La France de Zebda 1981–2004: Faire de la musique un acte politique (review)

The first decade of the 21st century has been characterized in Europe by impassioned debates on a broad range of questions associated with identity and belonging—citizenship rights, immigration status, alien documents, security, racism, religious freedom and the demands of secularism, and border control. In order to better address these complex questions, it has become all the more urgent to provide a more accurate contextualization of their respective genealogies. To this end, Danielle Marx-Scouras' book is an important step in that direction.

At the heart of this study one finds the challenge of explaining the tenuous relationship between insiders and outsiders in French society, epitomized by the lyrics of one of Zebda's most well-known songs, "J'y suis, j'y reste" (I'm here to stay), namely "Je suis d'ici mais pas assez" (I am from here but not quite enough). Indeed, one only has to examine the programmatic component of the new French museum of immigration, the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI), informed by the following umbrella structure: "Leur histoire est notre histoire" (Their history is our history) [See www.histoire-immigration.fr], to gauge the extent to which such exclusionary formulations remain in evidence. In other words, as Etienne Balibar recently asked, who are to be included in the new "we" that make up Europe today? (We, the People of Europe, 2004). These questions are central to the task of both assessing Zebda's importance but also their legacy. Marx-Scouras' project is thus simultaneously a biography of the musical ensemble and an analysis of the convergence of cultural, economic, political, and social factors conducive to the emergence of Zebda itself.

The 1980s and 1990s in France were informed by increasing awareness of racial inequality, the hopes and disillusionment of Socialist governance, the rise of extreme right-wing politics, the politics of cohabitation, but perhaps more significantly by the concerted interventionist cultural politics of the French state under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture run by Jack Lang, who endeavored to "reconcile culture with daily realities" (23). Indeed, as Marx-Scouras has argued, "Zebda's trajectory is closely linked to that of the Socialist government of the time and of the French Right looming in the background" (23). These transitions culminated in the partial decentralization of cultural outlets and a renewed focus on urban cultural production that ultimately provided greater visibility to minority practitioners. Zebda are thus the product of some of these policies and of the various activities sponsored by youth associations, in particular one known as Vitécri (video, théâtre, écriture) [video, theatre, and writing], and later the breakaway association called Tactikollectif which Zebda formed.

Whereas the dominant thinking at the time could be found in the theorization of the dual belonging of minority subjects—essentially, whether or not the children of North African immigrants were to be defined by the ethnic origin of their parents or by their geographic locality (or both)—the group Zebda did not ultimately find these categorizations productive. Thus, refusing to fully embrace the label beur—a term whose origins could be found in the linguistic device known as backslang that reversed the dominant consonants "r" and "b" in the word "Arab" and that was utilized to define this ambiguity—Zebda indicated a partial (albeit humorous) affinity to the broader identitarian issues at stake around the question of assimilation and integration through the name they adopted for their group that means "beurre" (butter) in Arabic. For Zebda, and this is a point Marx-Scouras underscores repeatedly, the imperative has been to achieve nothing short of Frenchness and full belonging (a demand increasingly demanded today by the chronological "third" generation). How can young people who don't quite fit in negotiate a space for themselves, young people "[qui] ont l'accent mais pas l'accès" (who have the right accent but not access), who are insiders although treated as outsiders. Thus...