Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation

Preface and Acknowledgments

The paradigmatic narrative of entry into a field site follows that of Bronislaw Malinowski (1922: 4): “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.” While it is tempting to translate this scene to the not-so-remote location of an Algerian neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, to do so would belie the realities of conducting urban anthropological fieldwork in the New Europe of the 1990s. Indeed, my own story of arrival began well before the actual research project when, as a young college student, I spent a summer as a cabana boy on a French beach along the English Channel resort city of Deauville. Often referred to as the “21st arrondissement of Paris” (Paris proper has twenty districts), Deauville attracts a mixed company of vacationers during its summer peak season, with bourgeois Parisians and Londoners who own property in the area rubbing shoulders with the more diverse weekend crowd escaping the heat of France’s landlocked capital. The two groups regard each other with a certain amount of disdain, and as an employee of the beach, I often found myself caught in the middle of their often racialized disputes. One glorious Saturday morning in August, as the beach was filling up to capacity, one of the beach’s regulars, Madame Rosenzweig, an older Parisian Jewish woman who grew up in colonial Algeria, approached me with a somewhat unusual request. While she always asked to be given a parasol where she could be left tranquille—by which we were to understand distant from Arab or African vacationers—on this day her demands were more emphatic, in no small part in reaction to the previous day’s faux pas of a new beach employee who had parked a large, dark-skinned family next to her. “I’m not a racist,” she explained. “But those people make lots of noise and cook strong foods. In any case, you’re from America so you understand . They are the racist ones, not us.” I was particularly struck by the seeming disconnect between her words and her personal trajectory of migration . Her words continued to resonate several years later as I began forPreface and Acknowledgments x Preface and Acknowledgments mulating a research project to explore the intimate relationship between France and Algeria. If my arrival in the “field” predated my actual fieldwork, so too did my presence in the field long outlast the official period of sponsored research. While I closed my twenty months of on-site research in Paris and its surrounding areas in November 1996, I remained (and remain) closely connected to my Algerian interlocutors’ lives and struggles. Since then, I have made several shorter trips to Paris, revisiting friends and sites of research, re-establishing my propinquity to the community of Beur and Berber activists I studied. And even when I have been physically absent, I have been able to stay communicatively present, directly exchanging electronic mail with my prior interviewees, actively participating in on-line discussion groups, and following local events through regular visits to Internet web sites dedicated to Algerian issues. As I write these words, I am listening to Beur FM —a Paris-based radio station dedicated to North African news and music— through my university office’s high-speed data connection, imagining that I am participating in some ritual communion with the thousands of other listeners across North Africa and the diaspora. While these forms of longdistance fieldwork by no means replace the direct observation of and participation in the lived everyday realities of Algerian immigrant life in and around Paris, they do underline the fact that anthropological research is always (or at least should be) a multiply mediated endeavor. This realization is central to the transpolitics—to the formation of Franco-Algerian political subjectivities across localities and through multiple genres of cultural production—that this book seeks to unravel. The research project from which the book emerges was formulated over many years while I was an undergraduate and graduate student at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and my many teachers at these two institutions are owed my deepest gratitude for their insights and wisdom in putting a hapless student on the right track. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Arjun Appadurai, Andrew Apter, Leora Auslander, James W. Fernandez, Michael Geyer, John Kelly, Rashid Khalidi, Jorge Klor de Alva, Saree Makdisi , Andr...