Identities, discourses and experiences

The 2005 rioting in France’s suburbs caught the world’s attention and exposed the limits of the Republic’s integration policies concerning its ‘immigrant-origin’ populations.

This book focuses on one of these groups – the French-born descendants of North African immigrants. It examines academic and public discourses about young people of North African origin in France and reveals a clear disjuncture between the preoccupations and parameters of these debates and the lived experiences of the majority of people concerned.

The resurgence of academic and public discussions in France focusing on spectacular questions of urban unrest, Islamic fundamentalism and the challenges of increasingly assertive cultural identities means that it is all the more important not to overlook the ‘ordinary’ majority of young French-North Africans. Their own preoccupations and identifications often go unnoticed in a context where issues such as violence in the banlieues, Islam and the threat of terrorism are pushed to the fore, sometimes with devastating consequences in terms of discrimination and exclusion.

This book rebalances and nuances the debates about post-migrant North-African youth by drawing on extensive empirical research carried out in those suburbs of north-east Paris affected by recent violence. It studies the construction of identity amongst this invisible majority and by adopting an ethnographic approach, the disjuncture between the sometimes inflammatory discourses about young people of North African origin and their own lives is addressed.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers working in Francophone Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and European Studies.

Contents:
List of maps and photographs
Acknowledgements
Notes on text
Map of Seine-Saint-Denis
PART I: Public and intellectual discourses of immigration
Introduction
1. Nation, immigration and integration: the public debates of the 1980s, 1990s and twenty-first century
2. ‘Cultural difference’, citizenship and young people: intellectual responses                 
3. An alternative approach to post-migrant narratives?
PART II: Post-migrant discourses
4. Individualist trajectories: social worlds and cultural positionings
5. Collective identities and cultural communities?
6. The socio-economics of community
7. Subjective identities
8: From individual to collective subjectivities?
Conclusions
Bibliography
Glossary
Appendix 1: Summarised interviewee biographies
Appendix 2: Photographs