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51. 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

52. 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

53. "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

54. 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

55. 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

56. 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

57. 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 ».

58. 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

59. La Représentation Du Culte Musulman En France

Author:
Alain Boyer
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Les musulmans se sont installés en France à cause et à la suite des deux guerres mondiales, essentiellement en provenance des pays sous domination française, à la fois comme recrues dans les armées françaises et comme force de travail. Ils ont ensuite participé à la reconstruction et au développement du pays, comme immigration de main d'oeuvre, durant les Trente Glorieuses. Ces flux migratoires se sont poursuivis, après la décolonisation et les indépendances, dans les années 1960. S'ils ont été freinés par l'arrêt de l'immigration en 1973, ils n'en ont pas pour autant totalement cessé, puisque l'on considère que sont entrés, depuis lors, en France, chaque année, environ 100 000 immigrés d'origines diverses. Bien plus, l'arrêt de l'immigration, en rendant très difficile la perspective d'un éventuel retour en France, et le regroupement familial ont concouru à l'installation durable en France de familles immigrées cherchant plus ou moins consciemment à s'intégrer dans la société française. Peu à peu se sont constituées des communautés musulmanes qui ont essayé de négocier, surtout pour obtenir des avantages individuels plus que collectifs, les modalités de leur intégration. Les populations immigrées ont souvent été reléguées dans les zones d'urbanisation récente, l'habitat social et les banlieues des grandes villes et ont été cantonnées, pour la première, et souvent pour la deuxième génération, dans des métiers peu qualifiés directement menacés par le chômage. Les immigrés et leurs enfants appelés à devenir français, dès lors qu'ils étaient nés en France, ont été victimes d'inégalités et d'exclusions par l'école, le travail et le logement.
Topic:
Development and Immigration
Political Geography:
France and West Africa

60. Les Fondements Idéologiques Et Les Choix De La Consultation

Author:
Alain Billon
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Pour ce qui concerne la problématique de l'islam en France, le changement le plus caractéristique de l'alternance de 1997 (qui, à la suite de la dissolution de l'Assemblée nationale, amène la "gauche plurielle" de Lionel Jospin au gouvernement et Jean-Pierre Chevènement au ministère de l'Intérieur) n'est peut-être pas tant un changement idéologique, qu'un changement d'état d'esprit par rapport au pessimisme et, par voie de conséquence, au non-interventionnisme qui avait caractérisé le passage de Jean-louis Debré place Beauvau. C'est un changement qui opère donc un retour au volontarisme qui s'était peu à peu imposé à la fin des années quatre-vingt, notamment avec la création du Conseil de réflexion sur l'islam en France (CORIF) par Pierre Joxe, et qui avait continué avec ses deux successeurs socialistes, puis sous une autre forme, avec Charles Pasqua, après l'alternance de 1993.
Topic:
Islam
Political Geography:
France