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100 4 Memory’s Blind Spots: Immigration, Integration, and the Post-Colonial Heritage Sociologist and author Azouz Begag asserts, “[A]ll the sociopolitical issues related to the incorporation of French people of Maghrebi origin into mainstream society connect up with constructions of their collective memory. Without memory, one cannot claim to be fully part of a society and its History ” (2006, 56).1 Begag’s assessment runs directly counter to the dominant interpretation of such “problems” of integration. Where the dominant interpretation has been that religion and cultural practice block the integration of France’s ethnic minorities, Begag poses the problem in terms of collective memory. His statement is interesting because although it challenges conventional wisdom concerning the integration process, it does not challenge the fundamental assumptions about the basis of national or collective identity. Begag, for example, borrows directly from the dominant culture the idea that shared history and memory are central to national identity. However, if both history and memory are typically regarded as fixed, stable, and, in some respects, hereditary, Begag suggests, through his use of the word “constructions ,” that both are produced by the culture itself and that they are, therefore, neither fixed nor stable. Moreover, in suggesting that it is the “construction” of the collective memory of France’s ethnic minorities that is at the root of the problem, Begag shifts the responsibility for integrating minorities away from immigrants themselves—where it is often placed—and instead places 2VFKHUZLW]&KLQGG $0 MEMORY’S BLIND SPOTS / 101 it on the dominant culture. The problem for immigrants, he states, is not the content of their collective memory, but it is the way that the majority culture imagines or constructs that memory. Begag reinforces this suggestion by avoiding the official term “intégration” and substituting the term “incorporation .” Where French political rhetoric and cultural discourse have tended to construct intégration as a process by which immigrants make themselves acceptable to the dominant culture, Begag emphasizes a mutual process of inclusion that by extension relies on a mutual construction of both history and memory, one that recognizes the existence of common spaces of memory that have, for the most part, been ignored or overlooked (2006).2 Begag’s comments concerning both memory and identity are of interest less because they constitute a radical break with France’s vision of its own identity than because they constitute nothing like a break with that vision. That is to say, he does not at all challenge the idea that collective history and memory define collective identity. On the contrary, he upholds the basic premise upon which French national identity is currently built, namely that national, collective identity is the product of a specific remembering of a specific past. In asserting the centrality of cultural memory to what he terms “Beur” cultural production, however, Begag does break with much of the existing scholarship on such texts, which has tended to regard such literature as the expression of a collective identity crisis rooted in the absence of memory (Rosello 1993, 15).3 For Begag, the past and the memory of the past are not absent from Beur literature and cinema. They are, rather, at their core, and such texts, therefore, are less about the absence of cultural identity or the inability to reconcile two conflicting cultural identities than they are about the process by which two different cultural identities, two versions of collective memory, become one.4 Begag is not alone in pointing to the centrality of the past in texts by French authors of Maghrebi origin. Assia Djebar, another novelist concerned with the shared colonial past and the legacy of that past, similarly insists on the importance of a common collective experience. Djebar, who became a member of the Académie Française in 2006, chose to speak during the occasion of her induction on the subject of the shared heritage that exists between France and Algeria, a theme she has explored in her own writing. She points, in that speech, to the shared space of colonialism, which she calls “a wound recently reopened through memory” and suggests that it was this shared space that had conferred upon her the French language, in which she speaks and writes (2006). For Djebar, colonialism, however problematic, created common spaces of history and memory between the histories and memories of the French and those they colonized. Using the heritage model that asserts that commonalities of history and memory are what define collective identity, it may...

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