| "Writing Paris: Transformations of Urban Geography from Haussmann to the Medina," examines social and political aspects of representations of selected parts of Paris from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of race, class, and memory, the project considers how practices of exclusion in modern France are rooted in the nation's nineteenth-century colonial enterprise and marginalization of its working class. This work draws on writings by nineteenth-century French novelists Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Emile Zola and twentieth and twenty-first century Maghrebian and French novelists Abdelkader Djemai, Mehdi Lallaoui, Leila Sebbar, Gerard Streiff, and Michel Tournier. It also considers film and music by Maghrebian and French artists Merzak Allouache, Mehdi Charef, Mathieu Kassovitz, Abdellatif Kechiche, La Tordue, and Zebda. In the category of Maghrebian writers and artists, I include those who were born in Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia and who immigrated permanently to France, and the Beur generation: those who were either born in France to immigrant parents or who were born in North Africa and immigrated to France as young children. Beginning in the 1980s the French government and media accused Maghrebian immigrant-workers and their children of causing the state's social and economic problems. Maghrebian and French writers responded by exposing the country's real conditions of racial discrimination and economic disenfranchisement and by challenging definitions of France's national identity that excluded Maghrebians. Through intergenerational viewpoints, historical research, personal narratives, and mixed genres of documentary and fiction, Maghrebian and French writers introduce ongoing challenges to official discourse in France on such topics as immigration, the Algerian War, and the events in Paris on 17 October 1961. The writers "write the nation" through a lens that highlights France's culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse make-up and resists forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, and sexuality (Bhabha 145, 155). Some of the methodological tools that inform this project include nineteenth and twentieth-century urban historical studies, post-colonial and feminist post-colonial theory, and social resistance movements. |
