Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (New Anthropologies of Europe)

302 Pages·2004·10.61 MB·English

by  Paul A. Silverstein PhD

Preface and Acknowledgments i
Algeria in France
ii Preface and Acknowledgments
New Anthropologies of Europe
Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Michael Herzfeld, editors
Preface and Acknowledgments iii
Algeria in
France
Transpolitics, Race, and Nation
Paul A. Silverstein
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
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© 2004 by Paul A. Silverstein
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silverstein, Paul A., date
Algeria in France : transpolitics, race, and nation / Paul A.
Silverstein.
p. cm. — (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34451-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN
0-253-21712-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Algerians—France—History. 2. Algerians—
France—Attitudes. 3. Algerians—France—Ethnic identity.
4. Algerians—France—Cultural assimilation. 5. Algeri-
ans—France—Social conditions. 6. Algerians—France—
Economic conditions. 7. France—Emigration and
immigration—History. 8. Algeria—Emigration and
immigration—History. 9. Immigrants—Cultural assimila-
tion—France. 10. Islam—France. I. Title. II. Series.
DC34.5.A4S58 2004
944'.00492765—dc22
2004002655
1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
In loving memory of my father

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii
Introduction 1
1 Immigration Politics in the New Europe 17
2 Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity 35
3 Spatializing Practices: Migration, Domesticity, Urban Planning 76
4 Islam, Bodily Practice, and Social Reproduction 121
5 The Generation of Generations: Beur Identity and Political Agency 151
6 Beur Writing and Historical Consciousness 184
7 Transnational Social Formations in the New Europe 213
Conclusion 237
Notes 247
Bibliography 255
Index 277

Preface and Acknowledgments
The paradigmatic narrative of entry into a field site follows that
of Bronislaw Malinowski (1922: 4): “Imagine yourself suddenly set down
surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native
village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of
sight.” While it is tempting to translate this scene to the not-so-remote loca-
tion of an Algerian neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, to do so would
belie the realities of conducting urban anthropological fieldwork in the New
Europe of the 1990s. Indeed, my own story of arrival began well before the
actual research project when, as a young college student, I spent a summer
as a cabana boy on a French beach along the English Channel resort city of
Deauville. Often referred to as the “21st arrondissement of Paris” (Paris
proper has twenty districts), Deauville attracts a mixed company of vaca-
tioners during its summer peak season, with bourgeois Parisians and Lon-
doners who own property in the area rubbing shoulders with the more di-
verse weekend crowd escaping the heat of France’s landlocked capital. The
two groups regard each other with a certain amount of disdain, and as an
employee of the beach, I often found myself caught in the middle of their
often racialized disputes.
One glorious Saturday morning in August, as the beach was filling up
to capacity, one of the beach’s regulars, Madame Rosenzweig, an older Pa-
risian Jewish woman who grew up in colonial Algeria, approached me with
a somewhat unusual request. While she always asked to be given a parasol
where she could be left tranquille—by which we were to understand distant
from Arab or African vacationers—on this day her demands were more
emphatic, in no small part in reaction to the previous day’s faux pas of a
new beach employee who had parked a large, dark-skinned family next to
her. “I’m not a racist,” she explained. “But those people make lots of noise
and cook strong foods. In any case, you’re from America so you under-
stand. They are the racist ones, not us.” I was particularly struck by the
seeming disconnect between her words and her personal trajectory of mi-
gration. Her words continued to resonate several years later as I began for-