Screening Integration

Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

Sylvie Durmelat, Vinay Swamy

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780803228252
• eBook ISBN:
  9780803238381
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: African History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction
• 1 From "Ghettoes" to Globlization: Situating Maghrebi-French Filmmakers
• 2 Hidden Islam: The Role of the Religiousin Beur and Banlieue Cinema
• 3 “Et si on allait en Algérie?” Home, Displacement,and the Myth of Return in Recent JourneyFilms by Maghrebi-French and North AfricanÉmigré Directors
• 4 Turning Integration Inside Out: How Johnnythe Frenchman Became Abdel Bachir the ArabGrocer in Il était une fois dans l’oued
• 5 Re-Visions of the Algerian War ofIndependence: Writing the Memories ofAlgerian Immigrants into French Cinema
• 6 Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes: Political or Ethical Event of Memory?
• 7 Class Acts: Education, Gender, andIntegration in Recent French Cinema
• 8 Don’t Touch the White Woman: La journée de la jupe or Feminism at the Service of Islamophobia
• 9 A Space of Their Own?Women in Maghrebi-French Filmmaking
• 10 Sexual/Social (Re)Orientations:Cross-Dressing, Queerness, and theMaghrebi/Beur Male in Liria Bégéja’s Changemoima vie and Amal Bedjaoui’s Un fils
• 11 (Re)Casting Sami Bouajila:An Ambiguous Model of Integration,Belonging, and Citizenship
• 12 Repackaging the Banlieues:Malik Chibane’s La trilogie urbaine
• Filmography
• Contributors
• Index