A multi-ethnic metropolis: representations of Marseille

By considering a range of different works from across contemporary visual culture, this chapter explores in detail how Marseille – and the ethnicities of its inhabitants – has been represented since the 1980s. It assesses the extent to which case studies taken from auteur and popular cinema, photography and television soap opera both conform with – and deviate from – traditional visions of this Mediterranean metropolis. It argues that Marseille has increasingly been deployed as a means by which to showcase ethnic diversity in contemporary France and French visual culture.

Introduction

Between 1995 and 1997 the French photographer Luc Delahaye conducted a rather peculiar project. While travelling with a concealed camera on the Paris metro, he began making hundreds of black-and-white portraits of unsuspecting passengers. Eighty of these were then published together as L’Autre (1999). A novel contribution to debates surrounding the visual representation of alterity, Delahaye’s surreptitious photography of strangers raises several legal and ethical issues. Viewers may question, for instance, who qualifies as “other” in his photography and what right, if any, a photographer has to take such photographs of others. They might also wonder whether alterity can be captured on camera at all. The metro passengers whose portraits were published are, visibly, ethnically diverse and the way their images appear can be read as a ...

Shaping spaces: representing people of Algerian heritage

This chapter builds on existing studies of how Algerian heritage has been represented across cinema by considering a range of case studies taken from different media, including visual arts, a TV film franchise by the director Yamina Benguigui and autobiographical trilogy by the author Leïla Sebbar. It pays particular attention to how gender and ethnicity interact in this area by focusing on works that have probed the role of women among Algerian diasporas and people of Algerian heritage more generally. As such it additionally aims to counteract the implicit focus on men and masculinity that has characterised many cinematic representations of people of Algerian heritage.

Changing notions of national identity: engaging with ethnicity

This chapter probes several of the ways in which ethnicity in relation to France and Frenchness has been represented visually since the 1980s across a wide variety of media and sectors, including popular and auteur cinema, photography and television. It argues that, during a time of significant political and cultural debate regarding the relationship between French national identity and ethnicity, notions of French national identity across these different media have remained far from static since the 1980s. It concludes, however, that the continuing importance of whiteness as dominant cultural norm, and its links with French republican universalism as main French political philosophy, should not be underestimated.

Conclusion

Work on this project began in the 2000s and, throughout the intervening years, the topicality and importance of how ethnicity – and particularly ethnic difference – is represented in France has only increased. Looking back, it was the evident gap between the equality for French citizens theoretically enshrined in the French Constitution and the patent practical inequalities that characterise contemporary French society that first intrigued me about this area. Moreover, as my research evolved, it quickly became apparent that it was within the domain of visual culture that artists, filmmakers, photographers and others have sought especially to explore some of the paradoxes and challenges such a situation presents, where a dominant political philosophy actively impedes the recognition of difference, and effectively marginalises the importance of aspects of identification deemed contrary to it....

From the past to the present: parameters of Jewish identity

This chapter analyses how Jewishness has been represented across a wide range of works since the 1980s in French visual culture. It probes especially how contemporary Jewish experience has been represented via photography and popular cinema, but also considers films set during the Occupation era, which foreground anti-Semitism and interrogate the legacies of history and memory of World War Two in contemporary France.