Identities at the margins: politics of space and belongings in French postcolonial banlieues

When?

Monday 1 February 2010, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

Room 04AD00 (AD Building, ground floor) University of Surrey

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

David Garbin, Gareth Millington

David Garbin, CRONEM, University of Surrey and Gareth Millington, Roehampton University

This presentation draws on a recent research project conducted during 2008 in one of the most stigmatised French banlieues, La Courneuve, in Northern Paris. The stigmatisation (experienced, internalised or contested) is a direct consequence of a dominant 'imaginaire institué', to borrow Cornelius Castoriadis’ expression - a dominant imaginary of urban violence, ‘ethnicisation’, ‘failure of integration’, Islamic ‘radicalism’ or 'zones de non-droits' (no-go areas) supposedly located outside the Republican project/model. We will first explore the counter-narratives produced by local activists or ordinary Courneuvians, to challenge or subvert this powerful dominant imaginary. We will examine the wide range of everyday ‘tactics’ they deploy to negotiate the banlieue ‘site effect’ ('effet de lieu'), which according to Pierre Bourdieu is a process of naturalisation of uneven power relations and marginalisation through specific spatial arrangements and representations. In the second part of our talk we will focus on the politics of identities and belonging, in particular against the backdrop of recent debates on the (contested) ‘postcolonial dimension’ of citizenship in post-riot France. What value does a ‘postcolonial lens’ give us in terms of unpacking the politics of space and resistance in the symbolic context of the banlieues?