Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation

Introduction

Introduction 1 Introduction In the summer of 1995, a series of bombs exploded in subway stations and public markets in Paris and Lyon. Attributed to the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that had been fighting a guerrilla war against the military government in Algeria since 1992, the bombings testified to France’s lack of immunity in the postcolonial struggles over the future of its former colony. Moreover, they renewed widespread fears that France’s large Algerian immigrant population represented a fifth column of a global Islamist insurgency that stretched from Kabul to Chechnya to Algiers to France’s own working-class suburbs (banlieues). Already, these anxieties had come to the fore in fierce national debates over the place of Muslim headscarves in France’s public school system, headscarves that, for many, indexed the growth of an integralist Islam in France incompatible with French state secularism (laïcité). Such fears appeared confirmed when a 26 August failed attack on a high-speed train line from Paris to Lyon was linked to Khaled Kelkal, a second-generation Algerian immigrant (or Franco-Algerian) from a housing project (cité) in the Lyonnais banlieue of Vaulx-en-Velin. In response , French authorities initiated a series of anti-terrorist measures that particularly targeted the Algerian immigrant community: reinforcing its policing of the cités, conducting a series of roundups of suspected Islamist militants, and instituting a policy of de facto racial profiling that resulted in hundreds of thousands of identity checks against North Africans in train and subway stations. In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, this war on terror has continued apace, particularly after Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born-and-raised child of Moroccan immigrants, was identified as the twentieth al-Qaeda hijacker. 2 Algeria in France Algeria in France plumbs the postcolonial predicament that unites Algeria and France into a single transpolitical space. It understands the struggle over the future of Algeria in France to be part of a larger transnational politics that takes place within and about the “West,” rather than relying on the popular discourse of a putative “clash of civilizations”—in which a secular-Christian modernity associated with Europe and North America finds itself set against an Islamic modernity associated with large parts of Africa and Asia (cf. Huntington 1996). Political Islam and late capitalist laïcité, rather than alternate global futures, must be understood as equally important elements within a larger historical dialectic in which universal models of social and political behavior (e.g. citizenship, cosmopolitanism, secularism ) derived from late-eighteenth-century European nationalism transform, and are transformed by, particular, incommensurable cultural logics. Making sense of these dialectics requires a nuanced understanding not only of the historical and demographic specificities of Algeria in France, but also of the broader formations in which these dialectics are embedded: the production and consumption of immigrant ethnic and religious subjectivities, the ongoing construction and reconstruction of the French nation, the dynamics of everyday life in the urban built environment, and the multiply mediated dimensions of Algerian transpolitics. The pages that follow introduce these broader conditions of Algerian immigrant life in France. A New France? As a locus of transnational violence and deterritorialized culture wars, France has increasingly had its capacity to socially reproduce the nation called into direct question. Throughout the 1990s, European unification continued apace, opening new avenues for physical mobility, economic cooperation , and cultural exchange between previously hostile states and populations . Intra-European borders that had been constructed across several centuries through multiple continental wars and treaties found themselves withering away with each successive phase of European economic and political integration. At the same time, as internal borders disappeared, extraEuropean borders became increasingly more stringent, with European states bringing their policing and immigration policies into conformity—resulting in what has often been referred to as “Fortress Europe.” In spite of such increased barriers to international movement, the civil war in Algeria proliferated in France during this same period, with Islamist and Berberist politics transecting the French metropole. After the Algerian army took power in 1992 and canceled the second round of legislative elections that the newly legalized Islamist parties were likely to have won, Islamist armed factions turned to guerrilla warfare, perpetrating attacks on government and civilian targets in the name of jihad. By century’s end, an Introduction 3 estimated 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting that took the form...