Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités

The housing projects that ring modern Paris are a highly fluid linguistic and cultural melting pot, where youth culture combines North African, French, and American elements in a constantly evolving mélange.   Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the cités . It shows how young people of Algerian Arab origins play with language and culture in fascinating and revealing ways, and in so doing afford us keen insights into youth culture and globalization. The author’s observations demonstrate that, far from evincing the ‘clash of civilizations’ so feared (and anticipated) by Western and Arabic observers, the youths of the Paris projects steadfastly occupy a progressive social crossroads where cultural ingredients from North African and European traditions are fused – and thus transformed. The book contributes to an understanding of the emergent identities that arise through movement across geographic, cultural, and linguistic terrain, and includes vital commentary on the everyday experiences of young French Algerian women – notably absent from scholarly publications and popular media alike. The author shows how the experience of growing up in a cité is one of spatial and racial marginalization within the national context of France, yet is nevertheless highly receptive to the frequent encounters with people, cultures, and modes of communication from a range of disparate sources.

Chantal Tetreault is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, USA. A specialist in linguistic and cultural anthropology, her work focuses on issues relating to migration and social change in France. She has contributed articles to journals such as Language in Society , Journal of Linguistic Anthropology ,and Language and Communication .