Postcolonial Paris

In the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris the city's banlieues have again come under intense media and police scrutiny. These towns and neighborhoods have long been synonymous with poverty, criminality, and the marginalization of postcolonial migrants living in the metropole. But what do these sensationalized representations have to tell us about myths of a colorblind, universalist Paris that sees itself—and especially the city center—as a cosmopolitan hub promising free expression for exiled and vulnerable people? Laila Amine's insightful study of “postcolonial Paris” begins from this question and its contemporary resonances, tracing literary and cinematic histories of the banlieues that reveal both interconnectedness with and exclusion from the city's mythologized center.Postcolonial Paris aims to “desegregate” studies of Paris in order to “[generate] a new cultural cartography” that maps narratives of social exclusion onto the city's universalist self-understanding (6). This strategy shows how writers and filmmakers reimagine the ideals of assimilation and integration on which Paris has long prided itself. Amine takes intimacy as her key analytical category, studying how films and novels (produced mainly by figures of Maghrebi origin but also by Black American writers) construct social and sexual relations that illuminate exclusions of all kinds as well as new forms of solidarity in everyday life. On its broadest level, Amine's argument about intimacy does not simply lay bare (post)colonial contradictions in the French national imaginary—she rightly points out that postcolonial studies, especially in the Francophone context, has been saturated with studies that retread this well-worn critical ground (30–31). Instead, the lens of intimacy orients us toward local histories that speak to unexpected connections among disparate traditions of confrontation with racism and exclusion.The chapters of Postcolonial Paris tease out these connections and study how writers and filmmakers from the time of the Algerian War (1954–62) through to the twenty-first century seek to “[write] nonwhite working-class populations into the Paris imaginary, constructing a shared city for the future” (31). Amine's readings are careful and instructive, moving deftly from close textual engagement to much broader historical contextualization that sheds light on the kinds of Parisian exclusions her primary archive challenges and reworks. Whereas her first two chapters are set against the Algerian War and postindependence migration to the Parisian outskirts, the following three chapters take a contemporary turn and examine cultural production in the contexts of, respectively, the 1983 Beur march against racism, the 1995 and 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and the 2005 riots.In Chapter 1, Amine studies Moroccan novelist Driss Chraïbi's The Butts (1955) with an eye toward how the text constructs domestic intimacy both as a critique of marginalization in colonial Paris and as a foil to a French colonial rhetoric of intimacy that positioned the France–Algeria relationship as one of harmonious family union. Giving the lie to this quaint rhetoric of domesticity, writers like Chraïbi thematized the exclusion and invisibility of Algerian migrants in Paris. Amine shows how The Butts uses interracial romance (in this case, between an Algerian man and a white French woman) to illustrate “how single North African men came to be viewed as a threat to the institution of family” (38). Whereas Chraïbi's novel uses race and sexuality to make clear how colonialism “denaturalizes” men and women (63), the African American writers Amine takes up in Chapter 2 think through intimacy in order to make sense of how the colorblind Paris they wanted to find when they left the United States might also be coextensive with a colonial Paris composed of the kinds of exclusion we see in The Butts. This chapter is particularly compelling thanks to the ways Amine reads against the grain: she studies texts by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and William Gardner Smith, revealing how these writers both embraced the universalist myth of a nonracial Paris and complicated this idealization by imagining anticolonial solidarity with Algerians in the city. Here interracial romance highlights “black heterosexual masculinity as an integral part of the liberationist project” (67); but Amine also shows how Baldwin, Wright, and Smith created homosocial relationships with colonized Algerians, recuperating a version of Black masculinity through a politicized fraternity that passed through colonial Paris.Chapter 3 moves us into the later decades of the twentieth century by focusing on Mehdi Charef's Tea in the Harem (1983). Positioning the novel against two generations of immigrants, the one that moved into social housing in the banlieues in the 1970s and the one that grew up there, Amine shows how Charef transforms colonial exoticism by casting the banlieues as a harem. This is a “hidden society ... that is segregated and surveilled” (91), unknown to ordinary Parisians yet at the same time a social space against which French society defines itself. Chapter 4 turns to male Arab queer characters in films by white French directors and directors of Maghrebi background. These films locate queer intimacies in the city center, with queer male characters often ostracized by Maghrebi families portrayed as the flipside of an inclusive French modernity. Chapter 5 stays within the realm of the visual and examines street art and graffiti in central Paris. Here Amine studies graffiti and alternative histories in Leïla Sebbar's The Seine Was Red (1999), the graffiti of Princess Hijab, an unidentified street artist who spray paints hijabs and niqabs on advertisements, and the flyposts of photographer JR, who projects images of racialized banlieue residents onto buildings in central Paris. Illegal street art, Amine contends, breaks down distinctions between city center and banlieue periphery; it also repositions historical, social, and political exclusions at the heart of Parisian urban life.Amine's conclusion brings us fully into the contemporary moment, examining the “everyday islamophobia” that undermines French republican universalism today (175). This is a fitting note on which to end the book, for it allows Amine to link her textual analyses, which amply demonstrate the ideological work of intimacy within and beyond Parisian banlieue settings, to twenty-first-century exclusions of racialized banlieue residents in media discourses and French political life. But it is also an analytically strong note, since it shows readers how the gendered anxieties about Islam in the banlieues take new political and discursive forms today, following on from the racialized fears and exclusions of Paris's colonial past. As such, Postcolonial Paris will surely be of interest to French/Francophone studies scholars as well as to scholars interested in gender and sexuality and postcolonial theory

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