On Visibility and Invisibility for the Tamil Population of Paris, France

In the French discourse of minority identity, (in)visibility serves as a strong metaphor.  From the concept of the “visible minority” to the contentious legal and social definitions of “ostentatious displays” of religious identities, the visual recognition of difference and its management are central to understandings of—and anxieties about—France’s contemporary social landscape.  Likewise, a sense of “invisibility” is synonymous with social and economic marginalization.  In conversations with Tamil residents of Paris, as well as media representations of French Tamil communities, issues of visibility are a prevalent theme—both through a perceived sense of the “invisibility” of the Tamil community, and the simultaneous hyper-visibility of certain cultural and racialized differences.  This paper considers strategies of managing both visibility and invisibility as an important facet of the lived experience of daily life in Paris for Tamil Parisians, and the collective work of fostering Tamil identity—and social and economic success—in France.  Based on ethnographic research in Paris, this paper draws from interviews with Tamils in Paris, as well as an examination of the concentration of businesses and community organizations that form a distinctively Tamil urban neighborhood of La Chapelle. As a space where the burden of invisibility is overcome through community-based networks of commerce and sociality, La Chapelle also illustrates the limits of “visibility” as an antidote to the economic and social marginality expressed through the idiom of invisibility: namely, the stigma of “communautarisme” (communitarianism) and the percieved failure to “assimilate” to normative French standards that it connotes.