Michelle Stewart is Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Literature at Purchase College in New York. Her scholarship centers on interdisciplinary questions of cinema’s relation to changing forms of sociality and political life under globalization. She received her PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, “Sovereign Visions: Native North American Documentary,” investigates the development of Native North American filmmaking as a creative form of cultural activism that is tied to a political program of cultural revival, self-determination, and national sovereignty. With Pam Wilson, she is co-editor of the forthcoming collection: Global Indigenous Media. Her most recent research concerns film policy, multiculturalism, and the European state, with an emphasis on the cinematic production of French citizens of African descent. This summer, she will participate in the Fulbright German Seminar on Muslim Immigrant Communities in Germany and France.
ABSTRACT
In an interview regarding the November 2005 riots in France, Antonio Negri suggests that the film "L'Esquive" (Abdellatif Kechiche 2004) “captures the banlieues” and the “erotic and affective relations between the kids that produces revolt.” This paper examines recent banlieue films for their contribution to national debates regarding the content of French identity and democracy. Banlieue films directly address the economic, social, and spatial marginalization of French ethnic minorities, often complicating larger media discourses of laïcité, the failure of integration, and the clash of civilizations. Against sensationalist and divisive formulations, banlieues films, and “L'Esquive” in particular, say much about shifting terms of identity within contemporary France.