A Multicultural Conversation: La Haine, Raï, and Menace II Society

Since the 1980s, studies of contemporary French culture have been taking note of working-class banlieues (industrial suburbs) and their inhabitants with increasing frequency. ¹ Often the gesture toward peripheral urban spaces and working class and immigrant cultures becomes part of an overdetermined equation to measure the health of the French nation via its "others." This equation links the flow of immigration and the presence of diverse populations in urban France to a range of national problems, from crime and violence to urban decay and unemployment. In this scenario, the idea of multiculturalism is understood as a threat on the horizon, ready to fragment national identity into unrecognizable and irretrievable pieces. But the signifier banlieue also works at another level, when it refers to the many forms of cultural production that originate in or address what are recognizable as banlieue cultures.

This sphere of production is situated in an urban milieu characterized by the collapse of models of productivity built on factories, workers, and the dreams and demands of modernization. In the contemporary context, unemployment is high, housing is crumbling, and periodic bursts of youth protest lead the national government to prescribe an almost permanent riot police presence in the most explosive or "hot" neighborhoods (les quartiers chauds). The changes and crises of a postindustrial city produce new conditions of daily life and new forms of urban culture, within the continuing context of an urban space of contact among Euro-French of the working class and families from post-World War II and postindependence patterns of circulation between North and West Africa and France. ²

A repertoire of popular culture has been emerging out of this mix in its current form since the first beur novels and films appeared in the 1980s, dealing quite specifically with the generation of youth born to immigrants from North Africa. Now the expression of banlieue popular culture proliferates in forms of production such as film, literature, dance, art, and music. The turn toward the banlieues as productive sites of contemporary popular culture has been forecasted in recent studies of urban and working-class cultural production. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose expresses the hope that her study of US hip-hop forms will pave the way for further work on expanding sites of international popular cultures, among them the "French North African immigrant hip-hop scene in Paris." ³ At the end of a study entitled Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900-40, Adrian Rifkin suggests that a new urban culture is developing in the suburbs, with their histories of immigration and deportation, against the sounds of raï music and Euro-Disney. ⁴ In addition, the productivity of the banlieue as a cultural site is part of a larger shift toward popular culture as global cultural currency, as commodities are exchanged, image and narrative are produced and disseminated, and conversations within popular cultures begin to take shape.

The emergence of these cultural forms coincides with a specific historical moment in Europe. The principles and practices of the European Community (EC) are being constantly negotiated, and questions of circulation between EC countries, and between the EC and the rest of the world, are pushed to the forefront. Such questions often result in debates about future immigration policies and discussions about the multiple populations that have long resided in these countries. Paul Gilroy's work in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack insists on the strategic and political necessity of refusing the imperative to choose, for example, to be either black or European, in the long tradition of "universal" models of identification and citizenship. ⁵ France is known for its particular formulation of an individual's relationship to the state, which forecloses recognition of the multiple factors that might mediate this relationship in daily life. While these debates take place in parliamentary and theoretical contexts, they are also negotiated on the terrain of popular culture.

In "What is this...