Parisian Banlieue Research Articles

Connections / disconnections: on Alice Diop’s Nous

ABSTRACT This article considers how Alice Diop’s documentary Nous/We (2021) challenges the myopia of hegemonic colourblind constructions of France and its people. Its title both raises a question (who are we?) and implicitly asserts an inclusive answer. But the film is not a reductively integrationist project. Indeed, it challenges this central policy of the French state and stages an interrogation of contemporary France, where, as Trica Danielle Keaton et al have put it, ‘race does not officially reside, even as racism and discrimination are long-term residents’. The author examines how Nous maps out a discursive space between the poles of forced assimilation and ghettoisation (communautarisme) that acknowledges racialisation and the racial dimensions of exploited labour, urban planning and social housing, but also tracks some points of inter-ethnic connection. The article argues that the film is three things at once: a self-reflexive celebration of filmmaking as an act of creative geography that moves across time and space to forge connectivity as well as tracking disjunctions; a documentation of everyday life and social diversity, particularly among the frequently demonised or simply ignored Parisian banlieues; and an indictment of the failure of the French state to properly recognise and value this diversity.

Confinement, Care, and Commodification in Mati Diop’s <em>In My Room</em>

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a claim to artistic autonomy. Finally, the article shows how the film might point to opportunities for collective action meant to construct alternatives to the ongoing crises of capitalism.

Divines and the Constructed Self

This article examines the character of Dounia from the 2016 film Divines through different facets of her identity. As a North African girl living in a Roma camp outside of a Parisian banlieue, Dounia faces a multitude of challenges if she wishes to not only survive, but ultimately escape her socio-economic position. To do so, Dounia must enter the banlieue’s male-dominated economy by masquerading in a male role. This performance of gender exposes other pieces of her identity as performed, and performance itself is exposed as her most powerful tool toward escape.

Féminité hybride, féminité dansée : performances de genres et oralité dans Bande de Filles et Divines

ABSTRACT The Parisian banlieue is often represented in cinema (in movies such as La Haine) and considered by academic literature (Austin, Fredette) as a space of hypermasculinity. However, in her analysis of the evolution of the banlieue film over the past 20 years, Lauren Reeck identifies a ongoing process of feminization of the banlieue. Willing to contribute to the conversation about the role, function and consideration of female bodies in this marginalized space, I offer a comparison of two French movies, Bande de Filles (Girlhood, and Divines , in order to study two attempts to rehabilitate the female body in the banlieue. Focusing on the access to orality, this contribution aims at analysing the different performances of femininity, whether they be hybrid or corporal performances, which the female characters resort to in both movies to reclaim a voice of their own, as well as their feminine identity. Sciamma and Benyamina thus try to shed light onto various systems oppressing female bodies in the banlieue, situating their works in a growing cinematographic corpus, at the intersection of gender studies, post-colonial studies and political sociology.

Space, Gender, and Identity in Sciamma's <i>Girlhood</i> and Arnold's <i>Fish Tank</i>

In this article, I explore the use of space in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles, two films that depict the experiences of 15-year-old girls in a British housing estate and a Parisian banlieue respectively. The spatial motifs related to identity that circulate throughout the films establish a regime of flux, ambiguity, and reversibility that contributes to a depiction of female adolescence as unfixed and unsettled. I argue that both films, in their focus on the lived experience of their protagonists, investigate the landscape of economically and socially peripheral spaces to develop a specifically female approach to contemporary coming-of-age narratives that takes into account the difference that gender makes.

‘Visions of ecstasy’: resilience and melancholy in the musical moments of Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014)

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of pop music in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (Girlhood, 2014). Responding to feminist readings of Bande de filles’s most striking musical sequence (in which the protagonists lip-sync to Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’) as an expression of the protagonists’ joyous defiance of the raced and gendered oppression that they face growing up in the Parisian banlieue, this article will instead situate it within the context of neoliberal resilience discourse. Easily mistaken for resistance, resilience is a neoliberal value that demands bodies ‘bounce back’ from the damage inflicted upon them by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Resilience, and its counter-resilient inverse melancholy, are political affects that operate through contemporary aesthetic forms. Following Robin James’s reading of ‘Diamonds’ as a melancholic anthem that sonically circumvents resilient musical formations, this article suggests that this melancholic political affect complicates the joyous, resistant function that has been emphasised in other feminist readings. Contextualising this sequence within the musical landscape of some of the film’s other musical moments, this article suggests that the critical over-emphasis on the resistance staged by the affective musical moment in Bande de filles overlooks the web of politically ambivalent meanings that music constructs in the film.

The sensorial redemption of the perpetrator’s tale

Since the end of the Second World War, the figure of the perpetrator has given rise to vigorous debates and indictments in both fiction and legislation. Where trauma studies have contributed to apprehending the complexity of the human condition and the will to survive historical atrocities, the link between perpetration and trauma has only begun to gain critical attention. Through a hospitable encounter between a former Congolese child soldier and a French nurse aid in the Parisian banlieue, Wilfried N’Sonde’s second novel, Le Silence des esprits (2010), provides an illuminating example of the ways in which perpetration and trauma are entangled. Using Raya Morag’s groundbreaking work on perpetrator trauma, the present article examines the mediating strategies deployed by the author to represent the subjectivity of the child soldier through the bifocal prism of victim-perpetrator and to suggest healing and redemption via a sensorial experience in postcolonial France.

‘Shine Bright Like a Diamond’: music, performance and digitextuality in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (2014)

This article examines the use of music in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (Girlhood, 2014), a film depicting the experiences of a black girl and her friends growing up in the Parisian banlieue. In addition to music written for the soundtrack, the film features diegetic performances by its characters of globally popular songs, the dance routine Internet hit ‘Wop’ by J. Dash, and ‘Diamonds’ as performed by Rihanna. These performances not only occupy key narrative roles but also situate the film in relation to a widely familiar and/or accessible pop cultural landscape that encompasses an online visual imaginary or ‘digitextuality’ constructed through YouTube, Vevo and Vine videos circulating, sharing and responding to the songs and their video performances. This article examines the significance of weaving such sounds and images into the film’s fictional world, aiming to understand the implications of this for questions of gender, sexuality and race raised by the film. Taken together with the film’s wider aesthetic and musical choices, its digitextuality serves both to implicate the spectator and to frustrate a fixed view or reading of the characters. The result is a queer film that exposes the rigid lines of straight, white culture whilst also working to disorient them.

Stigmatization and the social construction of a normal identity in the Parisian banlieues

This paper explores stigma-responsive identity work amongst youths in Bondy, a town in the highly stigmatized suburbs of Paris. Within France, youths living in these banlieues are seen as an exceptional group, as deviant from ‘the norm’ that is based on the traditional French Republican values, and as a threat to the French unity and thereby to the Republic. Their ‘abnormality’ is institutionalized in their stigmatization. A common interpretation of identity construction of stigmatized people is the internalization of the attributed identity; a stigma in this case. However, both the variety of possible responses to stigma and the embeddedness of identities within a relational network of overlapping and contesting narratives suggest that identity construction within the banlieues and amongst its diverse youth population is more complex than straight internalization. In the Bondy case, reformulating the stigmatized identity by normalization proves to be the main form of stigma-responsive identity work. Rather than internalizing their stigma, the Bondy youths show an externalization of stigma: employing normalizing strategies that vary across age and gender they actively exclude the discourse of stigmatization and ‘abnormality’ from their self-identifications by redefining what the banlieue and banlieue identity means to them: normalcy. The Bondy youths do not reproduce dominant understandings of normalcy and deviance, but rework the existing norm by articulating a different understanding of ‘normalcy’ as a new reality of France inclusive of their diverse but shared banlieue identity. By researching identification processes within the banlieues, this paper illustrates that ‘deviant’ groups concentrated at the urban margins should not be oversimplified as homogeneous, and as passive victims that are subjected to a norm. To understand the lives of these urban youths, they should rather be approached as a diverse population “living together in diversity”, that can maneuver within the social structures of society.

Place

Place

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Place, Space, and Time in MC Solaar’s American Francophone

Redefining stereotypes: The banlieue and female experience in Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain

In this article I discuss the female banlieue experience in Faïza Guène’s Kiffe kiffe demain, which describes daily life in a Parisian banlieue from the perspective of a girl with an immigrant background. In contemporary French literature the banlieues are usually portrayed either as oppressive places, where the characters feel alienated, or as non-places: according to Marc Augé meaningless spaces of transit and anonymity. Banlieue representations have also often reproduced stereotypical views about women. I argue that Kiffe kiffe demain challenges popular stereotypes and portrays a more nuanced image of the banlieue and its gendered practices. In the novel, the banlieue clearly does not evoke a sense of non-place, but rather holds personal and emotional values and meanings for the characters. The perspective of a young girl, ordinary experiences of everyday life, and a sense of community play an important role in constructing a rich image of the banlieue.

Runaway Narratives: Structural Experimentation in Leïla Sebbar's <em>Shérazade</em>

Sherazade, 17 ans, brune, frisee, les yeux verts , the story of a teenage runaway who flees from her quiet life in a Parisian banlieue to a squat in the middle of France’s capital, is a text that constantly disrupts readers’ narrative expectations. This study aims to provide new lenses through which to understand Leila Sebbar’s innovative novel. Sherazade’s desire for autonomy is echoed in the novel’s structural openness, making Sherazade a rich but challenging text to read and analyze. Sebbar has created in Sherazade a narrative that disrupts conventions of cohesion and linearity, weaving together stories and anecdotes of a dizzying multitude of characters in her fragmented and multi-perspectival novel. By examining Sherazade within the context of Les Mille et une nuits and the frame narrative, and by applying Joseph Frank’s concept of spatial form to the novel, this study hopes to suggest new interpretive strategies to illuminate Sebbar’s work.

“Il y a des règles:” Gender, Surveillance, and Circulation in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles.

When Celine Sciamma’s Bande de filles premiered at the Festival de Cannes in 2014, it was simultaneously met with instant praise and heavy critique. Praised for its innovative all-black cast, but critiqued for its air of intellectual colonialism, Bande de filles quickly stirred controversy in the general media. In trying to denounce French filmmaker Celine Sciamma’s motives, major media outlets eventually reiterated racial and gender stereotypes concerning the banlieue and its younger female inhabitants. This article analyzes the visual and narrative devices used by Sciamma as she paints the portrait of a male-dominated banlieue in which her bande de filles (girl gang)’s mobility is reduced to codified itineraries. This article argues that Sciamma produces an anticolonial critique of the Parisian banlieue in revealing the various networks of control and surveillance to which her protagonists are subjected, along with the various performances (gender, mobility, capital) assumed by her characters in order to evade that surveillance.

Political practices from the sidelines: A qualitative approach to political ambivalence in contemporary working-class youth in France

As a supplement to the classic works of electoral studies, this article investigates the relationships to politics and vote of working-class youth from the Parisian banlieues on the basis of a qualitative field study conducted during the 2012 presidential campaign. In doing so it addresses the general question of why and how a population that is usually seen as disconnected from politics votes anyway. We show that disinterest in politics does not equate to dispossession. Internal divides within the working class, elliptic appropriations, personal references and everyday life all contribute to the construction of opinions that translate into electoral positions. Finally, this article constitutes a methodological contribution to electoral sociology in addition to quantitative works.

Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture by John Patrick Walsh

Reviews 203 Robin tells us, the long, high-speed walkway has been retired after many mishaps), the shopping mall and giant Monoprix, and the unusual 750-unit apartment complex where Robin herself has chosen to live.Although a devoted Parisian often to be found, like her predecessors, writing in the Select, Robin nonetheless understands the necessity of modernization and continual change if Paris is to remain a living city. While many of us can resonate to Robin’s loving analysis of the new Montparnasse, her discovery of the more recently modernized areas on either end of the Simone de Beauvoir bridge may be a step into the as-yet-unknown. Robin welcomes the transformation of the old wine chais of Bercy, where she now happily visits the Cinémathèque, and looks forward to the transformation of the rapidly modernizing area around the Bibliothèque nationale into a new Quartier latin. Moving outward, Robin undertakes a study of the Parisian banlieue—a term best used in the plural, since the regions beyond the périphérique range from immigrant ghettos in the north to the impersonal commuter suburbs of the west, well described by Annie Ernaux. Robin explores the proposals to integrate and connect the various regions beyond the current urban boundaries in order to create a“Grand Paris”:“Paris-Métropole ou Paris-Mégapole, cela voudra simplement dire qu’on pourra s’identifier à l’ensemble de ses paysages, que la ville métamorphosée continuera à nous faire rêver” (325). Dartmouth University (NH) Mary Jean Green Walsh, John Patrick. Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-253-00627. Pp. 206. $75. This analytical study, which draws from history, politics, culture, and literature, focuses new light on two of the most influential leaders in the history of the French Caribbean territories: Louverture and Césaire. The author divides his analysis into two parts: the first studies various letters, proclamations, and reports written by Toussaint during the beginning of the Haitian revolution, and the second is devoted to the literary and political writings Césaire produced during the departmentalization of the French Caribbean colonies.Walsh’s introduction depicts the 2009 general strike in Guadeloupe when protesters demanded an end to the colonial structure of the relationship between the overseas departments and metropolitan France. The “push and pull” between autonomy and assimilation, which has gone on between metropolitan France and the Caribbean regions since the nineteenth-century rebellion in Saint-Domingue, serves as the basis of Walsh’s book. His comparison of Toussaint and Césaire’s writings reveals how both men fought the forces of French colonialism and slavery while also taking compromising positions. Walsh draws parallels between the writers’demands for freedom while remaining part of France, giving rise to the expression , “free and French.” Readers will not find here a history of Haiti and the French Caribbean. Instead, they will discover detailed analyses of a variety of texts written approximately 150 years apart by the two leaders, along with a review of earlier scholarship and theoretical considerations. Each of the two parts of the book is focused on key works of Toussaint and Césaire. In the chapters on Toussaint,Walsh conducts close readingsof two,oftenmisunderstood,documents—the1801ConstitutionandToussaint’s Mémoire. For Walsh, these writings are multi-layered narratives that reveal contradictions between the ideals of universal freedom and re-emerging policies on slavery. The chapters on Césaire contain studies of earlier critical works about Haiti followed by close analyses of Césaire’s historical essay,Toussaint Louverture: la révolution française et le problème colonial, and his Tragédie du roi Christophe. In both parts of the book, Walsh grounds his analyses in sufficient historical background so that the reader can better understand the context of the writings. An important unifying element that Walsh explores throughout is a metaphor of the family romance that he identifies in Toussaint’s political writings. This trope, which Walsh connects to a 1798 letter Toussaint addressed to his sons, is representative of Toussaint’s relationship between the French government and the people...

The Gangster in The Devil Finds Work as a Template for Reading the Parisian Banlieues

This article argues the prescience of James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work , a memoir of Baldwin’s resistances and recognitions of racial codes and their intentions in the cinema. The article traces the ways in which Baldwin’s memoir successfully articulates the tensions between screen space and narrative space in terms of racial messages for selected films. Baldwin’s critique of Fritz Lang’s film You Only Live Once is used in this article to explore racial bias in national cinema industries and the impact of such bias on the construction of collective ethnic spectatorships. Finally, this article posits that the methods used in The Devil Finds Work make it a fitting template for studying the changing trends in post-2005 Parisian banlieues audiences.

Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968

The great film director Jean-Luc Godard once claimed that cinema was a kind of ‘oracle’ that anticipated grand currents of social and cultural change. This article examines films depicting the Parisian banlieues during the period 1958–68, a phase that coincided with the construction of mass housing developments in these areas. Beginning with Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), this article will chart the parallel evolutions of urban thinking and onscreen representations of the banlieues through Denys de La Patellière's Rue des Prairies (1959), Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967), and Tati's Playtime (1967). These films, it will be argued, were demonstrative of the predictive powers that Godard saw cinema as possessing, as they anticipated many of the critiques of mass housing that later emerged centring on the loss of ‘traditional’ communities, social alienation and consumerism. Yet, while banlieue cinema has often been seen as merely reflecting degradation and social ills, this article will argue that films also included ‘positive’ narratives centring on notions of nostalgia.

Learning from urban revolt

This paper brings into conversation two texts that were written 40 years apart—Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and The Coming Insurrection in 2007—and yet share great lines of continuity. Both texts are situated within their economic, cultural and political conjunctures in order to ground their theoretical contributions. The paper emphasizes the important influence that urban rebellions in Watts and the Parisian banlieues had upon both texts, and in so doing, highlights the over-looked debt these theoretical projects owe to marginalized and racialized populations in struggle. Henri Lefebvre's theory of autogestion is developed as a mediator between the two books, and as a way to engage their theories through the eyes of a more obviously spatial and Marxist thinker. The argument expands upon the spatial perspective central to both texts, while highlighting the urban implications of both their conjunctural analyses of capitalism and the territorial nature of the adequate forms of resistance that Debord and The Invisible Committee propose in the form of workers' councils and metropolitan communes. These two works provide a foundation for a heretical Marxist tradition that both remains loyal to something we can continue to call Marxism, even as it departs from and extends this tradition in new and exciting directions by way of what Debord calls detournement. The paper concludes with an examination of Frantz Fanon's writings on spontaneity and the relevance of the discussion for contemporary political praxis.

French secularism as a ‘guarantor’ of women's rights? Muslim women and gender politics in a Parisian banlieue

This paper considers contemporary discourse in France that positions secularism (laïcité) as a guarantor of Muslim women's rights. In the first section I sketch a socio-historical genealogy of this discourse focusing on key shifts in its articulation. I suggest that the current identification between secularism and Muslim women's rights has its main expressions in recent public policy commissions and, as an example on the ground, in the positions taken by France's largest feminist organisation, Femmes Solidaires. Informed by one another, these commissions and this organisation (a) conceptualise Islam as overtly political and patriarchal and (b) define secularism as the primary way to ‘liberate’ Muslim women. The second section examines the impact of this discourse on Muslim communities in Petit Nanterre, a Parisian suburb where I conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork. Significantly, Muslim women in this suburb are uninterested in headscarf-related debates on secularism and more vividly engaged in the 2005 Pork Affair, a locally oriented controversy in a public school. I conclude that the religious concerns of the Muslim women positioned at the centre of the secular debate are expressed in certain forms of activism, efforts ignored by commissions and women's advocacy groups.