Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités

The housing projects that ring modern Paris are a highly fluidlinguistic and cultural melting pot, where youth culture combinesNorth African, French, and American elements in a constantlyevolving mélange. TransculturalTeens provides readers with a window onto the cultural andlinguistic creativity of the cités. It shows howyoung people of Algerian Arab origins play with language andculture in fascinating and revealing ways, and in so doing affordus keen insights into youth culture and globalization.

The author s observations demonstrate that, far from evincingthe clash of civilizations so feared (andanticipated) by Western and Arab cultures, youth in Parishousing projects steadfastly occupy a progressive socialcrossroads where cultural ingredients from North African andEuropean traditions are fused and thus transformed. Thebook contributes to an understanding of the emergent identitiesthat arise through movement across geographic, cultural, andlinguistic terrain, and includes vital commentary on the everydayexperiences of young French Algerian women notably absentfrom scholarly publications and popular media alike. The authorshows how the experience of growing up ina cité is one of spatial and racialmarginalization within the national context of France, yet isnevertheless highly receptive to the frequent encounters withpeople, cultures, and modes of communication from a range ofdisparate sources.

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: Performing Transcultural Youth Identities 1

1 Ethnography in les Cités 8

2 Speech in the Cité: Style and Stigma 34

3 Sans Problème or Cent Problèmes ? Revoicing Stereotypes about les Arabes 58

4 La Racaille and le Respect 91

5 You Call That a Girl? : Gender Crossing and Borderwork 114

6 Parental Name–Calling 154

7 Crossing Registers: Voicing the French TV Host 172

Conclusion 195

References 200

Index 213

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.