Identities, Discourses and Experiences: Young People of North African Origin in France (review)

The fieldwork for this study was conducted between 2000 and 2007 in Seine-Saint-Denis, epicentre of the riots that in 2005 swept through the banlieues. Although there is no evidence to suggest that any of the interviewees participated in the riots, the attitudes and circumstances portrayed offer many valuable insights into the tensions that fuelled the disturbances. Those circumstances are a cumulative product of demographic, socio-economic, political, and other trends that crystallized back in the 1980s into a shape that since then has changed relatively little for large numbers of young people of minority ethnic origin in the banlieues: high levels of unemployment, widespread ethnic and racial discrimination, and entrenched patterns of spatial segregation. Kiwan sets out to explore the extent to which dominant discourses about these issues resemble or diverge from the ways in which young people of North African origin see themselves. Central to her analysis is the belief that the self-identity of her interviewees cannot be properly understood without bringing together the social and cultural dimensions of their experience. The interface between these two strands is often ambiguous. Kiwan’s interviewees, like many other young people from similar backgrounds, often speak of a gulf between the banlieues and Paris, which, while spatial and class-based at one level, is at another level highly ethnicized, for it corresponds in large measure to a distinction that in popular discourse is often drawn between banlieusards and Français, that is, minority versus majority ethnic groups. While the spatial boundary is undeniable, it is not clear that the perceived ethnic boundary associated with this corresponds to a genuine cultural divide, at any rate in the sense in which many politicians and other contributors to public debates have suggested. The linguistic and religious heritage brought to France by North African migrants is generally less strong among their descendants, many of whom appear more interested in Anglophone popular culture disseminated through TV, radio, and other electronic media. Curiously, Kiwan makes little reference to this aspect of ‘banlieue culture’. In seeking to determine ‘the likelihood of the emergence of a mature collective voice representing both the socio-economic and cultural grievances of young people of immigrant origin in France’ (p. 14), Kiwan appears to assume ‘mature’ cultural demands to be rooted in the linguistic and religious heritage of migrants. On finding that her interviewees generally fail to articulate demands of this nature, she concludes that their subjectivity is ‘frustrated’ (p. 211), ‘thwarted’ (p. 212), and ‘truncated’ (p. 221), terms that appear to imply that those concerned are somehow unable to voice their ‘true’ or ‘full’ selves. An alternative view would be that while the materiality of the banlieues and the public debates surrounding them have changed all too little, the cultural dynamics of these spaces have moved on.