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23 Chapter 1 Kabyle Immigrant Politics and Racialized Citizenship in France Paul A. Silverstein On July 9, 2006, the national football teams of Italy and France met in the championship match of the World Cup finals in Berlin, Germany. While both countries had previously won World Cups, the presence of France in the final match came as a surprise, particularly given its first-round exit in the previous World Cup finals in 2002, and its poor showing during the preliminary rounds of the 2006 competition. Indeed, before its round of sixteen victories over Spain, most French fans and experts had all but written off the chances of their national side, Les Bleus. Searching for scapegoats, commentators from the political Far Right blamed the team— consisting largely of black and North African players, several of whom had been born outside of the metropole—as nonrepresentative of the French nation .1 Zinedine Zidane, the center-midfielder hero of France’s 1998 victory who was born in Marseille to Berber-speaking Kabyle (Algerian) parents, was particularly singled out for criticism both for his lackluster play and, more egregiously, for his apparent lack of patriotism as evidenced by his not publicly singing the national anthem (“La Marseillaise”) at the beginning of matches. However, after brilliant performances against Spain and Brazil—in which Zidane was remarked to have been the only “Brazilian” on the pitch in terms of his display of creativity and virtuosity normally associated with South American football (Delerm 2006)—and a gritty victory over Portugal —in which he scored the only goal from the penalty spot—Zidane had suddenly emerged as a renewed national hero, and expectations for a French victory charge led by Zidane were running high.2 Such expectations were nearly fulfilled deep in overtime when, with the match locked at 1–1, Zidane redirected a header toward the goal in nearly identical fashion 24 Pau l A . S i lv e r s t e i n as he had done to score the winning goal in 1998, with the ball only to be brilliantly saved by the Italian keeper. Several minutes later, with only ten minutes to go in the match and penalty kicks looking inevitable, Zidane, in a spectacular gesture that will remain indelibly linked to the 2006 World Cup and Zidane’s lasting legacy, seemingly inexplicably lowered his head and felled Italian defender Marco Materazzi. In the weeks that followed, Zidane’s “head-butt” (coup de boule) became the source of a veritable social drama over race, racism, and violence in France that all but overshadowed the outcome of the match.3 On replays, it was clear that Zidane reacted most immediately to a sustained verbal tirade from Materazzi, the exact words of which were subject to much debate, but about which there was some general agreement that the comments were racist in tenor, with some (including Zidane’s own brother) claiming that Materazzi had called Zidane the “son of a terrorist whore.”4 Regardless of the exact words said, Zidane’s reaction was itself racialized in the press, taken as a sign of his rough-and-tumble upbringing in the housing projects (les cités) of La Castellane (Marseille) and, more particularly, of his Algerian “sense of honor” (see Kessous 2006).5 Far Right ideologues gloated in the downfall of Les Bleus provoked by the “little hooligan” (voyou) of “Zidane the African” (Forcari 2006: 10). In addition to such reracialization of Zidane, the head-butt was immediately decried by a number of French commentators in the mainstream press (including L’Equipe and Le Monde) as setting a negative example for children across the world, and particularly from the suburban cités of France (see Caussé 2006; Droussent 2006).6 Such criticism was magnified by the recent memory of urban violence among France’s racialized youth, particularly in October-November 2005, when, after the electrocution of three Muslim children from the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, confrontations between local youth and police raged for three weeks across 280 municipalities , resulting in 10,000 torched cars and 4,800 arrests.7 Moreover, Zidane’s Algerian background recalled the disastrous France-Algeria match of October 2001, in which young Franco-Algerian men and women in the stands whistled during “La Marseillaise” and, in the seventieth minute with France leading 4–1, invaded the pitch waving Algerian flags. Accordingly the head-butt was read by many as a de facto act of sabotage of French...

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