewise linguistic lives Lorcin Maghreb Mantes-la-Jolie Marche des Beurs Mediterranean metropole migration Moreover mosque multicultural Muslim narratives nation-state Nonetheless North African novel Occitan official organization Pantin parents Paris Parisian particular police populations postcolonial practices production racial racism region religious residents Sayad social space spatial structures struggles suburbs Tamazgha Tamazight tion tional transnational transpolitics University urban Val-Fourré violence young youth
Popular passages
Page 24 - Work performed in the receiving society is purely instrumental: a means to gather income, income that can be taken back to his or her home community and used to fulfill or enhance his or her role within that social structure. From the perspective of the immigrant, work is essentially asocial
Page 32 - In this context, our task is less to reassure ourselves of our common origins in the European Middle Ages than to develop a new political self-confidence commensurate with the role of Europe in the world of the twenty-first century.
Page 31 - ... supranational form taken by economic integration. Third, the tremendous influx of immigration from the poor regions of the East and South with which Europe will be increasingly confronted in the coming years lend the problem of asylum seekers a new significance and urgency. This process exacerbates the conflict between the universalistic principles of constitutional democracies on the one hand and the particularistic claims of communities to preserve the integrity of their habitual ways of life...
Page 142 - ... (30) As the embodiment of conflicting forces that simultaneously compose and disrupt the nation, women are the guarantors of national identity, no longer simply as guardians of traditional values but as symbols that successfully contain the conflicts of the new historical situation. At the same time, women are the supreme threat to national identity insofar as its endemic instability can be assigned to them. Gordon's and Tillion's analyses imply, further, that women symbolize and are called upon...
Page 138 - Islamic associations have followed in this practice and incorporated soccer and judo teams into their activities, in part to attract younger members, in part to foster loyalty to a political or religious cause via the medium of sports. Some Islamic associations have gone as far as investing in local sports facilities in order to recruit membership, taking over financially in many cases where government programmes leave off.
Page 46 - having made Muslim society much more miserable, disorderly, ignorant, and barbarous than it was before meeting [the French]" (1841: 78; 1847: 170). He argued that military domination, based on the conquest and enslavement of the populace, must eventually give way to a civilian colonization, based on the reproduction of centralized, republican political models of France, both for practical as well as ethical reasons (1841: 64, 114-119; 1847: 179). In order to achieve this "new society," however, a...
Page 135 - ... the inevitability of the absolute nation-state — of its demands to exclusive loyalty and its totalizing cultural projects
Page 53 - Kabyles] own land whenever possible. They hold in high respect all property and although there are often no markings each property owner always knows the exact limits of what belongs to him
Page 47 - He knows very well that the nomadic life of tribes is his surest defense against us. His subjects will become ours the day they fasten themselves to the soil" (1841: 80). In this respect, Tocqueville recommended "re-anchoring the tribes in their territories" rather than "transporting them elsewhere" and thus underwriting their anterior nomadic tendencies (1847: 174-175).