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Citation for published version:
Horvath, C 2018, 'Banlieue narratives: voicing the French urban periphery', Romance Studies, vol. 36, no. 1-2:
Banlieue Narratives: Voicing the French Urban Periphery, pp. 1-4.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2018.1457820
DOI:
10.1080/02639904.2018.1457820
Publication date:
2018
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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Romance Studies on 12 June
2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2018.1457820.
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Download date: 15. Jun. 2020
Christina Horvath
University of Bath
INTRODUCTION
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, filmmakers, 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 organised 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 deteriorating the image of banlieues in
the collective imagination.
Other discourses, on the contrary, have attempted to destigmatise 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 like
‘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 the
French field of cultural production (Bourdieu, 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, organised 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 conceptualised 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 stigmatised 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, stigmatisation, 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 aesthetics 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
stigmatisation 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 colonisation and decolonisation 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
French language such as Francophone, postcolonial or migrant writing. Marginality, however, 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 (1983) thought about the writing of the self, 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 continues
to explore 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 though similar, their dissimilarities are due to the different ways 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 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 (2005) concept of the ‘state of
exception’ as a lens through which she examines the aestheticisation 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 filmmaking by
simultaneously feminising, ethnicising 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 emphasise 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 generalisations 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 theorise 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 socio-economic
segregation and stigmatisation in the French urban periphery.
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio (2005) State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Balibar, Etienne (1997) Race, nation, classe : Les identités ambigues (Paris: La Découverte).
Beaud, Stéphane and Gérard Mauger (ed.) (2017) Une génération sacrifiée? Jeunes des classes
populaires dans la France désindustrialisée (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm).
Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire (2005) La Fracture coloniale (Paris: La
Découverte).
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge:
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Daniel Chartier (2002) ’Les origines de l’écriture migrante. L’immigration littéraire au Québec au
cours des deux derniers siècles’ Voix et Images 272, 80 (2) 303–316.
Coquio, Catherine (2015) Le Mal de vérité ou l’utopie de la mémoire (Paris: Armand Colin).
Desponds, Didier and Pierre Bergel (2015) ‘La banlieue’: des dynamiques complexes derrière un mot
trop ordinaire. Le cas de l’agglomération der Paris in Carpenter, Juliet and Christina Horvath (ed).
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France since 2000 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Quijano, Anibal (2001) ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’ Cultural Studies vol. 21 (2-3) 168-178.
Thomas, Dominic (2010) ’Decolonizing France: from National Literatures to World Literatures’.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 14 (1) 47-55.
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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).