Banlieue narratives: voicing the French urban periphery

In the wake of the severe urban unrest that hit France in the 2000s, the banlieues have become the centre of sustained public attention as well as a narrative effervescence. Discourses produced by politicians, journalists, urban planners, social scientists, novelists, film-makers, hip-hop artists and stand-up comedians have since addressed urban marginality from a variety of angles. In mainstream media and political discourse, multi-ethnic suburban housing estates have mainly been depicted as menacing spaces that erode the cohesion of the nation and threaten both French national identity and Republican integrity. In 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy called banlieue youth ‘scum’ and ‘riff-raff’. He attributed rioting to the presence of organized gangs and promised to clean the suburbs with a ‘high-pressure cleaner’. Ten years later, in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks, Manuel Valls spoke about ‘ghettos’ and ‘territorial, social and ethnic apartheid’ in the French suburbs. The abrasive tone of these political discourses has contributed to the deteriorating image of banlieues in the collective imagination.

Other discourses, on the contrary, have attempted to destigmatize working-class suburbs by establishing a different perspective on identity, communities, local and national belonging and urban renovation. In a context of enduring turmoil and debate it was not surprising to see the emergence of new narratives which undertook to explore the French urban periphery from within, focusing on the experience of those living on the margins and investigating their cultural practices, memory, access to political representation and affective appropriation of the urban space. These narratives, which appeared simultaneously in literature, film, music and other cultural forms, were distinctively original in their tone, aesthetics and aims. Critics acknowledged their novelty by using labels such as ‘urban’ or ‘banlieue’ in order to differentiate them from the works of previous generations. These designations simultaneously referred to the production’s geographic setting, main theme and place of enunciation, which coincided in the case of most authors. However, the labels ‘banlieue literature’ or ‘banlieue film’ have never been explicitly claimed by the creators themselves. Targeting universal rather than exclusively local audiences, they have been cautious about being assigned to a peripheral position owing to their social origins, place of residence or marginal status within what Bourdieu termed the field of cultural production in France (1993). Nevertheless, the banlieue narrative has attracted considerable scholarly attention, in particular over the last decade. It has been discussed at an array of interdisciplinary conferences focusing on French banlieues, such as Communities at the Periphery held in 2013 at the Institut Français in London or The Banlieue Far from the Clichés, organized in Oxford in 2014. It was also the theme of literary conferences in Bologna (2014) and Genoa (2015) as well as panels at the conferences of the Society for French Studies in Cardiff and Glasgow (2015 and 2016), those of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France in Southampton and Bangor (2014 and 2017) as well as the 2017 CIEF (Conseil International d’Études Francophones) conference in Martinique. This volume draws on papers presented at some of these panels and conferences. It is interesting to observe that none of these events was held in metropolitan France. Just like Beur cultural productions, which have first been studied overseas, banlieue narratives have also been been mainly conceptualized by international scholars including the authors of this volume, who have worked or studied outside the French academy. This may be a consequence of French universities’ reticence to engage with postcolonial literary production or with authors considered as minor because of their proximity to popular culture, their interest and investment in a stigmatized geographic space, their contemporaneity or attempts to challenge dominant notions of Frenchness.

This volume seeks to examine how, since the mid-2000s, banlieue narratives have evolved by exploring new genres and narrative possibilities while tackling dominant perceptions of the suburbs. How do they address issues of marginality, hopelessness, stigmatization, exclusion and repressed memory? Do they also evoke solidarity, everyday life, exciting initiatives, success, social mobility and creativity? How do they express new identities? What generic rules and aesthetic codes do they follow? What artistic movements or individual creators do they consider as their precursors? How do they participate in renewing literary genres, subgenres and aesthetic tenets? What linguistic, narrative, visual and political strategies do they adopt and how can they be interpreted in relation to the official discourses produced by politicians and mass media?

The contributors of this volume have probed these questions by looking at different art forms and genres within the rich cultural production that reflects the living conditions and perspectives of banlieue residents. Informed by a broad array of theories ranging from postcolonial thought to sociological approaches as well as cultural and gender studies, their papers examine different types of narratives and explore how these have become vectors of a reflection on nationhood, territorial stigmatization and the contemporary cityscape. They have undertaken various attempts to classify banlieue narratives by concentrating on generic categories ranging from more conventional forms such as first-person narratives, testimonial writing, semi-autobiographical narratives, auto-fiction or Bildungsroman to less-predictable genres including crime fiction, science fiction, dystopian writing, anticipation novel, fantasy or poetry. They compare banlieue narratives to other literary productions marked by their distance from the centre including migrant writing, such as Francophone literature and the Beur novel. They have also examined parallels between banlieue narratives in literature, film and rap music, and between French peripheral writing and foreign literary movements emerging from similar situations of urban marginality.

These multiple comparisons have helped the contributors pinpoint some of the specificities which distinguish banlieue narratives. They have discerned the category’s particular interest in spatial and social exclusion, injustice and collective suffering of postcolonial populations in contemporary France. Banlieue narratives also tend to explore the memory and legacy of contested periods in national history including colonization and decolonization, providing a narrative counter-point to dominant discourses. Authors from less-advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds often find inspiration in different forms of popular culture including rap or slam poetry. Due to their distance from mainstream cultural institutions and centres of political power, their works are often dismissed as non-canonical and attributed a lesser artistic value by critics. Their relatively marginal position in the field of cultural production makes them similar to diverse peripheral literatures produced in the French language such as Francophone, postcolonial or migrant writing. However, marginality also provides creators with a greater degree of freedom to experiment with unconventional forms, genres and aesthetic canons and to explore memory and creativity from a peripheral angle to make unheard voices audible. Many of the authors of banlieue narratives explore the possibilities of individual or collective healing and promote debate and reconciliation in a divided society.

Some of the contributions point to a parallel between two marginalities, the one located in the French urban peripheries and the other outside France, in the former colonies, from where many banlieue residents’ parents or grandparents migrated to France. Isabelle Galichon draws on Foucault’s thought about the writing of the self (1984), as well as the concepts of ‘migrant writing’ (Chartier, 2002), ‘memory work-in-progress’ (Coquio, 2015) and decoloniality (Quijano, 2001) to explore how banlieue narratives attempt to reconstruct suppressed history, memories and subjectivities in order to resist Eurocentric models and disrupt dominant narratives through the use of multidirectional memories, testimonial genres and hybrid language. Séverine Rebourcet also explores the double marginality imposed on the French banlieues. She likens banlieue narratives to a ‘Francophone literature from within’ and uses this analogy to highlight the continuity between subaltern populations living in the former colonies and in the post-migration context in France. She also examines the links between Francophone and post-migration aesthetic models, which have in common the promotion of realist depictions of suburban space as a way of articulating social criticism.

A comparison with other movements is also at the heart of two articles by Bettina Ghio and Christina Horvath. Ghio undertakes a rigorous analysis of the intersecting ways in which banlieue narratives in literature and rap represent suburban housing estates. She reveals that the predominant metaphoric and metonymic images and engaged authorial posture have been consistently used in both productions for an extended period — to describe working-class suburbs. She argues that the difference between rap and novels lies in the contribution sound systems and performers’ voices and bodies make to reinforcing popular representations of the banlieue. Horvath goes beyond the Francophone literary space to draw a comparison between French banlieue narratives and the marginal peripheral literary movement simultaneously emerging in Brazil. While both movements tackle stereotypes, they manifest significant dissimilarities that stem from the different ways in which they have been conceptualised. Horvath reveals that while influences of malandragem (a Portuguese term for an idle, fast-living and petty criminal lifestyle celebrated in samba songs) and poesia marginal (a prestigious literary movement that emerged in the 1970s) enabled Brazilian writers to see the margin as a space of resistance on which a collective writerly identity can be founded. French writers are more cautious about the risk of being excluded from the French field of literary production because of their association with the periphery.

Finally, this volume is also interested in the mutations and transformations that banlieue narratives have experienced over the past decade. Some contributors demonstrate the production’s perpetual renewal by focusing on evolving narrative models, changing aesthetics and constant exploration of new genres. Rebecca Blanchard looks at the dystopian fiction and the anticipation novel as new alternatives to first-person accounts and semi-autobiographical narratives, which dominated the category at the time of its emergence. She uses Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘state of exception’ (2005) as a lens through which she examines the aestheticization of spatial and social exclusion. Laura Reeck turns to the fast-expanding category of banlieue film to investigate how directors are moving away from rigid gender norms and overstated representations of masculinity previously associated with this production. She shows how, in recent years, female directors and ethnic minority female characters have contributed to disrupting male-centred models of film-making by simultaneously feminizing, ethnicizing and renewing the category of banlieue film.

Across all these contributions, the aim of the volume is to highlight the vitality of the French banlieues as spaces of cultural production and to stress how vital their contribution is to the renewal of contemporary aesthetic codes and canons. It seeks to emphasize the great diversity of forms, genres and narrative models used by artists who propose different visions of the banlieues. The great diversity of both the banlieues and banlieue narratives makes generalizations difficult, if not invalid. In order to do justice to this multiplicity, the contributors seek to strike a balance between close readings of single novels, films and songs and attempts to theorize further this exciting contemporary cultural production. They also endeavour to demonstrate that, although working-class suburbs in France are complex and diverse spaces, their representations in various art forms may not always illustrate the banlieues’ actual state and degree of diversity. In spite of being associated with realism, banlieue narratives can sometimes reproduce and reinforce clichés, just as they can deconstruct or subvert them. Although they generally support the claims of peripheral youths feeling abandoned by the state and excluded from political representation and power, individual artists may also want to pursue aims other than those of bearing witness to socioeconomic segregation and stigmatization in the French urban periphery.

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number J003921/1] and Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number 734770].

Notes on contributor

Christina Horvath is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at the University of Bath and co-founder of the AHRC-funded Banlieue Network. Her research addresses urban representations in various art forms, the ‘urban novel’ genre, postcolonial and migrant writing in contemporary France as well as ‘banlieue narratives’. Her current project, Co-Creation, funded by RISE Horizon 2020 explores different methodologies using art to challenge urban marginality in France, Brazil and Mexico. She has published Le Roman urbain contemporain en France (2007, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle), edited a themed special issue of Francosphères (2014/3.2) and co-edited with Juliet Carpenter Regards croisés sur la banlieue (2015, Peter Lang) and Voices and images from the banlieue (2014, Banlieue Network).