Search

Most of the papers in this colloquium relate to the territories which the European powers built up overseas during a period of several centuries, part of a process which some theorists of globalization have referred to as a kind of globalization avant la lettre. During the colonial period, the main direction of population flows was from Europe to the overseas empires in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania plus forced migrations from Africa to the Americas. One of the unexpected consequences of European empires and their dissolution has been a reversal of those original North to South migratory flows. Since the end of empire, there have been significant population flows from South to North, i.e. from formerly colonized territories to Europe, leading to the rise of post-colonial minorities within the heartland of the former colonial powers. Post-colonial migrants and their descendants constitute new minorities in Europe not only in a demographic sense but also in their social, political and cultural status. Unlike the United States, which from 1965 onwards gave priority to skills-based criteria in selecting migrants, in Europe during the same period the majority of immigrants from former colonies were unskilled and often illiterate. Not surprisingly, the languages they brought with them have generally remained highly marginalized in relation to the national languages of the countries in which they have settled.

Kathryn A. Kleppinger, Branding the 'Beur' Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). In this skilfully conceived, carefully researched, and richly informative book, [...]

After dozens of attacks during the past ten years in which hundreds have been killed by French jihadists, it is often suggested that subversive attitudes towards the Republic and its code of laïcité are widespread among Muslims in France. Yet while Muslims are often at odds with recent laws that they consider to be unfairly targeted against them, those interviewed in opinion surveys express high levels of support for the code of laïcité as laid down in the law of 1905, which separated the state and its representatives from religious institutions while simultaneously safeguarding the right of members of civil society to express their religious beliefs not only privately but also in the public sphere. Very few Muslim girls were exercising their right to wear headscarves in state schools when these were banned in 2004, and very few women were wearing burkas until these in turn were banned in any public space in 2010. But these new laws have been perceived as Islamophobic not only by the tiny minorities who were wearing these garments but also by many other Muslims, in whose eyes these measures parallel other long-standing patterns of discrimination hindering their access to jobs, housing and other social goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006). This is by far the most comprehensive and best documented [...]

In the twenty years since Pierre Nora began publishing his landmark work on Les Lieux de memoire (Nora, 1984-92), the study of memory, especially in its collective forms, has become [...]

Introduction The emergence of a second generation among the Maghrebi population in France was marked during the 1980s by the popularization of a new term, Beur(s). By the end of [...]

The term 'banlieues' in France has, in the 1990s, become synonymous with ethnic disadvantage and deviance. Examination of the process by which the term changed from denoting an urban geographical area reveals that it was disturbances at Vaulx-en-Velin following the death of an immigrant youth in October 1990 which began the process. The disturbances highlighted social problems but journalistic coverage, together with government actions, presented people of immigrant origin as the cause rather than the victim, and subsequent coverage went on to ethnicise and criminalise the banlieues.