Notes towards a poetics of banlieue

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Notes

¹ Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La Psychose française: Les banlieues, le ban de la république (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), pp.17–18 [My translation].

² Sniper, ‘La France’, Du Rire aux larmes (Desh musique, 2001).

³ Title of Negri's seminar at the Collège international de philosophie in 2006–07.

⁴ I am alluding here to Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).

⁵ Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La Psychose française, p.10.

⁶ Ginette Vincendeau, La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995) (London: IB Tauris, 2005), p.20.

⁷ Laurent Dubreuil, Empire of Language, trans. David Fieni (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming). The original version in French is L'Empire du langage: Colonies & Francophonie (Paris: Hermann, 2008).

⁸ See Tropiques 1 (1941), p.5.

⁹ Césaire himself participated in the journal L'Étudiant noir (1934–1940).

¹⁰ Alain Faure and Jacques Rancière, ed., La Parole ouvrière: 1830–1851 (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1976), pp.16–17.

¹¹ On my critical reading of both Bhabha and Spivak, see Empire of Language, ch. 9.

¹² Thanks to one of my graduate students, I discovered that this extremely conventional presentation had also caught the attention of Ariel Kyrou, who studied the same newspaper article in his essay ‘Emeutes: Chroniques d'une politique-spectacle’ < http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?page = imprimer&id_article = 2812> [30/03/2012]. Though I share some of Kyrou's analyses and disagree with others, I will not refer to his interpretation.

¹³ Yves Bordenave and Mustapha Kessous, ‘Une nuit avec des “émeutiers” qui ont “la rage”’, Le Monde, 8 November 2005.

¹⁴ I am referring here to Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 90 (1991), 93 (1992).

¹⁵ Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), p. 156. The tragedy is included in this collection of poems.

¹⁶ Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, 10 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1947–1976), vol. 3, p.286.

¹⁷ The 1963 English translation by S. W. Allen even omits Sartre's footnote, turning the excerpt into an anonymous quote, or a lyrical ending written by the philosopher himself. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (Paris: Présence africaine, 1963), p.65.

¹⁸ See Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), pp.118 and 128.

¹⁹ Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, vol. 3, p.286.

²⁰ On this, see Laurent Dubreuil, ‘What is literature's now?’, New Literary History, 38.1 (2007), pp.45–47.

²¹ Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses, p.171.

²² Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses, pp.175 (‘hypocrites’), 178 (‘christ’), 187(‘criss’).

²³ One might argue that some expressions I personally use (such as prendre la parole) are gendered metaphors, where speech (parole is a feminine word in French) would be ‘seized’ or even ‘raped’ by speakers. May I confess some scepticism here? Would rompre le silence (silence being masculine) alter this ‘hidden’ logic? And would la prise de la parole (with both prise and parole being feminine nouns) be more ‘progressive’?

²⁴ Fadela Amara and Sylvia Zappi, Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto [2003], trans. Helen Harden Chenut (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), p.39.

²⁵ Fadela Amara and Sylvia Zappi, Breaking the Silence, p.39.

²⁶ Fadela Amara and Sylvia Zappi, Breaking the Silence, p.2.

²⁷ Samira Bellil, To Hell and Back: The Life of Samira Bellil [2002], trans. Lucy R. McNair (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p.207.

²⁸ In slang, fermer sa trappe means ‘shutting up.’ Trappist monks are also well-known for having minimal recourse to spoken language.

²⁹ See Joanna Helcké, ‘La tchatche and the gendering of ethnic identities in France's banlieue’, in Shifting Frontiers of France and Francophonie, ed. Yvette Rocheron and Christopher Rolfe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p.165–182.

³⁰ Faïza Guène, Kiffe kiffe demain (Paris: Hachette littératures, 2004), p.192. The English title is Just for tomorrow in the British translation and Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow in the American version.

³¹ On the partial ‘assimilation’ of foreign words, borrowed from the vernacular languages in use in the French colonial empire, see my Empire of Language, ch. 5.

³² Faïza Guène, Kiffe kiffe demain, p.100.

³³ Faïza Guène, Kiffe kiffe demain, p.100.

³⁴ See Samira Bellil, To Hell and Back, ch. 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7, in particular.

³⁵ See Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses, p.188, in particular.