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.

Research for this essay was generously funded by the National Science Foundation, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the U.S. Institute of Peace Jennings-Randoloph Program, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation, University of Chicago. The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following individuals for providing invaluable comments and suggestions on various drafts of this essay: Kamran Ali, Brian Axel, Genevieve Bell, Robert Brightman, Paul Brodwin, Partha Chatterjee, Tom Conley, Nicholas Dirks, Marco Jacquemet, Pradeep Jeganathan, Brian Larkin, Brinkley Messick, Martina Rieker, David Scott, Rupert Stasch, and all the participants in the Workshop on the Cultural Study of the Middle Eastern City.