Multiculturalism is a matter of margins in France – and thus of suburbs when it comes to Paris.
I remember postdoctoral fieldwork in ‘La Cité de Paradis’ an apartment complex in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris. Despite considerable investment and pride in the French schooling system and a system of promotion by examination which ought to be blind to ethnicity, the youth of the ‘city of paradise’ had been poorly served by schools with little interest of cultural difference which seemed to have ‘talked past’ their students. The expulsion of the French from Algeria is a trauma which continues to manifest in the suspicion ordinary citizens have of ‘les pieds noirs’ French refugees from the civil war, and an endemic racism against anyone who appears to be swarthy. This means being routinely stopped for identity papers and questioned by personnel of one of the more or less militaristic police forces while the ‘palefaced’ swan by. This informal profiling has operated since the late 1970s.
The public spaces available to these youth were blighted afterthoughts. Adventure consisted in scooter trips to open-air pools and occasional forays into the city centre, hanging out in the shopping malls, pedestrian streets or subway interchanges of Les Halles and the Plateau Beaubourg area around Centre Georges Pompidou. These were always only a matter of marking time, however. An endless present without much of a future.
The spectacle of burning automobiles is therefore not much of a surprise. To begin with, street protests are not uncommon, even if they have usually consisted of farmers jamming motorways to protest against any suggestion of change to agricultural subsidies. In addition, ethnic protests in the ethnicized suburbs have happened over and over again over the last decade. Such media spectacles of urban violence have been the most important means by which the plight of the disenfranchized has become relevant to the language of protest which remains, à la ‘68, one of rocks hurled at police on the streets.
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Hi Rob
it is indeed amazing what is now happening in France. They expect a ’state of emergency’ to be called – a blending perhaps of the war on terror and assimilation politics – it reminds of of Deleuze & Guattari’s Treatise on Nomadology, where they so usefully suggest why the ‘interior state’ (the state of interiority) is logically linked to the ’security politics’ of quarantine, fencing and gates. If they are right than this will be only the beginning.