2024/09/01 by Beth Epstein · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cultural Identity and Heritage #French Historical and Cultural Studies #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
paper · doi:10.1353/anq.2024.a948153
openalex publication_date 2024/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
ABSTRACT: Regularly portrayed as sites of breakdown and disorder, the disadvantaged French suburbs lie at the center of charged debates about diversity and integration, feeding deeply felt anxieties about the diminished promise of the French republican ideal and its impending decline. The suburbs are less well known, however, for their dynamic cultural pluralism and engaged civic life, facets which belie the overdetermined portrayals of France and its "others" regularly used to uphold an invested social order. Based on return fieldwork in the city outside of Paris where, 25 years prior, I conducted research, this article considers the significant shifts in race and class dynamics that have shaped perceptions of the disadvantaged suburbs and French public life more broadly during this same 25-year period. The racial question, long anathema to the republican "difference-blind" ideal, has come more prominently into view. Hitched to an acrimonious debate about the relative merits of the republican ideal, these shifts have engaged only obliquely with the radical potential of the everyday cultural mix of the disparaged suburban neighborhoods. As these polemics take center stage, they mask other singularly important elements of the suburbs' history, from the structural transformations that have undercut opportunities for social mobility for the most vulnerable residents of these neighborhoods, to the extreme social segregation that endures within the elite institutions of the well-to-do. Most important, these polemics sideline the significance of the plurality that has come of age in these districts, minimizing its possibilities for new forms of social and political engagement, and normalizing in the process the dispirited image that defines the suburbs in the public eye.