A sociological study of the cultural choices and identity negotiation of North African women immigrants in France.

The objective of this research is to examine the effects of gender, race, and class in the lives of women of Moroccan descent on the island of Corsica, one of the 13 regions of France. Little research has been done on this group in this context, though much is written on North African immigrants in Europe in general. In Corsica, the children and grandchildren of immigrants are suspected of being not French enough or not French at all, and are also othered on the basis of culture, religion, and gender. The cultural debates in France regarding Muslim women’s desire to wear the hijab, a veil, or a burqa (all often referred to under the umbrella of “the veil”) is one of the many issues confronting Muslim migrants from North Africa. The context of Corsica is important as Corsicans themselves are a stigmatized minority group within France, a phenomenon that has not been explored in terms of French- North African interactions. Interviews were done with five participants on the subject of stereotypes and discrimination in both workplace and community settings. The interviews were analyzed with a focus on centering the lived experience of North African women immigrants and women of North African descent within an intersectional analysis of their relationship to Corsicans and other people of North African descent in France. This research will contribute to existing work done about North African women in France as well as research done about the descendants of immigrants throughout Europe.

No detailed description available for "The Modernization of North African Families in the Paris Area".

The 2005 rioting in France’s suburbs caught the world’s attention and exposed the limits of the Republic’s policies on the integration of ‘immigrant-origin’ populations. This book examines academic and public discourses about young people of North African origin in France. The resurgence of such discussions in France, focusing on sensational questions of urban unrest, Islamic fundamentalism and the challenges of increasingly assertive cultural identities, means that it is all the more necessary not to overlook the ‘ordinary’ majority of young French-North Africans. Their own preoccupations often go unnoticed in a context where issues such as violence in the banlieues and the threat of terrorism are pushed to the fore, sometimes with devastating consequences in terms of discrimination and exclusion. The book rebalances and nuances the debates about post-migrant North-African youth by drawing on extensive empirical research carried out in those suburbs of north-east Paris affected by the riots. It studies the construction of identity amongst this invisible majority and, by adopting an ethnographic approach, addresses the disjuncture between the sometimes inflammatory discourses about this population and their own experiences.

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different picture. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Jean Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of Maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.

French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward “modernization,” and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a “modern” city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral “regeneration” of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women’s negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city’s Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.