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Immigration, politics and violence in urban France: between fiction and facts

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Recchia, Francesca (2008) Immigration, politics and violence in urban France: between fiction and facts. Information, society and justice journal, 2 (1). pp. 47-61. ISSN 1756-1078

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Abstract

Reflecting on the question of advanced marginality as it is elaborated by Wacquant in Urban Outcasts, this article examines the ways in which problems of relegation, territorial stigmatisation and unemployment emerge from the narratives of French writers of Algerian origins in the last twenty years. It proposes a reading of November 2005 clashes in French cities reconstructing historical networks of social and cultural reasons that contributed to ignite them. Semi-fictional accounts of immigrants’ life in the banlieues are a privileged source of information about the social distress that nurtured the explosion of urban violence. Reading between the lines of these representations helps grasping what happens underneath the surface of an overexposed situation of inequality that periodically morphs into violence.
Introduction.

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