Wednesday, June 26, 2013
D1.18A (Oudemanhuispoort)
In this paper, based on 45 interviews with adult children of North African immigrants in the Paris metropolitan area, I focus on those individuals who despite their educational and professional successes remain excluded from mainstream French society. Despite an official “masking” of difference, the state has an increasingly narrow definition of what it means to be “French,” a definition which often includes or excludes particular populations within French society. Second-generation North African immigrants are one such population. Despite being born in France, second-generation North African immigrants are often perceived as foreigners and therefore have their “Frenchness” contested. While some children of North African immigrants, or the North African second generation as I will refer to them, have experienced upward mobility vis-à-vis their immigrant parents, this French-born population often finds that they cannot escape their assigned otherness. And yet while their middle-class status might suggest a triumph of France’s Republican ideology that downplays differences among her citizens, this population’s continued feelings of exclusion and discrimination belie this straightforward conclusion. I argue that this population is denied a cultural citizenship, one which would actually allow their claim to French national identity to be accepted by others. Considering cultural citizenship provides a different understanding of the socio-cultural realities of being a minority in France and allows for a more nuanced understanding of how citizenship operates in everyday life. This research has implications for how race and ethnicity remain significant in French society and how France’s minorities remain linked to minority populations worldwide.
