counter-colonization

Here is an example of the kind of free-write type post that we might use this blog to sound ideas off of one another: As you can see, this is very informal, and as you know of me already, I find a great value in trying things out and asking dumb questions. I just thought this might be a more informal setting for following up on some of the threads that we are developing in seminar. As you can see, anyone from seminar can post here.

Last year I was living in France, where a certain element of the population is very vocal about their discomfort, let’s say, to be polite, with successive waves of immigration, particularly the increasing presence of “les Africains, et les Arabs,” who are characterized as having too many children, not working hard enough, and bringing over second-cousins and ailing great-uncles to sap the dole paid into by French tax-payers. Unbeknownst to the middle-aged shop-keepers and croctchety bar-tenders with whom I usually found myself embroiled in this type of conversation, I myself was part of this wave of illegal immigrants. The French government refused to give my husband or children visas to stay in the country (rightly surmising that my salary from a French university was nowhere near enough to support a family of four). But we came anyway, and I have to confess, were well pleased with the resources available to undocumented residents (such as free healthcare and free daycare), though who knows how long it will be until this is done away with...

My personal story aside, what I discovered in France, and am interested in hearing others talk about, is the narrative of “counter-colonization” that we might say is (perhaps unwittingly) constructed by anti-immigration rhetoric. Of course, this is not exclusive to Europe, and we often hear Lou Dobbes characterize the invasion of Mexicans into Texas and California, like a plight of locusts. If I can pose a question more directly, I am wondering if anyone knows of someone writing specifically about this narrative of “counter-colonization,” and further, I am wondering if we might not re-conceive of this, through a kind of discursive operation of the kind we were speaking of at the end of seminar, as a vocabulary that empowers rather than subjugates the immigrant. Whereas before, the Arabs and the Africans were colonized by the French, their land and resources physically usurped, their cultures subsumed, now we see a reversal (that I at least find deliciously ironic), as some members of the French old-guard feel themselves to be invaded, their hard-earned Euros drained, and their cultural values impinged upon, their language corrupted. (This infiltration of the African/Arab culture exists even on the level of fashion—as one can see from a recent trend that emerged in France, of women wearing what are called “sarrouels,” trousers with a low-slung crotch, like the kind worn by Muslim clerics. I have a pair, ask me about them! Though of course, there is room to debate in which direction this works as a moment of colonization...)

Here is what I was thinking of in the middle of the night: In Bordeaux, (where I was living and it is not without significance that this port was a central hub on the triangle trade), there was a not-so-silent war being waged every day between the youth, and in particular, it seemed to me, the teenagers that were probably second-generation immigrants, and the older French, in the form of a battle for control of the sonic space of the electric trolley. The Bordelaise are very proud of the “tram,” as it is called; the city has become nearly car-less, and the sleek tram glides swiftly and almost noiselessly through the streets. It is often joked about by the ex-patriot contingent living in Bordeaux that the tram is even featured on postcards. But here is the issue, and one that is doubtlessly familiar to anyone who has lived in a city with a major source of public transportation: and one that I am sure might be traced back to the seventies, and followed in film, if not in literature: it is the phenomenon of boomboxes in the train car! (We see this on BART, as we travel from Oakland to San Francisco; the London Tube, I believe even has placards prohibiting the use of the radio.) Whether this is a phenomenon exclusive to youth, or specifically to minority youth groups cannot be judged here, and I am not sure it is too important, for, regardless, this is the kind of counter-colonization of space in which I am interested. The component of the population that feels itself to be disempowered will perform this ritual, subjecting all the other occupants of the train car to listen to his or her music. Surely, this is an exercise of power. The youth blasts a radio (or increasingly, plays a song on an amplified cell phone), defying anyone else to tell him or her to turn it down. Can we consider this as a kind of counter-colonization? My reading of it is that these bodies who have been made to feel that they have less right than others to take up space, use the sonic waves of the music to occupy more space than is their due in the train car. By performing this auditory conquest of the car, they assert their right to be in the public space. This phenomenon seems especially pertinent when it is associated with minority groups, whose ancestors may have been denied access to public travel in the same cars as whites, but there are many ways in which young whites may feel they have to assert their right to exist in society as well. Doubtless, someone has written on this before; but it is a relatively new phenomenon in Bordeaux, which has just constructed the tram in the last decade, and in which, it seems to coincide with increased racial tensions, due to a rapidly increasing immigrant population amidst global budget concerns, and a more conservative turn in government.

My final question about this is looking forward to the readings we will do later in the seminar: Can this be considered non-violent resistance, even though it takes the form of an active rather than passive stance? I will leave it there....SJL