Algeria in France Transpolitics, Race, and Nation [Paperback]

Algerian migration to France began at the end of the 19th century, but in recent years Frances Algerian community has been the focus of a shifting public debate encompassing issues of unemployment, multiculturalism, Islam, and terrorism. In this finely crafted historical and anthropological study, Paul A. Silverstein examines a wide range of social and cultural formsfrom immigration policy, colonial governance, and urban planning to corporate advertising, sports, literary narratives, and songsfor what they reveal about postcolonial Algerian subjectivities. Investigating the connection between anti-immigrant racism and the rise of Islamist and Berberist ideologies among the second generation ( Beurs ), he argues that the appropriation of these cultural-political projects by Algerians in France represents a critique of notions of European or Mediterranean unity and elucidates the mechanisms by which the Algerian civil war has been transferred onto French soil.

This informative and sophisticated work . . . examines Algerian immigration to France . . . [Silverstein] deftly summarizes the history of Franco-Algerian relations.March/April 2005[Silverstein] approaches his subjects through the medium of everyday life, following the random individuals encountered during his field work in the 1990s, applying an ethnographical methodology with a highly critical and self-reflexive awareness of the environment he shared with them.... [This] is a critical work in opening up a broader consideration of the complex set of identifications running between France, Algeria, and the wider Arab and Muslim world.April, 2011An insightful chronicle. . . .. . . this is an important call that diaspora should become as important a theme in North African history as it has been in that of sub-Saharan Africa.[Silverstein] has elaborated an incisive inquiry into the complex configurations of state power and minority agency that marks a central contribution to the academic study of transnal#f