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

The history of French integration politics—from assimilationist, universalist, and multiculturalist initiatives—has frequently received international attention, and scholars from a variety of disciplines have documented consequent modes of resistance and social activism. However, a comprehensive study devoted to the theatrical response in Paris did not exist until Emine Fişek’s Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris. In this ambitious portrayal of the political intervention of theater, Fişek compellingly argues that “theatrical immigration activism in early twenty-first-century Paris provides key insights into the evolution of notions of immigrant rights, integration, and experience in postwar France” (180). She keenly establishes parallel structures between French aesthetics and politics in reaction to immigration and the resulting modes in which theatrical practices can generate national and cultural belonging. The emphasis is not on representation of immigrant identity on the stage; rather, Fişek underscores the very potential to animate citizenship by the stage, for those whom the national platform tends to occlude. In this way, Fişek’s monograph is a necessary foray for dance scholars, too, beyond scholars of French and francophone theater, as it intervenes in the hegemonic legacy affiliated with the French stage and performance traditions, including ballet and other dance forms.

Several questions motivate Fişek’s research on immigration politics and theatrical practices:

Is theater a primarily semiotic practice that transmits a series of meanings? Or is theater a space of subject constitution that foregrounds its habit-forming capacities? .. . What then are the unique meanings associated with these distinctions in the context of French debates on immigration? With what meanings are theater, collective identity, and bodily life endowed in contemporary France?

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To address these questions, Aesthetic Citizenship sources archival materials, ethnographic studies, and self-conducted interviews with actors and activists beginning in 2008 Paris. Through a sophisticated application of performance study theories, Fişek successfully frames the relationship between embodied social practice and citizenship construction through aesthetics of the theater. By focusing on the actors’ bodies, rather than their scripted roles and speech, Fişek argues that the performers themselves undergo change in the process of staging, rather than merely representing alternative political realities for their audiences to witness. Thus, the stakes at play move beyond aesthetic interpretation and instead gesture toward the risk and political potential embodied by the immigrant actor.

The introduction provides a detailed history of immigration and integration politics in France, dating from the immigrant-workers crises of the 1970s through Sarkozy era policies. Fişek also contextualizes key terms—such as integration, universalism, and animation—within their historical conversations particular to France, to clarify their subsequent use in her publication. Chapter 1, “On the Paris Stage,” rewinds to 1970s Paris to trace the development of theatrical immigration activism within the broader context of social and political transformations of the nation. In particular, Fişek focuses on two Arab-French theater troupes, Al Assifa and La Kahina. Tensions established in these oral interviews, such as precarious politics of staging representation of gender and racial identities, are amplified in her selection of contemporary case studies. For example, gender is continued as a common element of chapter 2, “Prendre la Parole,” as Fişek concentrates on personal-narrative performance within the Festival au Féminin, an annual women’s art festival, and the civic organization Accueil Goutte d’Or, both from the early 2000s. Fişek references Rachida Khalil’s one-woman show, La Vie rêvée de Fatna, to delineate the oppositional complexities of universality and particularity in performance, as Khalil navigates enacting her own personal narrative for public gaze without falsely generalizing, and subsequently imposing, her specific experience onto other immigrant bodies.

Chapter 3, “The Integrated Actor,” explores the role of theater as a mechanism for immigrant integration, as employed by two nongovernmental agencies, Réseau Education Sans Frontières (RESF) and La Climade...