Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation

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Indiana University Press, Oct 1, 2004 - Social Science - 304 pages

Algerian migration to France began at the end of the 19th century, but in recent years France's Algerian community has been the focus of a shifting public debate encompassing issues of unemployment, multiculturalism, Islam, and terrorism. In this finely crafted historical and anthropological study, Paul A. Silverstein examines a wide range of social and cultural forms -- from immigration policy, colonial governance, and urban planning to corporate advertising, sports, literary narratives, and songs -- for what they reveal about postcolonial Algerian subjectivities. Investigating the connection between anti-immigrant racism and the rise of Islamist and Berberist ideologies among the "second generation" ("Beurs"), he argues that the appropriation of these cultural-political projects by Algerians in France represents a critique of notions of European or Mediterranean unity and elucidates the mechanisms by which the Algerian civil war has been transferred onto French soil.

 

Contents

IV
17
V
35
VI
76
VII
121
VIII
151
IX
184
X
213
XI
237
XII
247
XIII
255
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Page 24 - Work performed in the receiving society is purely instrumental: a means to gather income, income that can be taken back to his or her home community and used to fulfill or enhance his or her role within that social structure. From the perspective of the immigrant, work is essentially asocial
Page 31 - ... supranational form taken by economic integration. Third, the tremendous influx of immigration from the poor regions of the East and South with which Europe will be increasingly confronted in the coming years lend the problem of asylum seekers a new significance and urgency. This process exacerbates the conflict between the universalistic principles of constitutional democracies on the one hand and the particularistic claims of communities to preserve the integrity of their habitual ways of life...

About the author (2004)

Paul A. Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Reed College.

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