Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: hybridity and citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13621025.2010.490031
ISSN1469-3593
Autores Tópico(s)North African History and Literature
ResumoAbstract Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship. However, such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution in conceptualizing the fragile and unstable condition of the migrant, and need to distinguish between various experiences of mobility, hybridity, and citizenship. Such a differentiation between these different lived experiences of citizenship echoes Aihwa Ong's critique of the ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’. My analysis points to how class, race and language structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship and make tenuous easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. I argue that practices of postcolonial mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context have produced differentiated and unequal hybridities, and, consequently, asymmetrical experiences of citizenship. By distinguishing between various practices of mobility and hybridity, I indicate that postcolonial hybridity can also be employed to re-constitute the rigid boundaries of nation and citizenship. Keywords: claiming citizenshipcategoriesidentityimmigrantracepolitical agency Acknowledgements This is a revised version of the paper presented at the International Studies Association's Annual Conference in New York, February 2009. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Will Coleman and Naeem Inayatullah for their careful reading and thoughtful comments on previous drafts of this paper. Many thanks to Peter Nyers for his helpful suggestions and his support. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Notes 1. I thank the anonymous reviewer for prompting me to make this clarification. 2. The French expression ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ (our ancestors the Gauls) is used nowadays ironically in Francophone postcolonial literature, since it illustrates the absurdity of the French colonial system of education that taught the young colonized from North Africa that their ancestors were the Gauls! Moreover, this example illuminates the perverse paradoxes that allow for the colonized (the ‘indigènes’) to assume a common history with their colonizers, but not a common humanity or indeed, a common claim to Frenchness. 3. The term has been appropriated by French intellectuals as well, such as Étienne Balibar (1999, p. 170). 4. During my travels in Tunisia, for example, I was struck by how much the educational curriculum was influenced by the French one, not only in terms of its structure, but also especially in its content: teaching French history, literature and linguistics is as natural as teaching Tunisian history and literature. From my personal discussions with Tunisian academics, I can venture to state that the former came more naturally. 5. By ‘vehicular language’ (langue véhiculaire), Alek Toumi (Citation2002) means a language of communication in an urban setting. 6. Passages quoted from this work are my translations. 7. Contra Toumi, Étienne Balibar (Citation1999, p. 169) notes, however, that present-day Islam is not a mere regression to a ‘pre-modern religiosity’, but a ‘form of politicizing the religious within the global crisis of the modernization process’. Within this complex process of contestation, there are uneasy and paradoxical alliances being struck, such as the one between the attempt to integrate into the flows of ‘technological globalization’, and ‘the claim to Islam as a universalist ideology’ and as an alternative to Eurocentric ‘figurations of universality’ (Balibar Citation1999, pp. 169–170). 8. I thank the anonymous reviewer for this thoughtful observation. 9. Passages quoted from this book are my own translation. 10. The term appears also in the texts of other French and Maghrebian intellectuals, such as Albert Memmi (Citation2004) and Leïla Sebbar. Hafid Gafaiti (Citation2003, p. 204), for example, clarifies that the concept immigré has come to designate almost exclusively, within France, persons of North African backgrounds. Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel devote one of their books to the exploration of the symbolical and material continuities and interruptions within the transition from indigène (native) to immigré (see Blanchard and Bancel Citation1998). 11. See Aihwa Ong's investigation of the distinction between various types of mobility and claims to citizenship in Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (1999) and in Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (2006). ‘Flexible citizenship’ represents the strategy available to certain privileged categories from South-East Asia (mainly professionals) who shuffle between Asia and North America. In Neoliberalism as Exception, Ong (Citation2006, p. 16) makes compelling distinctions between the neoliberal exception, which ‘gives value to calculative practices and to self-governing subjects as preferred citizens’; and the neoliberal exception, which marginalizes ‘other segments of population’ and renders them ‘excludable as citizens and subjects’. See also Ulf Hedetoft's distinction between ‘migrants’ and ‘cosmopolitans’ (2002), and Zygmunt Bauman's differentiation between tourists and vagabonds (1998). 12. Assia Djebar (Citation1999) refers to herself as migrante, which is very different from immigré: firstly, the former designates a processual condition, whereas the latter points to a category. Secondly, the former implies mobility, transgression, whereas the latter indicates fixity. 13. I thank Susie O'Brien for pushing me to make this clarification. 14. No page number can be provided since the article was accessed electronically. 15. See, for example, Didier Lapeyronnie (Citation2005) and Dominique Vidal (Citation2006). 16. The expression of ‘zombies’ belongs to Memmi (Citation2004, p. 137). 17. This argument appears also in Blanchard and Bancel (Citation1998). 18. The chibanis are Maghrebian men (most of them Algerian) who came to France in the 1950s and 1960s, at the end of the war and after, and who were mostly employed in the building of highways, subway lines, real estate, and in factories. Very few returned to North Africa, and in most cases, their families never managed to join them. Their story as a particular category of migrants is an extremely sad one, marked by loneliness, desolation, and non-recognition. Although their contribution to the reconstruction of post-war France is immense, they live precarious lives of marginal health and financial benefits. 19. All passages quoted from this book are my translations. 20. I am here referring implicitly to Tahar Ben Jelloun's experience at Renault. 21. For an insightful analysis on the (in)congruities of the image of the indigène with that of the immigré(e), see Blanchard and Bancel (Citation1998). 22. In here, I discerned two broad categories. However, I gloss over other nuances to the condition of being a refugee or a migrant, to which I only hinted in here, the chibanis, the beurs, former pieds noirs, and undoubtedly others, which I explore elsewhere (Sajed Citation2008). 23. I owe this insight to one of the anonymous reviewers.
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