This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. On 2 October , President Emmanuel Macron pronounced a fervent speech in Les Mureaux, a disadvantaged banlieue in Greater Paris, announcing a new law proposal designed to challenge Islamist separatism.
We ourselves have built our own separatism. Banlieues are mostly high-rise housing estates that were constructed in the outskirts of French cities in the s and s in response to the post-war housing crisis. Yet social scientists like Cyprian Avenel have demonstrated that rather than strengthening conviviality between different social classes, spatial proximity tends to exacerbate conflicts.
On the contrary, these neighbourhoods are liminal spaces or contact zones in which heterogeneous populations tend to negotiate their differences on a daily basis while producing a new, vernacular form of cosmopolitanism. The author, who was born in Senegal in , arrived in France at the age of six and grew up in Sarcelles, where he continues to live.
As an actor, slam and rap artist and novelist, he has attempted to depict contemporary life in the urban periphery from various angles. Located According to the census, The discourse of sarcellite medicalised a liberal-individualistic critique that argued social-capital investment in collectivist residential property incubated human neurosis. As a rhetorical device, therefore, sarcellite contributed to demarcating the geographical lines of spatial inclusion and exclusion in the Fifth French Republic.
The third section will look at the transnational neighbourhood not as a homogeneous, diasporic space but as a contact zone in which ethnically and culturally heterogeneous groups and individuals interact. In most of the novels, however, the French capital and its outskirts are endowed with a detailed topography and depicted in a realist fashion as the ordinary settings of everyday life. The protagonists are mostly youths raised in and around Sarcelles who share their time between Paris and its banlieues.
