Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek (review)

As part of its commitment to l’exception française, France has long supported the ideals of republican universalism through policies that use the arts to integrate its citizens and foster cultural competency. Given the postcolonial nation’s relentless struggle “to integrate a multicultural polity” (5) with its robust animation culturelle outreach, Aesthetic Citizenship rightly identifies France as an “exemplary site” to study the social and aesthetic practice of immigrant theatre. Emine Fişek’s meticulously documented overview of the conflicted politics of French immigration offers an essential backdrop to the book’s ethnographic accounts of localized performance projects that developed in social centers, aid organizations, and neighborhood associations in 2008. Each project enacts performance as both a staged event and “a structuring logic of social life” (29), demonstrating Fişek’s argument “that national participation, belonging, and citizenship are spheres of experience that require rehearsal, and that theater is a particularly apt space through which to understand the complicated relationship between ideal and enactment” (5).

Focused largely on the Sarkozy era (2002–12), the book situates the immigration crises of this period within France’s larger historical struggle toward national self-definition (including examinations of the 2004 law and the headscarf controversy, and 2005 urban violence in the banlieue neighborhoods). The book’s emphasis on embodied social practices interweaves performance studies research with discourses of alterity and communal belonging from French cultural theorists (Étienne Balibar, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière). Fişek’s expertise in cultural and linguistic translation serves the book’s extensive consideration of France’s distinctive relationship to processes of social integration and its articulation in the French language. Most importantly, the book’s argument rests on the tension between universality and particularity contained in two fraught terms: intégration as the abstract notion of French republican universality and autonomous personhood, and the danger of communautarisme as particular identification (local, ethnic, or religious) with the resultant categorization of the immigrant as Other. Fişek distinguishes Anglo-American notions of “community-based performance,” “intercultural theater,” and “multi-culturalism” from French critical terms often lacking handy English equivalents (communautarisme, laïcité, banlieue, animation culturelle, citoyen, and immigré). These concepts unique to the French lexicon are well-presented and prove critical to assessing theatre’s capacity for civic and artistic engagement consistent with France’s “ideal” of “social enmeshment and moral autonomy” (180) performed as an “enactment” of individual national belonging and self-affirmation.

Interweaving archival, theoretical, and socio-political sources, Fişek’s ethnographic, dialogic, and self-reflective approach calls to mind Dwight Conquergood’s ideal ethnography of the “ears and heart” as a co-performative witnessing. Extensive interviews and exchanges with theatre practitioners, social and humanitarian aid workers, and civic actors and activists offer “fieldwork vignettes” that bring localized immigrant experience to bear on the development of an “emergent immigrant theater” and the staging of the “immigrant body.” Noteworthy is Fişek’s nuanced discussion of immigrant women’s relationship to embodiment and the complexities of ethno-cultural particularity. Her account of the contradictory stances regarding the headscarf controversy is particularly incisive and theoretically enmeshed in feminist scholarship (by scholars including Judith Butler, Jane Freedman, Joan Scott, and Saba Mahmood).

Focused on empowerment through immigrant corporeality, the book tracks “two dueling ideologies” of emancipatory work: “public recognition for those who lacked visibility,” and “arts practices as habit-generating phenomena that participat[e] in the creation of cultured citizens” (17). Each chapter narrates site-specific case studies where “ethical and aesthetic sensibilities” intersect and evolve.

Chapter 1, “On the Paris Stage,” outlines the early effects of 1970s decentralization policies in their outreach to the “non-public” in underserved areas (la banlieue) through state-sponsored animation culturelle. The French-Arab troupes Al Assifa and La Kahina, as precursors to immigrant theatre activism, illustrate theatrical engagement as “both a force for cultivation and a space for aesthetic militantism” (23).

The...