Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France

Introduction: Examining Frenchness and the African Diaspora

Introduction ExaminingFrenchnessandtheAfricanDiaspora On October 27, 2005, a few days after the passing of Rosa Parks, one of the last iconic figures of the 1960s American civil rights movement, two youths of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin, Bouna Traoré (aged fifteen) and Zyed Benna (aged seventeen), died in Clichy-sous-Bois, a banlieue, located ten miles east of Paris.1 Bouna, Zyed, and several others were returning to their cité (housing projects) after playing a game of soccer. Rushing home to break the Ramadan fast, they encountered a police patrol at the entrance of their cité. These teenagers then took off in different directions to avoid the prospect of police brutality; some managed to slip through the net of the patrol, while others looked for safety within an unlocked electrical substation.2 Bouna, Zyed, and Muhittin Altun (a youth of Turkish origin) were among the latter group. After they spent approximately thirty minutes searching for a way out of the 10,000-volt substation, Muhittin’s body was literally projected outside of the substation. He was severely scorched by an electrical charge, was later hospitalized, and has since recovered. Inside laid Bouna’s and Zyed’s corpses. The subsequent uprisings throughout the country followed a wellrehearsed historical pattern, specific to France, in which social change is motivated by the paroxysms of collective unrest.3 The dialectical tension between the notorious bavure policière, on the one hand, and youth rioting, on the other, has been well documented since the 1981 riots at the cité des Minguettes of Vénissieux, outside of Lyons.4 Numerous commentators have interpreted these riots as a statement of rage and defiance against a discriminatory arsenal consisting of unemployment, ghettoization, and racial profiling that have become accepted features TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 3 8/10/09 10:47:24 AM  / Frenchness and the African Diaspora of social disenfranchisement (Beaud and Pialoux 2003). Although one could easily identify similarities between the 2005 events in Clichy-sousBois and previous banlieue riots, there are crucial differences. It was the gravity of these most recent uprisings, alternatively known as riots, as a historical continuity and a political rupture that has served as an impetus for organizing this edited volume. The sheer magnitude of the three-week riots is one of the most salient features. Starting in Clichy-sous-Bois, the riots affected most major French cities and nearly all midsized ones in virtually every one of the ninety-five French metropolitan départements. There were 201 police casualties and 26 injured firemen; no less than 10,000 automobiles, 100 postal cars and trucks, 200 public buses, and several dozen police cars were either torched or stoned. Hundreds of public buildings (including schools, police stations, and city halls) were vandalized or burnt to the ground, and at least twenty religious centers (including mosques, churches, and synagogues) were seriously damaged. At the height of the riots, nearly 12,000 police and gendarmes were deployed to quell the nightly riots, whose operations resulted in 5,200 arrests. A report issued by the Renseignements Généraux (RG, the French equivalent of the FBI, with a secret service mandate) estimated the financial toll caused by these events at nearly $300 million (Mucchielli and Le Goaziou 2006: 9). The aftermath turned out to be perhaps as momentous and revelatory as the riots themselves, especially in a post-9/11 world where cultural and ethnic difference of the underclass has been used to substantiate Samuel Huntington’s distorted “clash-of-civilizations” paradigm, thus giving ammunition to a clinically paranoid but rhetorically efficient form of political communication that pits “us” against “them.”5 Dissent and subversion have become open-ended categories in the global war on terror such that the agentive power of minority populations is made synonymous with an international terror network justifying state repression.6 With this call to order, an antagonistic Manichean rhetoric has reignited a climate of fear, condensed in arguments claiming that cultural differences finally function as obstacles to globalization . Former Interior minister, now president, Nicolas Sarkozy framed the riots within an ascendant politics of fear and innuendo, claiming that the racial underclass can be written off as an“organized intifada,”a nondescript group of Islamic fundamentalists, a network of drug- and arms-dealing gangs, or diasporic polygamist tribes.7 TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 4 8/10/09 10:47:24 AM Introduction /  These political arguments,intended to explain what Bernard Cassen has dubbed the “French...