North African Women In France

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

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

Over the past four decades immigration to France from the Francophone countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) has changed in character. For much of the twentieth century, migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to France were men seeking work, who frequently undertook manual labour, working long hours in difficult conditions. Recent decades have seen an increase in family reunification - the arrival of women and children from North Africa, either accompanying their husbands or joining them in France. Contemporary creative representations of migration are shaped by this shift in gender and generation from a solitary, mostly male experience to one that included women and children. Just as the shift made new demands of the 'host' society, it made new demands of authors and filmmakers as they seek to represent migration. This study reveals how text and film present new ways of thinking about migration, moving away from the configuration of the migrant as man and worker, to take into account women, children, and the ties between. Isabel Hollis is a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast. She has published widely on North African migration to France.

“The Hidden Patients” looks at questions of gender in psychiatric publications on the colonial Maghreb, which described “normal” and “abnormal” forms of behaviour among the colonised and compared these findings to descriptions of Europeans who had been diagnosed with psychiatric “abnormalities”. Many psychiatric experts claimed that Muslim women rarely went “mad” and that they only accounted for a negligible percentage of the patients cared for by colonial psychiatrists. Consequently, relatively little space was dedicated to female Muslim patients in the theoretical source material, even though case studies and statistics clearly showed that it was mainly an imaginary absence and that it contradicted the everyday experiences of the psychiatrists.

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.

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.

"The translation of Breaking the Silence allows us, finally, to listen directly to the voices of Muslim women in France. Fadela Amara's book is at once autobiography, an analysis of the degradation of male-female relations in France's working-class suburbs, and an engrossing chronicle of a political movement. Helen Chenut's deft translation and comprehensive introduction shows us complex universe inhabited by young women of North African descent in contemporary France."—Susanna Barrows, author of Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History "This book delivers a timely and evocative corrective to stereotypes of Muslim women. Amara discusses with sensitivity the complex gender position of Muslim women in a Western European country in which the conflict between liberal republican ideals and cultural norms has had particularly violent consequences for women. Chenut's fine translation brings Amara's words to life and her excellent introduction places the Muslim women's movement in the context of the racial and cultural tensions that plague France's banlieues today."—Laura Levine Frader, co-editor, Gender and Class in Modern Europe

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.