Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light by Laila Amine (review)

Laila Amine's Postcolonial Paris joins the increased scholarship on transnational solidarity in Paris. Amine's book adds a new dimension to existing studies by extending her inquiry to cover both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as a range of genres, including novels, short stories, film, and graffiti. In this examination of race, gender, and representation in the works of African American and North African writers, artists, and filmmakers, Amine focuses on the marginal spaces of Paris, the banlieues or suburbs whose place and meaning in the Republic continue to be contested in public discourse. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that disrupt traditional French narratives about the banlieue as a site of cultural and religious alterity.