[Bilimsel Haber] Book review: Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Paul Silverstein. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. xi + 284
pp. Bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-253-34451-5; $22.95
(paper), ISBN 0-253-21712-1.
*
Reviewed by:* Jennifer Sessions, Department of History, University of Iowa.
*Published by:* H-Africa <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Eafrica/>
(December, 2006)



Is Paris Burning?

If, in 1988, historian Gérard Noiriel could open his magisterial study
of immigration in modern France with the observation that immigration
was a "non-lieu de mémoire" (non-site of memory) in French history, the
same can no longer be said today.[1] With the growth of the xenophobic
far-right Front National party and the rise of immigration as a
political issue in France over the last two decades, immigration,
especially from the former French colonial empire, has captured the
attention of scholars across the human and social sciences. The central
theme of much of this scholarship has been the tension between the
secular universalism of French republican ideology and the
ethno-religious particularity of colonial and postcolonial immigrants,
especially Muslims from former French colonies in the Maghreb.[2] Paul
Silverstein's new study of Algerian immigrant subjectivities in
contemporary France shares this preoccupation.

Drawing on a wide range of printed materials and ethnographic fieldwork
carried out in and around Paris in the mid-1990s, Silverstein sets out
to explore how Franco-Algerian identities have been constructed,
contested, and experienced from the French conquest of Algeria in the
mid-nineteenth century to the present. Whereas historians of
postcolonial immigration in France have primarily focused on cultural
racism and exclusionary citizenship policies, the anthropologist
Silverstein is interested in immigration not only as an artifact of
French colonialism, but also as a window onto broader social-scientific
questions about the relationship between the local and the global in the
postcolonial era. In answering these questions, he seeks to intervene in
a series of anthropological debates enumerated in the introduction:
coloniality and postcoloniality, nation and infranation, transnational
social formations, and urban anthropology.

"Transpolitics" is the term that Silverstein uses to describe the ways
in which questions of postcolonial immigration simultaneously cross
national boundaries and transcend formal state and political
institutions. Hence the title, Algeria in France, which encapsulates the
book's argument that Algerian immigrants' subjectivities are forged
through "the processes of collusion and contention, of appropriation and
transformation, that link Algeria and France--Algerians and
Franco-Algerians" across the Mediterranean (p. 7). This thesis departs
in subtle but important ways from earlier sociological work on the
"divided lives" of immigrants in France, and from the concepts of
"hybridity," "creolization," and "métissage" that have gained currency
in postcolonial studies over the last decade.[3] Unlike postcolonial
theorists and scholars, who see the creative mixing of cultures as
evidence of resistance by the colonized and postcolonial non-West
against hegemonic Western culture, Silverstein defines "transpolitics"
instead as a tactical tacking back and forth between France and Algeria
on the part of Franco-Algerians. He sees the relationship between the
French nation and Algerian immigrants, between France and Algeria, not
as an example of cultural hybridization, but as a dialectical
relationship through which the two countries form a single space in
which Franco-Algerians construct their social, cultural and political
identities.

The author, like many of the postcolonial globalization theorists he
cites, may overestimate the uniqueness of the postcolonial moment's
challenges to the nation-state, and his use of "transpolitics" sometimes
risks reifying the very colonial binaries he claims to challenge.[4] But
in grafting globalization theory's interest in the "transnational" with
cultural studies' search for the political in forms like rap music,
graffiti, and sports, "transpolitics" offers a dynamic, alternative to
the vision of global "flows" of people, ideas, and goods celebrated by
postcolonial critics like Arjun Appadurai.[5]

Eschewing the ethnographer's community study format, Silverstein has
organized his book into thematic chapters which highlight citizenship,
ethnicity, locality, religion, and generation as the key categories of
Franco-Algerian identity. The first three chapters survey citizenship
law in France since the French Revolution, colonial ethnographers'
invention of "Berber" or "Kabyle" ethnicity in the nineteenth century,
and the organization of domestic and urban space in Algeria and Paris
from the 1850s to the present. Although much of this ground is well
explored, and despite a certain collapsing of temporal distinctions
between colonial and postcolonial discourses, these chapters highlight
important continuities and parallels between the French state's
management of racial difference in the Algerian colony and its treatment
of subnational minorities at home.[6]

It is in the second half of the book that the author begins to draw more
heavily on the voices of his Franco-Algerian informants in order to
explore the cultural practices implied in the concept of transpolitics.
Chapter 4's consideration of sports as a form of religious bodily
practice yields a fascinating discussion of the convergence of global
capitalism, radical Islam, and gender in personal and public attitudes
towards the multiracial national football team captained by the
Franco-Algerian star, Zinédine Zidane, in the 1990s. Those who followed
news reports of the rioting in French suburban housing projects in
November 2005 and of the Zidane-led team's fairytale dance into the
final game of the 2006 World Cup tournament will be struck by the
ongoing pertinence of the connections Silverstein draws here.

Chapters 5 and 6 trace important shifts between the cultural practices
and political attitudes of second- and third-generation
Franco-Algerians. Drawing on interviews with Berber cultural activists
and examples of Franco-Algerian literature, Silverstein directs
well-deserved attention to the differences between the second, Beur
generation's struggles with cultural assimilation and their younger
brothers' turn away from the national and towards the ultra-local
("crews" based in individual housing projects) and the transnational
(Berber and Islamic social movements). The final chapter sketches
intriguing links between Franco-Algerian ethnic and religious movements,
and efforts by other cultural minorities in France to gain from the
European Union recognition that is denied them by the French state.

Throughout, the author raises intriguing questions about the ways that
Franco-Algerians relate to both France and Algeria. The embrace of
Franco-Algeria football players in youth culture and the appropriation
of supranational institutions by subnational groups explored in the last
chapter are both fascinating examples of the sorts of challenges to the
nation-state that the book seeks to highlight. The book's focus on big
themes, however, often leaves the reader wishing for more attention to
the author's empirical data. The kind of close reading of lyrics and
performances that made Silverstein's earlier work on French rap so
compelling, for example, is largely missing here.[7] In the first half
of the book, the emphasis on interpretation may leave readers unfamiliar
with the histories of France and Algeria in the dark about basic
elements of the historical narrative. Similarly, brief glimpses in the
last chapter of the alliances forged by Berber cultural associations
with Catalan, Breton, and Occitan groups only hint at a rich body of
research that an old-fashioned community study might have more
effectively exploited.

The book's conclusion, that efforts by the French state to efface
Algerians' ethnic, racial and religious differences ultimately reinforce
them, that "the ongoing process of French national construction is
predicated as much on the production as on the erasure of infranational
differences" (p. 10), is indicative of its ultimately Franco-centric
focus. This is, perhaps, not surprising--Algeria in France is, after
all, one of the first entries in Indiana University Press's new "New
Anthropologies of Europe" series--but it is disappointing in light of
the promise held out by the framing concept of "transpolitics." Algeria
itself figures in Silverstein's analysis primarily as an absence, a
referent whose meaning is defined from within French politics and
society. Algeria's place in immigrant subjectivities is further obscured
by the author's tendency to conflate the Berber cultural associations he
studied with Algerian immigrants as a whole, and to discuss the
Franco-Algerian experience in isolation from that of other immigrant
groups, whether from different former French colonies or (as is
increasingly the case) from Central and Eastern Europe. Even so, with
the recent opening of Algeria to foreign researchers, Silverstein's work
raises critical new questions for scholars not just of colonial France,
but of the Maghreb as well. For a field that has tended to highlight
migration primarily as a tactical response to the dislocations of French
colonial rule, this is an important call that diaspora should become as
important a theme in North African history as it has been in that of
sub-Saharan Africa.[8]

Notes

[1]. Le Creuset français: histoire de l'immigration XIXe-XXe siècles
(Paris: Seuil, 1988), 14.

[2]. Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and
Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992); Alec Hargreaves,
Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London:
Routledge, 1995); David Beriss, Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean
Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (Boulder and Oxford: Westview
Press, 2004); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude
and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005).

[3]. Albert Nicollet, Femmes d'Afrique noire en France: la vie partagée
(Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992); Homi Babha, The Location of Culture (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994); Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity:
Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992); Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole
Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,
Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

[4]. Frederick Cooper is only the most recent historian to point out not
only that reports of the nation-state's demise have been vastly
exaggerated, but that its hegemonic power, even at the height of
Europe's nationalist, imperialist nineteenth-century, has similarly been
overestimated. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), esp. chapters 4-5.

[5]. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

[6]. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Patricia Lorcin,
Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial
Algeria (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995); Zeynep Celik, Urban Forms and
Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997); Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and
Racism: Algerians in France, 1900-62 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997),
esp. chapter 5; Tyler Stovall, "From Red Belt to Black Belt: Race,
Class, and Urban Marginality in Twentieth-Century Paris," in The Color
of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler
Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

[7]. "'Why Are We Waiting to Start the Fire?': French Gangsta Rap and
the Critique of State Capitalism," in Alain-Philippe Durand, Black,
blanc, beur: Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture in the Francophone World
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 45-67.

[8]. On the increasing accessibility of Algeria to researchers, see
Benjamin Brower, review of Nabila Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine:
monuments, musées et politique coloniale en Algérie (1830-1930),
H-France Review 6, no. 67 (June 2006),
http://www.h-france.net/vol6reviews/brower.html; Julia Clancy-Smith,
Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters
(Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994); Kamel Kateb and Benjamin Stora, Européens, 'indigènes' et
juifs en Algérie (1830-1962) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2001).



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Citation: Jennifer Sessions. "Review of Paul Silverstein, Algeria in
France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation," H-Africa, H-Net Reviews,
December, 2006. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=47201169497827.