‘Beyond Ethnicity’ or a Return to Type? Bande de filles/Girlhood and the Politics of Blackness in Contemporary French Cinema

This chapter aims to promote an analysis of black female subjectivity as a means of considering the potential difficulties and contradictions that emerge in reading Bande de filles (Sciamma, 2014) as an example of post-migratory cinema. Drawing on Anthias’ (1998) notion of diasporic identity moving ‘beyond ethnicity’ as both lived experience and mediated reality through cinematic representation, the chapter will question how ethnic origins as a marker of difference are displaced by gender and, to a lesser extent, class in Bande de filles. Finally, the chapter will explore whether the proposed move ‘beyond ethnicity’ simply masks the same problems of stereotyping and marginalization that have traditionally been found in French cinema when black actors appear on the screen. Such questions lead to a related discussion of agency for ‘post-migratory’ artists and performers on both sides of the camera and the production of French ‘national’ identity in contemporary French cinema.

Redefining Frenchness through Urban Music and Literature: The Case of Rapper-Writers Abd Al Malik and Disiz

An essential element of urban culture is rap, which has grown progressively in importance to and for post-migratory postcolonial minorities since the mid-1980s. One interesting development in the last decade is the emergence of a group of rapper-writers, including Abd Al Malik or Disiz, who use various platforms to offer a counter-narrative to dominant discourse on the banlieues. Both artists, who draw on similar influences, move across and fuse genres to redefine Frenchness in the 21st century and to imagine what it is to be an artist in the instance of what Marie-Claude Smouts has called ‘the postcolonial situation’.

Banlieue Writers: the Struggle for Literary Recognition Through Collective Mobilization

This chapter focuses on processes of social categorization used in the French literary field to define authors born in France to postcolonial immigrant parents. In 2007, the collective 'Qui fait la France?' released a volume of short stories called Chroniques d’une société annoncée, prefaced by its manifesto that was also released to the popular press. Composed of authors self-identifying as having 'mixed identities', the collective aimed through the publication of their manifesto and short stories to transform French literature through narrating and recognizing the unique histories, suffering, and aspirations of ethnically diverse populations. Meanwhile, its reception demonstrated how judgments of artistic value for cultural production by French artists of postcolonial immigrant heritage reveal problems tied to the conditions, modalities, and process of categorizing literary production. Through a sociological reconstruction of the formal and subjective meanings that each individual (artist, journalist, publisher, producer, etc.) ascribes to his/her actions, this chapter exposes the various logics through which artistic labelling based on social criteria establishes hierarchies and categories that structure the French literary field.

Afterword A Long Road To Travel

In assessing the extent to which creative works by post-migratory artists are shaped by the legacy of the colonial era in present-day France, we delineate a spectrum stretching between two poles – on the one hand, postcolonial entrenchment, and on the other, post/colonial detachment – between which lie a range of more nuanced and multi-polar positions. Politically hard-edged rappers typify the more entrenched end of the spectrum, positioning themselves in conflict with the state and appealing to audiences in which post-colonial minorities are to the fore. More consensual positions, suggesting that France is moving or has moved beyond the polarized divisions of the colonial era, tend to characterize the work of artists such as professional dancers benefiting from public funding and others, such as the filmmaker and actor Dany Boon, whose minority ethnic origins have been largely effaced in productions that have achieved high-profile box office successes among broadly based audiences. The works of many other post-migratory artists are positioned between and in some respects disjunct from these poles, tracing multi-polar trajectories in which Anglophone spaces often displace the binary logic of (post-)colonialism. At the same, many of these artists complain that, no matter how hard they may try to leave behind divisions inherited from the colonial past, they remain in many ways framed by them in majority ethnic eyes, suggesting that a long journey still lies ahead on the road from a neo-colonial to a post/colonial France.

Vietnam by Removes: Storytelling and Postmemory in Minh Tran Huy

Minh Tran Huy participates in the production of a second-generation Vietnamese French literature that departs from the first-generation’s autobiographical immigrant narrative. In two novels, La Princesse et le pêcheur [The Princess and the Fisherman] (2007) and Voyageur malgré lui [Travelers in Spite of Themselves] (2012), Tran Huy engages with the postmemory that interrogates war and the trauma of the French colonization of Indochina, the American military engagement during the Vietnam War and refugee displacement from Vietnam to France that parents and families experienced. Attending to Tran Huy’s position as a second-generation Vietnamese French woman writer, I argue that she (re)presents the second generation’s postmemory through the mode of storytelling. Storytelling highlights the interpersonal exchange and transmission that occurs through the spoken word between generations despite traumatic silence.

Francophone and Post-Migratory Afropeans within and beyond France Today

Alain Mabanckou, Léonora Miano, and Abdourahhman Waberi are often spoken of as forming part of an 'Afropean' generation of writers, perched between the African and European continents. However, of the six fictional works included in a 2014 volume (eds. Thomas and Hitchcott) on Francophone Afropean writers, three are penned by writers who no longer live in Africa or Europe. My chapter will investigate how such writers exist in an increasingly more cosmopolitan world which stretches beyond Europe and into North America. Then, to further mine the “Afropean” designation, I will explore the works and careers of post-migratory postcolonial minorities of African heritage, such as writers Julien Delmaire, Dembo Goumane, Thomté Ryam, Abd al Malik, Wilfred N’Sondé and Bessora, who were born and raised in France/Francophone Europe. In this way, I query the binary of Africa and Europe in the 'Afropean' designation.

Identity and ‘Difference’ in French Art: El Seed’s Calligraffiti from Street to Web

The attempts to ban the burkini on numerous beaches in the summer of 2016 highlight the extent of fears of visual signifiers of Arabo-Muslim ‘difference’ in public spaces in France. Given these anxieties, the positive reception of El Seed’s ‘calligraffiti’ – combining graffiti and Arabic calligraphy – in Paris might seem surprising. Focusing on El Seed’s work, this chapter asks how art can encourage dialogue and tolerance between cultures and communities in local – particularly Parisian – contexts and in a globalised frame. How does El Seed bring Arabic writing, a visual signifier of ‘difference’, into the public spaces of the French capital? How does he use public sites within and beyond France? How does the digital online presence of his multi-sited ephemeral work signal new means of evoking cultural identity and of interpolating diversely located spectators?

Mixed Couples in Contemporary French Cinema: Exploring New Representations of Diversity and Difference on the Big Screen

This chapter examines Rachid Djaïdani’s Rengaine [Hold Back] (2012) and Amelle Chahbi’s Amour sur place ou à emporter [Take-Away Romance] (2014), the only French feature films to date that focus on couples in which neither person is a majority-ethnic character (one is black, the other is of Maghrebi descent). Though stylistically very different, both films explore the place of and relationship between diverse minority-ethnic groups in France through the portrayal of these mixed couples. In doing so, they offer new perspectives on the treatment of mixed couples in French cinema while exposing complicated dynamics that exist between different post-migratory postcolonial minorities. Rengaine and Amour sur place ou à emporter condemn racism and discrimination that exist between members of these groups and underscore the respective filmmakers’ desire to portray different kinds of diversity than has previously been seen on the big screen.

Moving Beyond the Legacies of War in Second-Generation Harki Narratives

Despite the proliferation of memory works related to the Algerian war of independence, remembrance of the conflict has resulted, for the most part, in the coexistence of parallel, often conflicting narratives of specific constituencies such as the harkis, the pieds-noirs, and French conscripts. This chapter examines the corpus of memory works portraying the harkis, many of which were written by the sons and daughters of harkis who grew up or were born in France. In particular, it focuses on the small but growing number of texts which privilege the depiction of interactions between the different memory carriers and their descendants. Through their interweaving of intersecting stories and overlapping trajectories, these narratives give voice to a desire to move beyond the transmission of positions determined during the war and, as such, move a step closer to creating the shared memories advocated by historian Benjamin Stora.

Difference-Conscious Critical Media Engagement and the Communitarian Question

This chapter examines the critical media engagement of an activist and author (Rokhaya Diallo) and an organization (the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France [Collective Against Islamophobia in France]) that describe their work as oriented toward the cause of equality in France. Their interventions in traditional and New Media challenge stereotypes and draw attention to racial and religious discrimination. This kind of discourse about the lived experiences of racial and religious minorities in France, however, opens them up to criticism from those who believe that the French model of equality demands difference-blindness and the rejection of identity politics. The chapter suggests, however, that critical media engagement by post-migratory postcolonial minorities (PMPM) is a product of experiences and values born in France, and that while it may sometimes draw on movements and strategies used by equality activists in the United States, it remains a thoroughly French affair. Rather than a rejection of France, PMPM critical media engagement should be read as yet another chapter in the ongoing negotiation and articulation of what it means to be French.