Thin Lines on the Pavement

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the historical construction and everyday sitedness of the multiracial, postindustrial, Parisian and Lyonnais suburban housing project complexes—known collectively as la banlieue and recently known as the site of the October-November 2005 “riots” (see Silverstein and Tetreault 2005)—arguing that their racialized boundaries and identity are largely demarcated through the violent practices associated with French (internal) colonialism and late capitalism. By interrogating the larger context and history of violence as productive of the very social groupings (“tribes,” “races,” “ethnicities,” “classes,” etc.), which anthropologists have historically studied, I fathom the limits of standard ethnographic methods for approaching violent incidents. With a particular focus on the production of the ethnoracial category of the male Franco-Maghrebi banlieue residents, I argue that violence—both physical and symbolic—informs the ways “race” in France is spatialized, and banlieue space racialized. Beginning with a concrete instance of violence—a mugging of which I was the victim—I aver that such violence, as both a historical precondition and an indelible immediacy to the banlieue as a racialized space, exceeds and defies direct ethnographic description. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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