Of slums and banlieues: spaciality and hopelessness in contemporary France

Abstract

From the 1983 March for equality and against racism to the 2005 urban riots in France, the African diaspora has multiplied attempts to gain some visibility in the French public sphere. These militant mobilizations happened in response to discrimination and segregation. This paper concerns itself with the relation between spatiality and distress in France during the last three decades. Building on shanty towns, slums and the banlieues, I offer an interpretation of the relation between African immigrants and their descendants on the one hand, and the French society on the other. Through a reading of Mehdi Charef’s Le thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983) and Thomté Ryam’s Banlieue noire (2006), I maintain that the management of space is an indicator of the social disqualification that afro descendants suffer from in France nowadays. It is my ultimate contention that the colonial paradigm is of paramount importance in understanding the ways in which daily life in France is a permanent thinking on the paradoxical inclusive exclusion that structures social relations.