Paris is Postcolonial: Centering the Suburbs

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in 2014, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated that there is a “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in France (quoted in Zappi 2016). France is home to the largest North and sub-Saharan African populations in Europe, most of whom live in the geographically segregated suburbs surrounding large metropolitan areas. In the 1990s, rap, hip-hop, and acclaimed “banlieue” (suburb) films like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995) brought the banlieues and their residents into public consciousness, in France and internationally. However, to this day, the religious, cultural, economic, and ethnic and racial differences perceived in residents of the banlieues frequently serve to exclude them from the sometimes ill-defined category of normative Frenchness. Postcolonial Paris brings the banlieues, the outer suburbs of Paris, firmly into the foreground in this excellent exploration of the cultural and political histories of these often maligned and misunderstood neighborhoods and their residents. Alongside the work of Mireille Rosello (2010), Michael Rothberg (2009), and Paul A. Silverstein (2018), Postcolonial Paris is a timely intervention into a growing corpus that reads French colonial and postcolonial cultural histories as intersecting phenomena. While the banlieues in and of themselves have produced a wealth of sociological and cultural analysis, rarely do discussions of Paris seek to bridge the gap, or “cross the train tracks,” between the polished, mythologized “city of love” and its outer limits. Laila Amine’s provocative analysis draws on canonical postcolonial theory, particularly the work of Frantz Fanon, as well as theoretical frameworks like multidirectional memory to bring the suburbs and the city together, thus widening the “script” of “what and who is Paris” (3).

Amine carefully sketches the cultural and political construction of fantasies and mythologies around central Paris and its neglected outer reaches. She argues that a wide range of cultural discourses (notably, nineteenth-century icons of realist literature and impressionist painting) have evoked central Paris as a haven of sexual and social freedom, universality and equality, and the center of civilization and progress. However, as Amine argues forcefully, “the common association of the capital city with universalist and egalitarian ideas has worked in tandem with the obliteration or vilification of a postcolonial Paris” (3). The myth of Paris does not simply exist alongside its postcolonial other in the suburbs; rather, the glorification of central Paris contributes to a dualistic conception of the city and the banlieue, whereby the banlieues come to contain the individuals and the ideas from which mainstream France seeks to distance itself and sometimes vilify. Paris thus functions metonymically for France as a whole, as the repository of Republican values. Concomitantly, the suburbs come to be associated with the colonies, as spaces of deviance and otherness, “lawless zones where misogyny, homophobia, and Islamism flourish” (6). Amine demonstrates how residents of these suburbs are constructed as threatening — both in terms of violence but also values: communautarisme (tribalism) versus universalism, Islam versus secularism, primitive versus modern.

The chapters move chronologically from the mid-1940s to the present, and this structure allows Amine to trace the similarities among various intergenerational iconographies of exclusion and marginalization. In this regard, one fascinating aspect of Amine’s research, and one of the most original theoretical perspectives in the book, is that she shows that the symbolic construction of the banlieues as the antithesis of French values began long before clashes between young people and the police drew media and scholarly attention to these neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead she shows that from the beginning of mass immigration from African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, these areas were marked as other, known as “small casbahs”: a reference to the Ottoman medina in Algiers, featured most prominently in Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic The Battle of Algiers (1966).

Amine signals the feeling of “colonial fatigue” identified by Emmanuelle Saada, which refers to the repetition of the same objects of study in the sphere of Franco...