Search

Begin New Search Content Type Journal Article

11041. Des quartiers sans voix: Sur le divorce entre la Gauche et les enfants d'immigrés

Author:
Olivier Masclet
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article examines why the activism of the children of North African immigrants has not been noticed or recognized by elected officials of the Communist Party. Through historical and ethnographic study of a Communist municipality in the greater Paris region, the article first demonstrates that this militancy, far from being a new thing, is inscribed in the traditional forms of the militancy associated with the "banlieues rouges." In order to understand the urban activists' invisibility in politics, the author analyzes the negative representations of the group from which they come and the tensions between North African immigrants and local officials of the Left, tensions linked to urban renewal in the industrial suburbs. The detour through the history of the "red suburbs" thus reveals the structure of the tense relations between the Left and the housing projects, which seem to be disowned not only economically but also politically.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
North Africa

11042. The Other French Exception: Virtuous Racism and the War of the Sexes in Postcolonial France

Author:
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Twentieth-century France invented for itself an "exception" that successfully preserved the French culture industry. Postcolonial France is experiencing another "French exception" that renders a "virtuous racism" commonplace and legitimates the discrimination that expresses this racism by identifying the undesirable "new French" as scapegoat figures. Four gender-specific stereotypes strengthen the belief that there is a form of sexism exclusive to the segregated neighborhoods of the suburbs that are inhabited primarily by French people of immigrant and colonial descent. Associated with the central figure of the garçon arabe are the beurette, the veiled Muslim French woman, and the secular Muslim. The article argues that the model of abstract, universalist France has become one of a fundamentalist republicanism that plays diverse expressions of otherness and singular identities off of one another in order to preserve a soft regime of oppression.
Political Geography:
France

11043. Y a-t-il un « problème des quartiers sensibles »? Retour sur une catégorie d'action publique

Author:
Sylvie Tissot
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The November 2005 riots in France brought new attention to debates over the situation of underprivileged areas. Rather than analyzing what happened in these areas, this article examines how this social problem was constructed and publicized and has since become an object of public policy since the end of the 1980s. The political focus on underprivileged areas was not primarily or only an effect of increasing concrete problems, like unemployment, poverty, or juvenile delinquency. Instead, it resulted from and contributed to a fundamental restructuring of the French welfare state, by authorizing a recentering of public action on specific urban spaces––rather than across the nation–– and on social ties, rather than economic reality. This constructivist study seeks to understand why politicians, experts, or civil servants have associated the question of "underprivileged areas" with certain problems (like lack of communication and the weakening of social ties) while ignoring others (such as ethnic discrimination).
Political Geography:
France

11044. "Maintaining the Class": Teachers in the New High Schools of the Banlieues

Author:
Frédéric Viguier
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Over the past twenty years, a silent revolution brought 70 percent of a generation to the baccalauréat level (up from 33 percent in 1986), without ensuring students corresponding job opportunities. Sociologists have analyzed the impact of this educational democratization, which sought to solve the economic crisis by adapting the younger members of the French workforce to the new economy of services: it has paradoxically accentuated the stigmatization of youths from working-class and immigrant families who live in suburban housing projects. Therefore, high school teachers have had to deal with students' profound disillusionment with education. Moreover, teachers have been central to all of the recent political controversies in France regarding cultural difference. While there are books, pamphlets, and memoirs reflecting their experiences, there is no research exploring the discrepancy between high school teachers' expectations and those of their predecessors. This article explores this discrepancy and its contribution to the social and political construction of the "problème des banlieues."
Political Geography:
France

11045. Myths and Realities in the 2006 "Events"

Author:
George Ross
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The "events" around Dominique de Villepin's abortive promotion of the CPE in spring 2006 were seen by many as a great popular victory in the defense of France's social model and another, albeit modest, version of May 1968. Others, particularly Anglophone neoliberals, saw them as proof that the French were incapable of reform. Both conclusions were wrong. The events and defeat of the CPE may have been enjoyable for many involved, but they resolved none of France's underlying and debilitating economic problems. On the other hand, the neoliberal view that the French are averse to real social policy reform is incorrect. Instead, the unresolved dilemmas surrounding the CPE episode are in large part the product of a particular strategy of reform, the "social management of unemployment," that has nourished and intensified dangerous–– unavowed––social dualism in France. The present problem, illustrated indirectly by the events, is that political actors and social partners are unable to cooperate sufficiently to confront this dualism.
Topic:
Reform
Political Geography:
France

11046. Le CPE est mort––et maintenant?

Author:
Erhard Friedberg
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The failure of the CPE does not prove the impossibility of reform in France, but rather illustrates political actors' incompetence when it comes to developing and leading reform efforts. The article argues the foregoing thesis by reviewing different moments when competence in these matters would have been able to make a difference. It then examines the collateral damage of this aborted reform with regard to the adminstration's capacity to act and with regard to the French political landscape from now until the 2007 presidential elections.
Topic:
Reform
Political Geography:
France

11047. The Musée du Quai Branly: Art? Artifact? Spectacle!

Author:
Herman Lebovics
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Designed by Jean Nouvel, the Musée du Quai Branly, the just-opened museum of African, Amerindian, Pacific, and Asian cultures, covers a city block on the Left Bank of Paris's museum row. Both in landscaping and internal layout, Nouvel wished to frame the building within his understanding of the cultures on display inside, but also within its setting in the metropolitan capital. Objects collected in the imperial age now are displayed in what French officials see as the postcolonial era. But how were the pieces on display to be shown: as works of art or well-made cultural artifacts? Nouvel took the lead in evoking a vision of the cultures on display that is closer to Joseph Conrad's dark tales than to enlightened contemporary scholarship and museology on these societies. Neither an art nor an ethnography museum, the Musée du Quai Branly is a spectacle about the societies of the global South.
Political Geography:
Africa, Paris, and Asia

11048. Review Essay -- NOVEMBRE 2005: sous les émeutes urbaines, la politique

Author:
Valérie Sala Pala
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Tout commence le 27 octobre 2005, à Clichy-sous-Bois, petite commune de la région parisienne. Deux adolescents de parents immigrés, se pensant poursuivis par la police, se réfugient dans un transformateur EDF et y trouvent la mort. Ce drame marque le point de départ d'une vague d'émeutes urbaines d'une ampleur et d'une durée exceptionnelles, même au regard des soulèvements les plus emblématiques dans les « quartiers » depuis les années 1980 (« été chaud » de 1981 dans les Minguettes, dans l'Est lyonnais, émeutes de 1990-91 dans les banlieues de Lyon et Paris). Nées le jour même à Clichy-sous-Bois, ces émeutes s'étendent rapidement à la banlieue parisienne puis à de nombreuses villes de province et durent trois semaines. La proclamation, le 8 novembre, de l'état d'urgence— mesure à haute teneur symbolique, puisqu'elle s'appuie sur une loi votée durant la Guerre d'Algérie et utilisée une seule fois depuis cette époque (en 1985, en Nouvelle- Calédonie)—ajouta au caractère exceptionnel de ces événements qui amenèrent des observateurs du monde entier à s'interroger sur la crise du « modèle français », jusqu'à soulever dans certains cas, de façon effarante, la perspective d'une « guerre civile ».

11049. Review Essay -- Of Tour Buses And Politics: American Tourists in France in the Twentieth Century

Author:
Nancy L. Green
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Tourists take travel seriously (up at 6 a.m., visiting several monuments a day, followed by Paree-by-night). So should historians. Not only because it is one of the world's major industries, but because tourism is at the crossroads of culture and consumption, pleasure and politics. Harvey Levenstein, a cultural historian (first of food, more recently of tourism), and Christopher Endy, a diplomatic historian, have published two very complementary, stimulating, and, gee, fun, books on cross-cultural encounters of a particular type.
Political Geography:
America and France

11050. The Dogma of Japanese Insignificance: The Academic Discourse on North Korea Policy Coordination

Author:
Linus Hagström
Publication Date:
09-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Pacific Affairs
Institution:
University of British Columbia
Abstract:
The message of Japanese insignificance in international affairs can be found in many different literatures, including that on the formation of policy towards North Korea in the 1990s and 2000s, in particular in regard to the recurring nuclear crisis. Books and articles on the topic either exclude Japanese foreign policy altogether or tend to emphasize the predominant role, or power, of the United States. Japanese foreign policy, it is implied, is under US control. The aim of this article is to question that dominant view, (1) by demonstrating that there is an undercurrent of statements in the same literature which could well be interpreted as implying Tokyo's exercising of political, economic and perhaps even military power over Washington; (2) by clarifying the conceptual bias upon which the predominant view rests; and (3) by suggesting how another understanding of power is more coherent with the first two points, but at the same time renders the whole question of power in North Korea policy coordination practically a quagmire. By doing so, this article deconstructs the more uniform understanding of power in that discourse and reveals a patchwork of inconsistencies, differences and questions.
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, Washington, North Korea, and Tokyo