Mathieu Kassovitz Research Articles

“LA HAINE”: CINEMATIC INSIGHTS INTO PERIPHERY INEQUITY AND FRENCH NATIONAL IDENTITY

The multicultural suburban areas, known as banlieues, surrounding French cities are marked by social inequalities, systemic discrimination, crime, and violence. Mathieu Kassovitz’s film “La Haine” (1995) is set in one such Paris suburb, capturing the daily lives of a group of multi-ethnic friends amidst escalating tensions between the French police and immigrant residents. The film “La Haine”, which received critical acclaim and won the César Award in 1996, serves as a powerful portrayal of life in the banlieues, capturing the essence of marginal inequality. By focusing on the contrasting experiences of suburban youth and the disparities between Paris and its outskirts, the film highlights societal issues that remain relevant even two decades later. This study uses “La Haine” as a lens to explore whether the challenges depicted in the film persist in contemporary society, demonstrating the enduring impact of marginal inequality. Through this analysis, the film emerges as a significant cultural artifact that challenges national identities in France.

The Jew, the Arab, the Black: La Haine and the structure of Anti-Black violence

This essay places Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and psychoanalysis in conversation with critical Black studies through an interrogation of the film La Haine (1995, France), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. I argue that while the action and dialogue that construct La Haine convey a progressive, perhaps even apparently radical, critique of race and policing towards the embrace of a multiracial coalition politics, the cinematic structure of La Haine administers what Deleuze calls a shock to thought that reveals the anti-Black structure of not simply European civil society, but the anti-Black relations among its historical and timeless Others—the Jew, the Arab, and the Black—such that the political desires and aspirations portrayed in the dialogue are rendered untenable through the cinematic structure. In other words, the critique of civil society La Haine offers on the level of structure and composition is one that exceeds and undermines any conscious desire for love, reparation, or coalition. By problematizing ethno-religious categories deployed by Kassovitz, the essay briefly asks how the representation of “religious” and “racial” bodies in La Haine operates within the same biocentric logic of the modern state to the extent that it represses the historico-material and psycho-affective origins of Jewish, Arab, and Black Enmity with regard to secular civil society and the Human. If so, then while Kassovitz’s best efforts to create a narrative arc and recuperative gesture toward reconciliation and redemption between the multiracial coalition of people and the police ultimately collapse into the flatline of anti-Blackness, the impossible reconciliation between the Black and secular civil society does not foreclose, following Selamawit Terrefe, the confluence and unflinching embrace of monstrosity, hatred, and enmity among the human’s familiar and radical Others—the so-called Jew, Arab, and Black.

Sound Corporeality and Multidirectional Acousmatic Music in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine

Sound Corporeality and Multidirectional Acousmatic Music in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine

“La haine” (Hate)

Sociological reflections based on the film “La haine” (Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and released in 1995, whose plot takes place over the next twenty-four hours of a night of riots and heavy clashes with police in a slum on the outskirts of Paris, in which the protagonists, three teenagers, walk the streets in an atmosphere of violence between gangs and constant conflicts with the police.

Paris Is Postcolonial

Book Review| March 01 2020 Paris Is Postcolonial: Centering the Suburbs Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light, by Amine, Laila, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018, 256 pages, $44.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-299-31580-1 Maria Flood Maria Flood Maria Flood is a lecturer in film studies at Keele University. She has published widely on Francophone and world cinema and political violence. Her monograph, Screening Histories of Violence: France, Algeria, and the Moving Image, was published in 2017. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (1): 144–146. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017403 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Maria Flood; Paris Is Postcolonial: Centering the Suburbs. Cultural Politics 1 March 2020; 16 (1): 144–146. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017403 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search 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... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 You do not currently have access to this content.

Music and spatial injustice in banlieue cinema

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of pre-existing music in French films set in impoverished banlieue neighbourhoods. It draws on Dikeç’s concept of ‘spatial injustice’, which arises in a convergence of media representation and government policy, entrenching inequality, in the context of the ‘fracture coloniale’ in French society. Pre-existing music, with its wider spheres of signification beyond the film, potentially disrupts reifying visions of the banlieue. The article considers ‘third space music’, applying Powrie’s concept to contemporary cinema in the banlieue. For context, Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Mehdi Charef, 1985) and La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) show pre-millennial banlieue films using music as a shared cultural resource. La Haine begins to evoke a third space by foregrounding analogue ‘sampling’, a hip-hop practice in which dominant codes are appropriated and reconfigured, an aesthetics which now pervades contemporary digital life. Looking at pre-existing music in more recent films Divines (Houda Benyamina, 2016) and Swagger (Olivier Babinet, 2016), through the prism of ‘third space music’ and sampling, shows how these films use music in their search for alternative ways of representing the over-determined space of the banlieue, whilst also confronting its spatial injustice.

Paris in Architecture, Literature, and Art. By May Spangler

This textbook responds to the burgeoning popularity of Paris studies and is aimed at American liberal arts students. It takes us through the various phases of the development of the French capital, from Gallo-Roman Lutetia to the Beaubourg and postmodern Paris. Students deepen their knowledge through the study of architecture and art, as well as literary extracts and films concerning each period, for example the Wars of Religion as evoked in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques and Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994). The study of texts and images is complemented by classroom interaction and internet searches. For example, in order to understand the Gothic experience of light, students are asked to form groups of two and reflect on times they were touched by light. They then share the results with the class and classify them in Kantian categories. Another example of interaction is a virtual visit to the Eiffel Tower, where students look online for images that may embody Impressionist principles. In general, the course is useful, engaging, and uncontroversial, and May Spangler displays her considerable knowledge of architecture and art. But inevitably such a book will fall foul of some Paris aficionados. Despite (or because of?) her long-time residence in Paris (we do not know which arrondissement), Spangler gives no sense of the social and geographical diversity of the city intra muros that resisted Haussmannization. The Paris Commune, a historic example of spatial class struggle, is hardly mentioned. If Louis Chevalier and Jean-François Lyotard make the postmodern section, there is no place for Henri Lefebvre or the Situationists. The ‘Underprivileged Banlieue’ is tacked on at the end like some afterthought of a liberal guilty conscience and predictably portrayed through the film La Haine (dir. by Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995). This merely reinforces a caricatural view of the so-called quartiers difficiles and, again, erases the diversity of the Parisian suburbs, especially as the construction of le Grand Paris, a new, sustainable city for the twenty-first century that aims to break down the inequalities of wealth and power in the Paris region (and which, contrary to what the author asserts, is not dogmatically opposed by the left), proceeds apace. For all its richness, this book reinforces a reified relationship between students and a Paris reduced to great buildings and the great men (and occasionally women) associated with them, a sense of distance aggravated by the use of English as medium. However steeped in Parisian architecture, art, and literature, you have the impression that, upon finally crossing the Pond, students will explore the City of Light very much as tourists.

L’Ordre et la Morale: Looking Beyond the Transnational in a Non-indigenous Film About Recent Pacific History

Most films about the Pacific may be described as transnational in terms of production (and often content), but is it ever possible, within a Postcolonial or Indigenous critique, to move beyond conversations about appropriation? And is the transnational aspect of the film the most useful way to categorise it? Specifically engaging with the Mathieu Kassovitz film L’Ordre et la morale, a retelling of the 1988 French military assault on Kanak hostage-takers in Ouvéa, New Caledonia, this article explores whether we can reconcile the twin dangers of Pacific narratives going untold (and the consequent erasure felt by Indigenous people) versus the peril of Pasifika people seeing only shallow, erroneous, or negative stereotypes of themselves on screen. What role, if any, can non-Indigenous filmmakers play in the cinematic reproduction of Indigenous Pacific histories?

The Eternal Other: (Franco-)Asians through the Lens of Contemporary French Cinema

ABSTRACTImmigrant identities occupy the foreground in contemporary French films such as the anthology Paris, je t'aime (Paris) and Entre les murs by Laurent Cantet, signaling the changing cultural and ethnic faces that comprise the Hexagon. Yet the portrayal of East/Southeast Asians remains atemporal, confining them to the realm of the unassimilated other. In comparison, an increasing number of individuals of black and North African heritage are gradually being profiled as more linguistically and culturally—albeit never completely—“French” as in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, his segment in Paris, je t'aime, and in Yamina Benguigui's television film series Aïcha. Does the political environment in France with respect to immigration create a hierarchy that determines the assimilability of specific racial and ethnic groups and/or do certain characteristics of East/Southeast Asian cultures contribute to crystallizing their other-ness? In order to tackle these perplexing queries, this paper considers how residual colonial ideologies underlying identity politics and citizenship as well as sociocultural elements of Asian ethnic groups help explain the perpetuation of Far Eastern Orientalism in contemporary French cinema.

Le cinéma de banlieue: Teaching Immigration, Teaching Perspective

This article proposes an approach to teaching immigration in France through film. I discuss a sequence of three films—Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, La haine by Mathieu Kassovitz, and Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche—in order to show how they allow for an exploration of issues surrounding immigration and, more importantly, how they illustrate different representational approaches to the subject. The ambition of the sequence is to attune students to the different ways in which directors look at and talk about immigration and to sensitize them to the implications of these choices.

Youth Dispossession, Volcanoes and Diaspora: Recent Developments in Francophone Caribbean Film

THE PAST DECADE HAS WITNESSED SEVERAL EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS in Francophone Caribbean cinematic production, and this article presents a survey of the current landscape of Caribbean cinema in French, focusing on work by Martiniquan and Guadeloupean filmmakers.1 The distinct history of the French islands has given rise to the development of strong literary and theoretical traditions, from Negritude and Antillanite to Creolite, which seek to explore the parameters of Francophone Caribbean identity, questioning how this identity relates to the wider Caribbean and problematising the ongoing relationship with France.This complicated history famously finds expression in the work of the late Martiniquan theorist, novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, particularly in the extended essay Caribbean Discourse, in which Glissant laments the fact that in the Caribbean, colonisation has divided into English, French, Dutch, Spanish territories a region where the majority of the population is African: making strangers out of people who are not.2 Despite this call for a greater racial and diasporic solidarity in the early 1980s, literary proclamations of Francophone Caribbean identity are inevitably shaped by references to metropolitan French poets, philosophers and novelists, and must first be translated and contextualised in order to reach non-French-speaking audiences. In contrast, film offers a more immediate manner of crafting cultural works which, through their use of setting and characterisation, can create bridges with a regional Caribbean audience. The visual and audible appeal of landscape, soundtrack and emotion can, then, combine to overcome the obstacle of language.Neg maronJean-Claude Flamand-Barnys Neg maron (2005) demonstrates a pronounced desire to connect with a local Caribbean audience. Just three years prior to its release, the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) by Fernando Meirelles had achieved global success, marking a new boom in neo-naturalist fictional narratives and images that focus on marginal characters, urban violence, poverty and extreme experiences.? Neg maron deals with these same themes, initiating the public to a poor area of an unnamed Caribbean island by following the violent everyday lives of marginalised young men.Neg maroris director Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny, who now works under the name of Jean-Claude Barny,4 co-wrote the script with Alain Agat, a Martiniquan,? and the film was produced by Mathieu Kassovitz and Richard Maignan. Barny had gained experience of the film industry by working with the acclaimed French director Kassovitz, and he was a casting director for Kassovitz's 1995 global hit La Haine (Hate), a film which also explores the theme of youth dispossession, and which examines the violent and chaotic lives of young French men from highrise estates on the outskirts of Paris.Barny began work on Neg maron in 1999, and moved back to Guadeloupe, where he had spent his childhood, to complete the project. The film skilfully blends the present-day era with references to the slave past - the title alone forges this connection - by passing comment on the ways in which this past continues to inflect the present. In 1998, the figure of the negmaron (maroon) played a central role in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French DOMs, and in Guadeloupe a flame honouring the memory of the neg mawon passed from town to town during the entire year preceding the events.6 Barny's film must, then, be understood as part of an ongoing cultural reworking of the memory of the Neg maron in the French Caribbean consciousness.Moreover, Neg maron can be viewed as part of a Francophone tradition of using film as a means of examining the economic legacy of colonialism and its impact on contemporary economic structures: in a very different context, the African film Bamako (2006), set in the Malian capital and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, also addresses these themes. …

Reframing the Periphery: Narrative Authority and Self-Reflexivity in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine 1I gratefully acknowledge the support of Barbara Hanna, Juliana de Nooy, the UQ Arts article development scheme and the Nottingham-Trent University visiting scholars program in the preparation of this article.

This article takes a narratological approach in examining how Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) establishes itself as an authoritative voice in framing the banlieue. It argues that framing is essential in establishing the film’s narrative authority, the idea that it is recounted from a position of experience. To do so, the film juggles two contradictory narrative impulses: a sense of critical distance which propels the film to its finale; and an emphasis on what Ross Chambers would call loiterliness, as the film tracks the wanderings of its trio of protagonists. By concentrating on three key storytelling sequences—the opening and closing voiceovers, as well as a story told by an elderly Jewish man which will be read self-reflexively—it will be argued that the key means through which the film adopts an insider’s perspective is through its affinity with Hubert, a character often overlooked in writing on the film.

Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins in Contemporary France

Much was made of the banlieue film in work on French cinema in the early 2000s. The sensationalist La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) attracted considerable attention from politicians, notably Jacques Chirac in his presidential campaign of 1995, and from film scholars, who saw it as a symptom of Chirac's theme of fracture sociale. Film scholars have shifted their focus in recent years, partly because of a growing interest in the films of Maghrebi directors in postcolonial contexts, and partly because of a resurgence of interest in political cinema as exemplified by Martin O'Shaughnessy's The New Face of Political Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), in which the Dardenne brothers' films are as important as any broad category such as banlieue cinema. Jonathan Ervine's book frequently references O'Shaughnessy's work (as well as Mireille Rosello's essential study, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001)), and is a useful addition to it. Ervine focuses on fiction and non-fiction films since 1995 that deal with the plight of immigrants and banlieusards. Feature films and documentaries are taken as more or less equivalent in terms of what they can tell us about the nature of contemporary France. The mixture of genres, however, sometimes leads to strange bedfellows, such as in Chapter 2, which analyses Samir Abdallah's La Ballade des sans-papiers (1997) alongside Michael Haneke's Code inconnu (2000). Understandably, there is little work here on formal and aesthetic issues, such as the nature of documentary filmmaking. Among the handful of fiction films, apart from Code inconnu, we find, predictably, La Haine and Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997), but, less predictably, films that others have explored in some detail from very different perspectives, such as L'Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004) and Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006). The majority of the films discussed are documentaries, many of them relatively unknown (such as On n'est pas des marques de vélos (Jean-Pierre Thorn, 2002)), which makes this book a valuable resource. After the introductory first chapter, four major chapters each deal with a key theme. Chapter 2 rightly foregrounds one of the significant issues of the mid-1990s, the sans-papiers. Chapter 3 focuses on films that defend foreign nationals subject to the double peine. Chapter 4 is concerned with representations of the banlieues. The final chapter, which in many ways is the most interesting, shows how certain films shy away from the sensational in their representations of ordinary life in the banlieues. Ervine references the twists and turns of government policy, such as the Loi Pasqua, which led to the criminalization of hardworking individuals; one particularly striking phrase intentionally echoes Simone de Beauvoir, suggesting that ‘on ne naît pas sans-papiers, on le devient’ (p. 37). Underpinning the whole book is the simple question: what is the relevance of republicanism in an increasingly multicultural society? Ervine points out that the reality of daily life in France has less to do with government rhetoric about republican values and national identity than with participation and an acceptance of hybridity.

Screening strangers in Fortress Europe and beyond

Abstract This article, responding to the current crisis of European cultural identity, goes beyond the specific national context of film production in Europe, and discusses how the issues of migration and diaspora are challenging the conflicting, and sometimes conflating, ideas of post-Europe, Fortress Europe, post-Holocaust Europe, New Europe, post-nation Europe and transnational Europe. It asks how the films dealing with migration and diaspora challenge European identity, particularly traditional notions of Europeanness, and how they subvert or/and reinforce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic attempts to construct and deconstruct European identity. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, the article determines cultural and political patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Code 46 (2003) and The Road to Guantanamo (2006).

Wielokulturowa przestrzeń miejska w "kinie blokowisk" (cinéma de banlieue)

The controversy over the advantages and disadvantages of the policy of multiculturalism has been ongoing since the 1980’s. Simultaneously the growing social mobility and migration movements in today’s Europe are accompanied by a crisis of the nation-state, or rather, as Patrick Savidan suggests, by a gradual transformation of the political project characteristic of the past aimed at strengthening the processes of social integration. The identities of different ethnic and national groups are being shaped either by dialogue or by confrontation: members of various minorities demand respect (as understood by Charles Taylor) not only in the personal sphere, but also in the public one. A good reflection of the debates on multiculturalism is offered by contemporary French cinema, which, in particular in the films directed by representatives of ethnic minorities, discusses the burning issues of integration, racism, and the heritage of the colonial past. The film art of the cinema de banlieue responds this way to the current political situation, to the deepening social inequalities and to the alienation of the young generation. Social exclusion, or marginalization, accompanied by the feeling of helplessness, are depicted as forms of oppression in films directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, Jean-Francois Richet, Thomas Gilou, and Malik Chibane. They frequently use spatial metaphors which turn out particularly relevant in showing problems related to exclusion. Translated by Dorota Chabrajska

On Abrams's <em>The New Jew in Film</em>

On Abrams's The New Jew in Film Carolina Rocha The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema. By Nathan Abrams. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 258 pp., ISBN 978-0-8135-5341-2 (pbk). US $25.95. Jewish men and women have been represented by stereotypes in films since the inception of cinema. Heavily influenced by sociopolitical developments in both Europe and the United States, these representations underwent changes throughout the twentieth century. In The New Jew in Film, Nathan Abrams sets out to explore the transformations that Jews have undergone in world cinema since 1990. The book, which is a collection of some previously published articles and book chapters, consists of an introduction and eight chapters. In the introduction Abrams presents a concise background of the portrayal of Jews in American and European films during the twentieth century in order to contextualize his thesis that, since the 1990s, representations of Jews not only have become more prominent in cinema around the world but also have paralleled the assimilation of Jews in different societies as well as their attainment of middle-class status. The author identifies the widespread depiction of Jews in cinema as representing a global trend that has become more noticeable in the last three decades. Abrams also makes the case that this trend is the result of a new generation of actors and actresses, screenwriters, and directors who take pride in their Jewishness. (Here he borrows Daniel Boyarin’s term, “Jewissance,” or [End Page 108] pleasure in being Jewish.) The author argues that many of these new portrayals originate with the Jewish directors, screenwriters, and actors who deploy reverse stereotypes as a way to challenge prevailing perceptions of Jews. This study builds on previous work by Lester Friedman and Patricia Erens, who surveyed Jewish cinematic representations up to the 1980s, and challenges David Desser and Lester Friedman’s assertions from 2004 about the final flowering of American-Jewish cinema (18). Chapter 1 presents a history of the Jew in film, concentrating on two opposing self-images: the tough Jew and the sissy Jew. The latter has been perceived as an image of Jewish passivity, but for Abrams he embodies the new characterizations of Jews in film through the lenses of multiculturalism and pluralism. Furthermore, he argues that new varieties of Jewish masculinities have emerged, including the stoner Jew and the working-class Jew. Such changes are seen, for example, in Woody Allen’s 1990s films, in which the hysterical schlemiel has been replaced by less lovable characters; in David Mamet’s screenplays, which depict sexist and aggressive Jews; and in the Coen brothers’ films. Similarly, European films have also depicted working-class Jews, notably in the work of the French-Jewish director Mathieu Kassovitz. The same images can be found in the comedies of the Jewish-American director Judd Apatow, where Jewish characters assume the roles of badkens (slackers). These new representations of Jews in film have also transformed the penis from a locus of shame to one of comedy, and blatantly critique the values of the dominant Gentile society. The second chapter centers on the depiction of the Jewess in film. Whereas earlier depictions of Jewesses had them relegated to secondary roles as the overbearing Yiddishe momme or the asexual and materialistic Jewish American Princess, Abrams identifies in post-1990s films the “Jewess with attitude,” who evolved from the feminist movement and found expression particularly in the positive Jewish female film roles played by Barbra Streisand. In addition, Jewish female directors presented the feminine Jewish gaze in films such as The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998). Iconoclastic Jewish female characters also were depicted in Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999) and Zwartboek (Paul Verhoeven, 2006). The subsequent chapters examine film depictions of Jews in relation to sex, passivity, agency, religion, food, and bathrooms. The fact that Jews and Jewesses are represented as sexual predators, erotic beings, and porn stars is interpreted by Abrams as a sign of a heightened confidence on the part of Jewish and non-Jewish directors to take on these portrayals. The topics of exogamy and endogamy are [End Page 109] also explored, leading...

REVIEW: Gossanna cave siege tragic tale of betrayal

Review of: Rebellion [l’Ordre at la morale], directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. Nord-Ouest Films, 2012 [English version]. 136min. www. lordreetlamorale-lefilm.comWhen the headlines hit France in April 1988 about the critical turning point in ‘les évènements’ down under in New Caledonia, maverick filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz was just 18. He remembers the gritty images of the Gossanna cave siege on television. Indigenous Kanaks were reported to have massacred a quartet of gendarmes with machetes and shotguns and taken 27 others hostage (three others were captured later). There were also false reports of alleged decapitations and rape on Ouvéa in the remote Loyalty Islands.

Urban Sprawl in Europe

The alienated atmosphere, the shallow relationships of the residential suburbs inhabited by the American middle classes and the spatial manifestations of the failure of the American dream and family model are spectacularly presented in Edward Albee’s dramas written in the 1960s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Everything in the Garden, or A Delicate Balance. The problems of some types of European, including French, suburbs such as suburban crime, violence or fear are best illustrated in the context of art cinema by films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hate) or Luc Besson’s Banlieue 13 (District B13). Naturally, for us examples from the context of art are not as important as scientific studies indicating the main causes of today’s social problems, which are basically the lifestyle of the middle class, its self-fulfilling confinement and individualism in the American suburbs, and the concentrations of socially disadvantaged classes and social exclusion in Europe. Behind the differences, behind the characteristics of the American and European societies, and the traits of their history, economy and development, the different social structural features of cities are evident. The American middle classes live mostly in suburbs, and more disadvantaged groups are spatially concentrated in inner cities. The European middle classes are located predominantly in the inner city or betteroff suburban areas, while the disadvantaged classes are increasingly concentrated in suburban areas. Although European suburbs are different from their American counterparts, there are visible signs of increasing convergence. Now European cities also have to face tensions which hitherto characterised mainly American urban societies. European cities are also typified by fragmentation, the rise of individualism, and the disintegration of community sense and social cohesion (Cattan p. 1). Slums, which in the past were mainly typical of American cities, are now spreading in European cities as well and segregation is also increasing (Haussermann–Haila 2010, p. 60). The hereto positive features specific to Europe, namely the European welfare state which has played an outstanding role in comparison with America, the relatively limited enforcement of market impacts and public efforts to manage social tensions, have been damaged and needs to be limited (Kazepov 2010, Cities of Europe). It is a fact that the European welfare states are not always able to restrain the various tensions, particularly due to different social structural and economic difficulties and crises, and to the strengthening of European urban sprawl and its sociological impacts. Besides American suburbanisation, which fundamentally has historical relevance to America, European suburbanisation is also gradually spreading (Kazepov 2010, p. 13). Because of global economic interests, metropolitan * This article is the introductory part of the book entitled Urban Sprawl in Europe published by Aula Kiado (Budapest,

The Red Shoes: Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance

The Red Shoes:Islam and the Limits of Solidarity in Cixous's Mon Algériance Anne Norton (bio) "My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria" testifies to Cixous as exile and refugee. Cixous is more uprooted than she knows. She has been torn from a place and a heritage by violence. She has been torn from those who might be her people. This deracination is an artifact of colonialism in its late stages, haunting the postcolonial. That which is severed in her divided France. Cixous knows she has been torn from Europe, from the heritage that belonged to Northern European Jews. She does not seem to know that she has been torn from Algeria, robbed of the heritage of Andalusia and the Maghreb, separated not only from Algeria, but from Algeria in France. If she does not value the loss, it is no less a robbery. If she accepts, or has been taught to welcome the separation, she is no less wounded by it. Cixous's essay "Mon Algériance" reveals this severing. In reading it, I hope to show how it might be repaired. "Mon Algériance" was not presented, as it is in the United States, as a rather rarefied work in theory, but as an intervention in French cultural politics. The essay was first published in Les Inrockuptibles.1 Les Inrocks is a journal of politics and culture, publishing pieces on music, visual arts, and commentaries on politics and current events. It regularly features by significant intellectual figures. Cixous's article appears in Les Inrocks as a theorist's postcolonial memoir, speaking to the continuing debates over Islam, Muslims, and what Paul Silverstein has called "Algeria in France."2 Americans would call it the work of a public intellectual. When Cixous published this account of her relation to the Algerian, France had already seen unrest in the banlieux of Paris. Mathieu Kassovitz's acclaimed 1995 film La Haine (Hate) had made solidarity, alienation, police brutality and discrimination visible as conditions of immigrant experience. France continued to consider its colonial past, and the legacy of torture in Algeria. Benjamin Stora's La gangrene et l'oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie was only the latest of his works to address the tangled French relation with Algeria and the Algerian.3 The question of the politics of memory was very much to the fore. A month before Cixous's article appeared, Eduardo Galeano wrote in Le monde diplomatique, "As the years pass and we change the memory of what we have lived, seen and heard changes as well. And often, it happens that we place in the memory what we want to find, like the police during the searches."4 Cixous's essay speaks to each of these: to the question of the rioting alienated chebab of the banlieux; to France's fraught colonial past; and to the temptations of memory. One might, following Bourdieu, read Cixous's postcolonial memoir as an instance of the trials peculiar to one "dominated fraction of the dominant class." One might, following Memmi, read it as another instance of the futilities that attend the "colonizer who refuses." One might, following Derrida, remain silent. I hope to read the testimony of the Algérienne sleeping in Cixous, and recover for her a solidarity that overcomes, albeit partially and imperfectly, the divisions of sex, religion and ethnicity in contemporary France. It is a reading she resists. Cixous's account of her birthplace among the Arabs, among the Muslims, in the Maghreb begins in an echoing disavowal. She writes of "My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria."5 She is not Algerian, Algérienne, une Algérienne, jazriyya. She departs. She has never arrived. She speaks in other words than theirs. Cixous's title, "Mon Algériance" claims both domesticity and dominion. The title is possessive. Mireille Calle-Gruber reads "allegiance" "alliance" and "riance" in Cixous's "Algériance." The word can then be read as a benign, smiling linkage of the political and the personal, of alliance, allegiance and an object of familiarity and affection.6 Cixous, however, refuses a home...

Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World (review)

Reviewed by: Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World Leslie Barnes Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David Troyansky , eds. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xxiv + 427 pp. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, the second volume of interdisciplinary articles originating in a comparative literature symposium held at Texas Tech University in 2002, brings historians and literary scholars together to explore the interrelated questions of migration, identity, and Francophonie. The first section, entitled "Colonialism and Immigration," situates concerns in contemporary France in relation to the twentieth-century colonial empire. Inquiry ranges from Philip Dine's analysis of the ideological construction of French Algeria to Keith David Watenpaugh's reading of the political ambiguity of collaboration in mandate Syria between 1920 and 1946 to Elisa Camiscioli's discussion of intersecting [End Page 111] organicist and assimilationist metaphors in interwar-year French immigration discourse. The section on "Immigrant Spaces and Identities" opens with Neil MacMaster's discussion of the ways in which Maghrebian migrants reappropriated space in French and Algerian bidonvilles to recreate a "sense of internal cohesion and solidarity" (77) and the French state's attempt to destroy that order by imposing Eurocentric notions of domesticity and "normalcy" on migrant communities. Todd Shepard continues the interrogation of Algerian populations in France by documenting the plight of the harkis—Algerian collaborators with French colonial authorities—in the wake of independence and noting the series of legal maneuvers by which the French government made "refugees" out of "citizens," effectively "effacing law and harki rights" (98). The section ends with Alain Gabon's article, which situates Mathieu Kassovitz's cinematic representations of youth and multiculturalism in Métisse and La Haine in a global perspective. In the third section the focus shifts to "Writing Algerian Identities" through the lens of gender and sexuality. Robert Aldrich's cogent discussion of Jean Sénac's political writings and tragic demise in post-independence Algeria illuminates the paradox of pied-noir support for Algerian nationalism. Trudy Agar-Mendousse reads Malika Mokeddem's novels as an example of "creative counterviolence" (188) with which the female Algerian author undermines colonial and patriarchal authority. Finally, Mary McCullough's article on Leïla Sebbar poses important questions about literary categorization and expectations placed on the "beur" author. The articles in the fourth section provide socio-historical, literary, and philosophical interrogations of "Jewish Migrations and Identities" in France and North Africa. Sarah Sussman begins by documenting the linguistic and culinary customs of Algerian Jewish populations in France. Johann Sadock analyzes the complex and shifting perspectives of "anti-Other tendencies" (247) in post-1948 literary representations of Jews, Arabs, and French in "Oriental" Jewish Literature. Brigitte Weltman-Aron contributes the final article, which brings Memmi into dialogue with Derrida and Cixous on the persistent indeterminacy marking North African Jewish identity. Opening the inquiry to a larger geographical field, the articles in the fifth section cover "Francophone Spaces and Identities" in the contexts [End Page 112] of Lebanon, Africa, the Caribbean, and Vietnam. Antony Johae's article explores Lebanese author Amin Maalouf's use of the traveler to express an identity as self and other, noting that for Maalouf, "every one of us has our origin in migration, and every one of us belongs to the diaspora of the world" (301). Joseph Militello's reading of the madwoman archetype in relation to the "postcolonial Third World nonwhite male authorities" (318) in Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane and Mariama Bâ's Un Chant écarlante is a welcomed foray into Afro-Caribbean struggles with identity. In the last two articles, Georges Van Den Abbeele and Ali Yédes investigate the Vietnamese tradition. Van Den Abbeele, insisting on the multifaceted nature of the Vietnamese diaspora, reads contemporary Vietnamese literature in Vietnamese, English, and French as a practice where "exile and return, love and betrayal become complex faces of each other" (337). Through a close reading of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese epic, The Tale of Kiêu, Yédes locates the seeds of Vietnamese modernity not in the introduction of a French education model, as others have suggested, but in Vietnam's own literary...