Immigration

Amnesia and Memory

Bibliographic Data

ID8940344
AuthorsGérard Noiriel (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume19
Issue2
Pages367-367
Publication date1995-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/286777
OpenAlexW2322270714
LanguageEN
Citations received11

The immigration issue is an ideal starting point for considering the problem of intellectual relations between France and the United States. Indeed, what the two countries share in common is that they both welcomed a sizeable number of immigrants of the most diverse origins. Yet the social sciences in France have fallen well behind scholarship in the United States in analyzing this phenomenon. French sociologists and historians have always borrowed extensively from American studies of immigration, widely perceived as their most relevant field of reference. In so doing, however, they failed to examine critically the paradigms of ethnicity and multiculturalism which guided those studies, largely ignoring the specificities of cultural, social, and political traditions in the United States. Recurrent French polemics concerning immigration have tended to use the reference to North America for partisan purposes, picturing it either as a model to be emulated or as a counterexample to be avoided, a pattern which, I believe, has served only to aggravate misunderstandings between the two sides. I argue that to overcome these schematic analyses, we must first restore the coherence of each specific tradition by placing it in its proper historical context. In this essay, which builds on an earlier comparative study of immigration in France and the United States coauthored with Donald Horowitz,' I will underscore some of the historical specificities of the French model of immigration, by showing how it resembles and differs from a contextualized understanding of the American case

Amnesia · Cognitive psychology · Immigration · Political science · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology