Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History

4. Creating an Old Maghreb: Beur Cinema and East-West Polarities

4 Creating an Old Maghreb Beur Cinema and East-West Polarities Since the appearance of a cinema produced by children of North African immigrants in France in the early 1980s, debates about integration and assimilation of France’s minority populations have alternately receded only to reappear during periods of political strength shown by France’s right-wing political constituencies. France’s recent riots brought renewed attention to debates about whether its minority populations of North African origin and heritage were well assimilated into the fabric of the nation. Framing those riots and the corresponding discussions about cultural assimilation were larger discourses on relationships between the West and the Arab world, influenced most recently by 9/11, the “war on terrorism ” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the oil crisis. In France divergent opinions continue to prevail about whether issues of socio-cultural assimilation raised by beur filmmakers beginning in the early 1980s have been fully resolved. Many of those early films, such as Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au harem d’Archimède, the title itself revealing a 102 Creating an Old Maghreb symbolic attachment to underlying issues of physical displacement and spatial relations, were concerned with “reframing difference” and positing the question of the place and cultural identity of France’s beur populations within the French nation (Tarr, Reframing 8–15). These films now constitute a genre of cinema, categorized by the terms beur or, sometimes, banlieue cinema, and many have achieved mainstream popularity for their humorous and popular treatments of excluded ethnic minorities in France.1 My interest in this chapter resides not in consolidating the genre as an important form of social commentary (Tarr, Reframing 3), nor in rehearsing its corresponding message about the multicultural identity of beur children in relationship to French national identity (Hargreaves; Higbee). As a genre, beur cinema, or cinéma de banlieu, has become acknowledged, if nonetheless frequently overlooked, as an integral corpus contributing to wider conceptions of European cinema (Ezra, European Cinema 290–98).2 In this chapter I examine the way that important Francophone beur films that are now acknowledged to be part of the wider canon turn to victimization as an important trope. I am interested in the ways that the representation of the beur or beurette’s path to cultural emancipation or social integration within France is frequently dependent upon a polarity between East and West and is informed in great part by the evocation of the East rooted in colonial tropes and imagery. The reinscription of this aged construction, as Edward Said demonstrates, has been a focal point in the relationship between culture and imperialism, one that has enabled the West to view its “Other” as a simultaneously symbiotic and hostile reflection (Culture). If beur cinema often seeks to situate its beur characters in a hybrid position between the East and West to expose better the dilemmas of cultural assimilation and French patterns of exclusion and racism, such representations frequently play upon the conception of North Africa as an “old” continent distanced from the West and its modernity, both culturally and temporally. The image of the “old” here does not connote an ideal or utopian place removed from the problems of the Western Creating an Old Maghreb 103 world either; it refers more to the stereotypes of backward nations with retrograde views on cultural and social relations. Of course, frequently, these representations of an “old” Algeria, characterized by its alignment with the colonial era, are intended as oppositional representations designed to show how Algerian immigrants were perceived by the French. However, I would also like to point out how the adoption of that perspective and the choice to represent Algeria and Algerians in that way enables the representation of the beur or beurette subject’s integration into French culture and distancing from his or her parents. The postcolonial identifications of socio-cultural dilemmas related to assimilation and racism have provided beur films with the characterization as resistant and oppositional representations. They are often characterized as deploying “an appeal for social change” (Bloom 51), a “hybrid” oppositional stance (Hargreaves and McKinney), and an aesthetics of the inhospitable world of the housing projects (Fahdel 142). Patricia Geesey underscores the “spatial aspect” of the quest “for the creation of a new concept of citizenship and belonging for France’s increasingly diverse community” (205). Geesey points out that the sense of belonging in French culture that beur characters seek is...