Veiled voices in the films of Yamina Benguigui

Abstract

ABSTRACTYamina Benguigui's films have often been praised for ‘giving a voice’ to the Maghrebi population in France and bringing to the fore experiences that have been overlooked or under-represented in cultural productions and the media in France. Closer analysis of her cinematic corpus reveals, however, that there are much more selective and complex processes at work in her films when it comes to giving a voice—or not giving a voice—to certain members of the Maghrebi population. This article highlights the ways in which, especially through the aesthetic illusions generated through the formal conventions of the documentary, Benguigui's films construct a misleading vision of Islam as it is practised by the Maghrebi population in France—and in particular by first-generation Maghrebis—as a moderate form of Islam that does not constitute a barrier to integration in France, while silencing the voices of young Franco-Maghrebi women who wear the Islamic headscarf and casting them in a consistently negative light.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.