Screening Integration

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Screening Integration

Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

Edited and with an introduction by Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy

282 pages
21 illustrations, 2 tables

Paperback

January 2012

978-0-8032-2825-2

$35.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

January 2012

978-0-8032-3838-1

$35.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

North African immigrants, once confined to France’s social and cultural margins, have become a strong presence in France’s national life. Similarly, descendants of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have gained mainstream recognition as filmmakers and as the subject of films. The first collective volume on this topic, Screening Integration offers a sustained critical analysis of this cinema. In particular, contributors evaluate how Maghrebi films have come to participate in, promote, and, at the same time, critique France’s integration. In the process, these essays reflect on the conditions that allowed for the burgeoning of this cinema in the first place, as well as on the social changes the films delineate.

Screening Integration brings together established scholars in the fields of postcolonial, Francophone, and film studies to address the latest developments in this cinematic production. These authors explore the emergence of various genres that recast the sometimes fossilized idea of ethnic difference. Screening Integration provides a much-needed reference for those interested in comprehending the complex shifts in twenty-first-century French cinema and in the multicultural social formations that have become an integral part of contemporary France in the new millennium.

Author Bio

Sylvie Durmelat is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Fictions de l’intégration: du mot beur à la politique de la mémoire. Vinay Swamy is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Vassar College and the author of Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films.

Praise

"[Screening Integration is] a welcome study of a recent body of Maghrebi-French films. . . . The book is a solid, timely read."—Florence Martin, H-France

"Fascinating volume . . . in-depth and challenging discussions of individual films all while considering the impact of this for contemporary France more widely."—Hannah Kilduff, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies

"This is a nicely balanced and focused book that will undoubtedly find its way onto a good number of reading lists."—Martin O'Shaughnessy, Modern & Contemporary France

"This edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in cultural productions by and about the Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French populations in France and/or in broader questions relating to integration, immigration, and difference in France."—Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Reviews & Critical Commentary

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

      Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy

1. From "Ghettoes" to Globalization: Situating Maghrebi-French Filmmakers

      Alec G. Hargreaves

2. Hidden Islam: The Role of the Religious in Beur and Banlieue Cinema

      Michel Cadé

3. "Et si on allait en Algérie?" Home, Displacement, and the Myth of Return in Recent Journey Films by Maghrebi-French and North African Émigré Directors

      Will Higbee

4. Turning Integration Inside Out: How Johnny the Frenchman Became Abdel Bachir the Arab Grocer in Il était une fois dans l'oued

      Hakim Abderrezak

5. Re-Visions of the Algerian War of Independence: Writing the Memories of Algerian Immigrants into French Cinema

      Sylvie Durmelat

6. Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes: Political or Ethical Event of Memory?

      Mireille Rosello

7. Class Acts: Education, Gender, and Integration in Recent French Cinema

      Carrie Tarr

8. Don't Touch the White Woman: La journée de la jupe or Feminism at the Service of Islamophobia

      Geneviève Sellier

9. A Space of Their Own? Women in Maghrebi-French Filmmaking

      Patricia Geesey

10. Sexual/Social (Re)Orientations: Cross-Dressing, Queerness, and the Maghrebi/Beur Male in Liria Bégéja's Change-moi ma vie and Amal Bedjaoui's Un fils

      Darren Waldron

11. (Re)Casting Sami Bouajila: An Ambiguous Model of Integration, Belonging, and Citizenship

      Murray Pratt and Denis M. Provencher

12. Repackaging the Banlieues: Malik Chibane's La trilogie urbaine

      Vinay Swamy

Filmography

Contributors

Index

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