MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO

Exceptional citizens: Secular Muslim women and the politics of difference in

This article traces the emergence of secular Muslim women into the French public sphere. I focus on , co-founder of Neither Whores Nor Doormats (), an association protesting the denigration of women in the immigrant suburbs. I argue that Amara is politically efficacious for the French government, shifting focus from the structural causes of socio-economic problems in the suburbs to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In addition, I argue that figures like Amara are effects of the dual universalising and particularising imperatives of republican citizenship and, moreover, that such figures help to defer the contradiction between those imperatives.

Key words citizenship, Islam, secularism, France, immigration, republicanism

Introduction

The term ‘Muslim women in Europe’ – the theme of this collection of essays – tends to evoke the image of the Islamic veil, and with it, the increasing visibility of Islam in the public sphere. In France, the burgeoning Islamic revival is largely regarded by the secular majority as a threat to the cultural integrity of France, and to the secular values of freedom, gender equality, and tolerance that ostensibly define France, and Europe more generally. Yet alongside the paradigmatic Other of the veiled woman and the seemingly incommensurable Muslim difference she signifies has appeared another kind of Muslim woman in the French public sphere, namely, the self-declared ‘secular Muslim woman’ (la musulmane laıque¨ ).1 Between 2002 and 2004, the French public sphere was consumed by debate over the Islamic headscarf, a debate that culminated in the adoption of a law in March 2004

1 I take the phrase musulmane laıque¨ from the terminology of a number of ‘secular Muslim’ associations that have been formed in recent years, including the Conseil franc¸ais des musulmans laıques¨ (French Council of Secular Muslims) and the Mouvement laıque¨ des musulmans de France (Secular Movement of Muslims of France), formerly known as the Mouvement des musulmans laıques¨ de France (Movement of Secular Muslims of France). For more on ‘secular Muslims’ and ‘secular Islam,’ see Mas (2006).

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2009) 17, 4 379–392. C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 379 doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00081.x 380 MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO banning ‘conspicuous religious signs’ in French public schools. During these debates, three highly mediatised figures – Fadela Amara, Loubna Meliane,´ and Chahdortt Djavann – emerged as vociferous proponents of the ban. Amara and Meliane´ are both anti-racist activists and co-founders of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Doormats), a group protesting the denigration of women in immigrant suburbs (banlieues); Chahdortt Djavann is an Iranian dissident and writer. All three women published popular autobiographies of their difficult personal experiences with Islam – Amara’s entitled Neither Whores Nor Doormats,Meliane’s´ Living Free, and Djavann’s Down with the Veil!2 – and all three were prominently featured in newspaper articles and on radio programmes and television shows between 2002 and 2004. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Holland and Irshad Manji in North America – other secular Muslim and ‘ex- Muslim’ women who are vocal critics of conservative Muslim-immigrant communities – Amara, Meliane,´ and Djavann positioned themselves as having cast off the chains of Islamic tradition and embraced the secular-qua-universal values of liberty, equality, and tolerance. Moreover, having experienced first-hand the supposed evils visited upon Muslim women, Amara, Meliane,´ and Djavann claimed to be ideally suited to speak on behalf of their sisters silenced by patriarchal Islamic ‘fundamentalists’ (integristes´ ). Amara and Djavann were invited to speak before the Stasi Commission, a committee of academics and education specialists convened in 2003 by then-President to investigate threats to French secularism, or laıcit¨ e´, and to propose any necessary action (the 2004 law banning religious signs was initially recommended by the Stasi Commission after three months of hearings). Amara and Meliane´ have both translated their presence in the public sphere into political positions, Amara as a junior cabinet minister in Nicholas Sarkozy’s current conservative government and Meliane´ as an official in the opposition . While social scientists have long paid a great deal of attention to publicly pious Muslim women in France (Boubekeur 2004; Gaspard and Khosrokhavar 1995; Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006), scholars have only recently begun to critically analyse the emergence of publicly secular Muslims, and in particular secular Muslim women.3 This article is part of that nascent effort. Unlike critics who focus on the personal ambitions of women like Amara and Meliane´ in explaining their meteoric public and political ascension (Bouteldja and Delphy 2007; Tevanian 2007), I am not particularly interested in the question of individual intention. What I investigate are some of the political, discursive, and ideological conditions undergirding, even compelling, the appearance of secular Muslim women like Amara, Meliane,´ and Djavann in the French public sphere. Focusing in particular on Fadela Amara and her autobiography Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Doormats), which won the French National Assembly’s Political Book Prize in 2004, I make a series of interrelated arguments. First, I argue that Amara and her organisation Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) are politically efficacious for the French government, shifting political and public focus (and blame) from the structural root causes of the pressing social and economic problems in the banlieues – unemployment, social segregation, drug and gang violence, delinquency, and overcrowded schools – to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and, consequently, to symbolic panaceas like the headscarf ban.

2InFrenchNi Putes Ni Soumises (Amara 2003), Vivre Libre (Meliane´ 2003), and Bas les voiles! (Djavann 2003). 3 The exceptions are Fregosi´ (2005), Mas (2006), and Raissiguier (2008).

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Second, going beyond the question of symbolic politics and political efficacy, I argue that the emergence of Amara and NPNS must be understood in relation to what Gary Wilder (2005 and 2007) has called the dual imperatives of French republicanism to universalise and to particularise simultaneously. These contradictory imperatives of republicanism are articulated in the concurrently contractual and cultural bases of republican citizenship. I suggest that the universal promise of abstract citizenship depends in part on figures like Amara, whose assimilation of French/universal values belies the particular bases of French identity evidenced in the racial discrimination and socio-economic marginalisation suffered by non-white immigrant-origin citizens (Fassin and Fassin 2006; Keaton 2006; Silverstein 2004). At the same time that figures like Amara defer the contradictions of republican citizenship, however, they are also themselves effects of the dual imperatives to universalise and particularise. In other words, while Amara represents the universal promise of abstract citizenship, the racial and cultural bases of citizenship render her incapable of transcending her Muslim difference; she therefore remains in the end unable to fulfil the particular requirements of Frenchness necessary to being a full (abstract) citizen. I conclude the article by suggesting that it is precisely the existence of Amara’s difference that makes its (ultimately impossible) erasure meaningful, and that the promise of universal citizenship depends on the simultaneous erasure and recognition of commensurable forms of difference.4

Displacing culpability, defending the Republic

In October 2002 in a housing project on the outskirts of , an 18-year-old woman named Sohane Benziane was burned alive by a male acquaintance, reportedly in retaliation for a slight inflicted on him by Sohane’s boyfriend.5 Although Ni Putes Ni Soumises had been formed only a few months earlier, Sohane’s murder galvanised the association to plan a five-week march across France in early 2003 to draw attention to the dire condition of young women in mostly immigrant housing projects. Indelibly linked as it was to Sohane’s murder, which drew a great deal of media coverage, the march catapulted Ni Putes Ni Soumises to the forefront of the growing national debate about France’s immigrant suburbs and its apparent ‘Muslim problem’ (Benabdessadok 2004). Later in 2003, Fadela Amara published Ni Putes Ni Soumises (translated into English and published in the USA in 2006 as Breaking the Silence),6 which chronicles not only the development of the NPNS movement, but also the rapidly degrading conditions of women in the banlieues and Amara’s own childhood growing up in a housing project in Clermont-Ferrand, a working-class city in central France. Amara’s autobiography is an odd read, notable for its unexpected juxtaposition of depictions of racism and social marginalisation with Amara’s glorification of the French Republic and its commitments to liberty, equality, and fraternity. The first chapter of the book recalls how her parents, like so many other North African immigrants recruited

4 My notion of commensurable difference expands on the trope of incommensurable difference in anthropological scholarship (Povinelli 2001; Silverstein 2004). 5 Parts of this section of the article appear in my review of Amara’s book for the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (Fernando 2009); I am grateful to JMEWS for allowing me to republish these elements. 6 All citations are from the English translation of Amara’s autobiography.

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 382 MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO by the French government and French industry to rebuild France after World War II, were ‘parked’ in a transit city before finally being settled in Herbet, a housing project (cite´) in which 90% of the population was Algerian (Amara 2006: 47). Amara notes that at school, she and other children from the housing project were constantly marked as Arabs (48), and that one of her teachers forced Amara to identify herself as a foreign student, even though she was by law a French citizen (49). She poignantly recounts the death of her youngest brother, Malik, run over by a drunk driver when Amara was fourteen years old. ‘I saw how the cops were able to mistreat people simply because they were Arabs,’ she writes, describing how the police roughed up her mother, bullied her father, and called her family bougnoules (a racial slur for Arabs) (53–54). The next few chapters of Amara’s book move beyond chronicling her own story to a quasi-sociological description of the deteriorating gender and generational relations in the banlieues. Amara contends that, in contrast to her own adolescence, constraints on young women of immigrant origin are no longer imposed by fathers but rather by older brothers (63–65). These older brothers have extended their authority beyond their own sisters to all young women in the projects, monitoring their comings and goings, policing their sexuality and romantic dalliances, and verbally insulting and sometimes physically assaulting girls. Women ‘who [dare] to break the rules’ by showing off their ‘femininity’ – which Amara identifies as the wearing of ‘short skirts, tight-fitting jeans, low-cut blouses, and short T-shirts’ – ‘[are] treated as whores’ (65). Amara argues that poverty, racism, and exclusion from French society have ‘generated an incredible rage’ (68) within young men, and that they assuage their feelings of powerlessness by exercising mastery over the only domain they can control, namely, women in the housing projects. Despite her criticism of the state for having ‘abandoned’ the immigrant suburbs and ‘continued its policies of social segregation’ (84), and despite her own lived experiences of racism, police brutality, and socio-economic marginalisation, Amara nonetheless remains a staunch supporter of the French model of integration, with a thoroughly idealised view of the Republic. She writes that even though she and her family lived with ‘discrimination, exclusion, [and] racism ...deep down I knew with certainty that this was not France. My own France ...is the France of the Enlightenment, the France of the [R]epublic, the France of ... In short, the France of liberty, equality, and fraternity’ (48–49). Amara never entertains the possibility that racism and social segregation of immigrants and their children – which as she herself notes lie at the root of the problems in the banlieues – might be intimately tied to the republican model of nationhood (Khosrokhavar 1997; Silverman 1992; Silverstein 2004). Amara further avoids the contradiction between the ‘the France of liberty, equality, and fraternity’ and the stark realities of social abandonment and racial inequality by shifting her focus mid-way through the book from structural concerns like poverty, unemployment, and racism to the presence of ‘Islamist groups’ practicing a ‘basement Islam’ (i.e. an unregulated underground Islam) that enforces ‘reactionary’ codes of morality on women. Without much elaboration about these unnamed Islamist groups, she turns to a discussion of the headscarf, which she decries as a ‘symbol of women’s oppression’ (98). By moving from an analysis of social disintegration caused by the state’s own policies to an excoriation of ‘basement Islam’ and the Islamic headscarf, Amara obfuscates the root causes of social malaise and defers responsibility for such malaise away from state practices and onto ‘fundamentalist’ Islam. In fact, the chapter in which she transitions from a discussion of social exclusion to a discussion of

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. EXCEPTIONAL CITIZENS 383 conservative Islam is titled ‘Obscurantism, the Key to Regression,’ suggesting that Islamic obscurantism, and not the government’s ‘policies of social segregation’ she so recently indicted, constitutes the ‘key’ to diagnosing and solving the banlieues’ problems. Moreover, she ends this chapter on Islamic obscurantism by depicting not the banlieues but rather the Republic as under threat, ‘tested on all fronts to resist religious inroads’ (98), and she advocates the ‘reaffirmation of secularism’ (99) as the solution to the problems of the banlieues. Amara registers surprise at the public and political approval with which the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement was met, but such approval seems only fitting, given that Amara served to confirm what the mainstream media and politicians already alleged about those parts of the Republic lost to ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’ and did so as an ‘authentic’ spokeswoman from the banlieues (Bowen 2006: 215–216). By following up her chapters on the social breakdown of the banlieues with calls for action against Islamism in general and against the headscarf in particular, Amara buttressed the dominant state logic that considers the ‘Islamic threat’ the central challenge facing the banlieues and that therefore privileges largely symbolic measures – like banning the headscarf – over more substantive efforts to alleviate poverty and discrimination, create jobs, and adequately fund schools and social services. She also enabled the government and media to reframe the social disintegration of the suburbs as a symptom of the decline of secularism, rather than the result of a decades-long failure of social and economic policy. When Amara won the National Assembly’s Political Book Prize in 2004, the day of speeches and panels devoted to her book barely touched upon the structural conditions that have led to the erosion of gender and generational relations (the ostensible focus of her organisation), tellingly concentrating instead on how to defend laıcit¨ e´ (four of the five panels that day concerned laıcit¨ e´, with titles like ‘Daily threats to laıcit¨ e´’ and ‘The future of laıcit¨ e´ in France’). The trope of defending an embattled laıcit¨ e´ and the very integrity of the Republic became the perceived crux of Amara’s book and of the NPNS movement. It also led to a political consensus about the need to secure France against the inroads made by Islamic communalism, and to re-establish the authority of the Republic by banning the headscarf. In a perceptive essay, the French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray writes that the 2004 headscarf law constituted a moment of ‘political hysteria’, ‘a peculiar defensive ploy [in which a community] will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for the real one that it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter’ (Terray 2004: 118). The insurmountable realities that Terray describes are the ‘breakdown of integration’ and ‘the stagnation of any equalization of the sexes’, both of which ‘come as a brutal affront to national amour propre’, and to the French ideals of racial and sexual equality (120). Terray argues, in essence, that national anxieties stemming from the insurmountable problems of racial and sexual equality are displaced or deferred onto the problem of Islam. While remaining within Terray’s heuristic of displacement, I would go even further in diagnosing the sense of national anxiety that so consistently undergirds debates about the headscarf and about Islam in the banlieues. The insistence on defending laıcit¨ e´ and on re-establishing the authority of the Republic needs to be located in a time in which the Republic’s sovereignty is increasingly challenged by globalisation, European integration, regional decentralisation, and consumerism, all of which disrupt the national values of equality and social solidarity on which the French welfare state

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 384 MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO has long been based (Holmes 2000). In such a predicament, which Balibar (2004) has called ‘the impotence of the omnipotent,’ Amara does not simply defer national anxieties about insurmountable problems onto seemingly surmountable ones. Her narrative, and her very existence, also serve to forestall the impotence of the Republic to ‘integrate’ its subjects, even as she provides evidence of this impotence when she describes the ‘current process of ghettoization’ and the ‘social destitution’ of young people ‘[p]arked in poor neighborhoods, abandoned by politicians ...[living] in a system that continues to exclude them’ (Amara 2006: 89–90). Despite these dire conditions that clearly signal the Republic’s failure – conditions that lead Amara herself to lament that ‘we are losing the battle for republican integration’ (90) – Amara nonetheless offers up her co-marchers and herself as symbols of successful integration and therefore as a sign of the Republic’s success. The curious juxtaposition of failure and success that subtends Amara’s narrative was consistently echoed visually in televised debates about the headscarf, when secular Muslim women like Amara, Meliane,´ and Djavann were often seated next to or opposite women in headscarves.7 The existence of publicly pious Muslim women, generally understood as signs of the failure of integration, was thus symbolically and politically countered by the presence of publicly secular Muslims, signs of the Republic’s success. That women’s bodies and women’s dress were so central to this politics of integration is unsurprising, given the way that women’s bodies have consistently served as the site upon which citizenship and national identity have been variously constructed (Chatterjee 1993; Moallem 2005; Scott 2007). That such a politics was played out on non-white women’s bodies should be doubly unsurprising, since ‘native’ women were particular objects of concern for the colonial mission civilisatrice (Clancy-Smith 1998; Conklin 1998). As Moallem (2005) has argued, ‘the borders of barbarism and civilization ... are drawn by women’s bodies’, and the contemporary concern with secularising Muslim women in France through the process of integration must be read as one more instantiation of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988: 297).8 The public visibility of secular Muslim women, many of whom actively embraced normative secular notions of ‘femininity’9 in their sartorial choices, signalled integration’s ostensible success. In the face of the Republic’s very obvious failures to abide by its commitments to equality and social solidarity with regards to its racial and religious minorities, then, Amara and other publicly secular Muslim women served to mitigate the facts of social exclusion, to displace blame for that social exclusion, and to refocus political energy on defending the (failed) policies of the republican model of integration.

7 Examples include an episode of ‘Mots croises’´ entitled ‘L’islam est-il compatible avec la laıcit¨ e´ franc¸aise’ on April 14, 2003 (France 2) and an episode of ‘Ripostes’ entitled ‘Menaces sur la laıcit¨ e?’´ on October 19, 2003 (France 5). For more on the representational politics of televised debates, see Tevanian (2005). 8Guenif-Souilamas´ and Mace´ (2004) and Raissiguier (2008) have written on the discursive production of Franco-Maghrebi women as the victims of Franco-Maghrebi men. 9 Defined by Amara, one will recall, as the wearing of ‘short skirts, tight-fitting jeans, low-cut blouses, and short T-shirts’ (2006: 65).

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Deferring contradictions of universal citizenship

Beyond the domain of political efficacy and symbolic politics, the emergence and public fetingˆ of figures like Fadela Amara as exemplars of successful republican ‘integration’ also needs to be understood within the discursive structure of republican citizenship and its dual universalising and particularising imperatives (Wilder 2005 and 2007; see also Bancel et al. 2003). As Wilder writes, ‘Republican sovereignty both universalizes, by transforming qualitatively different people into formally equivalent abstract citizens, and particularizes, by fixing shifting human collectives as a concrete nationality [that] ... implies a related identity among culture, nationality, and citizenship’ (2007). The following section traces these imperatives, and the tension they engender between the need to exclude and include difference, through a discussion of historical and contemporary republican representations of the French nation and national citizenship as both contractual (hence universal) and cultural (hence particular). Extending Wilder’s argument, I hold that subjects like Amara, who are ostensibly able to transcend their particular identities and become bona fide abstract citizens, serve to defer the tension between universal and particular that lies at the heart of the republican project. On March 11, 1882, ten years after France’s defeat in the Franco–Prussian War, the renowned philologist Ernest Renan delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled ‘What is a nation (Qu’est ce qu’une nation)?’ Renan described the nation as constituted both by ‘the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories’ that ‘presupposes a past’ and by ‘present-day consent, the desire to live together’ (Renan 1990: 19). Renan also called the nation ‘a daily plebiscite,’ thus distinguishing between the particularist and primordialist German conception of nationhood and the ostensibly universalist, contractual French one (Brubaker 1992). Renan’s formulation of the nation undergirded republican ideology in the mid- and late-nineteenth century – including the ideology of the colonial civilising mission – and continues to provide the basis for contemporary French theorising about citizenship and immigration (cf. Finkielkraut 1987; Schnapper 1994; Taguieff 2005). Renan, however, was not only a scholar of the nation. His philological work on Semitic languages also exemplifies mid-nineteenth-century thinking about the linkages between language groups, races, and religions (Masuzawa 2005: 171). For example, Renan and other philologists believed that the so-called structural rigidity of the Arabic language mapped onto the inherent fanaticism of Islam and the inflexibility of the Arab mind, compromising the potential of the mission civilisatrice in to turn Arab indigenes` (natives) into French citoyens (citizens). Orientalist thinking like Renan’s was integral to the formulation of the nineteenth-century ‘Kabyle Myth’ in Algeria, which portrayed Kabyles (or Berbers) as the original, proto-Christian inhabitants of the territory, and as racially, linguistically, religiously, and culturally distinct from Arabs. Instituting an ‘objective’ division between commensurably different Kabyles and incommensurably different Arabs, the colonial state found Kabyles to be prime candidates for civilising (Lorcin 1999; Silverstein 2004). With the existence of incommensurably different Arabs, however, the republican project, underpinned as it was by a rigid racialism (Blanchard et al. 2006; Conklin 1997; Wilder 2005), also discovered the limits of its universalist promise. The tension between Renan’s inclusive notion of the nation and his exclusive racialism – a tension, really, between the universalising and particularising imperatives of republicanism – is actually contained within his conception of the nation-form itself.

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Recall that the nation is both a voluntary political community bound by contract and a historical community bound by memory; Janus-faced, the nation looks both to the future and to the past. On the one hand, French values – liberty, equality, fraternity – are purportedly universal, and therefore open to voluntary adoption by those not necessarily a part of France’s past. But on the other hand, a sense of French national identity emerges out of the French people’s already-constituted particular history. More than simply a rational political unit, the nation is also a cultural, ethno-racial, historical, and affective entity as well. This ambivalence between contractual and cultural citizenship at the heart of Renan’s formulation has been restaged by a number of republican public intellectuals, most notably by political sociologist Dominique Schnapper. Laying out the classical republican model of citizenship in La Communaute´ des citoyens (The Community of Citizens), Schnapper contends that ‘[t]he nation is defined by its ambition to transcend particular affiliations – biological, historical, economic, social, religious, or cultural – through citizenship, to define the citizen as an abstract individual, without identification and without particular qualifications’ (1994: 49, original emphasis). Yet Schnapper also believes that the abstract rationality of modern citizenship leaves the nation- state vulnerable to infra- and supra-national communal identities (155). The nation- state cannot, consequently, coalesce solely through rational political citizenship but must also be founded on a sense of (pre-existing) identity linked to the historical and cultural particularity of each national entity. In a less academic treatise entitled Nations Without Nationalism, philosopher Julia Kristeva echoes Schnapper’s overarching point, identifying ‘the French national idea’ as both ‘contractual’ and ‘cultural’ (1993: 40). This dual nature of French citizenship does not exist only in theory, but is also inscribed into French nationality law, which has historically been and remains a combination of jus sanguinis (whereby citizenship is accorded to the children of citizens no matter where they may be born) and jus solis (whereby citizenship is accorded to persons born in the territory in question) (Brubaker 1992; Feldblum 1999). Since the late 1980s political parties on both the Left and the Right have sought to restrict the principle of jus solis, largely in response to the rise that decade of the extreme- right National Front party, which claimed that (mostly Muslim) immigrants from North and West Africa were undermining French values and threatening France’s national identity (Favell 2001). In 1993, the conservative government revised the nationality code so that those born in France to foreign parents would henceforth have to file formal requests between the ages of 16 and 18 in order to become French nationals, and making it possible to deny such requests on the basis of a criminal record (Feldblum 1999). Similar restrictions on citizenship and naturalisation have continued into this decade. For example, under both conservative and Socialist governments, the period of time a foreign spouse must wait before applying for French nationality has steadily increased, going from six months to one year in 1998, and then up to four years in 2006. Under a new anti-terrorism law adopted in 2005, the period of time after naturalisation during which a naturalised citizen can be stripped of French nationality has increased from ten years to fifteen years. These various revisions and restrictions comprise part of a larger set of political discourses and practices aimed at ‘protecting’ French identity, especially against the supposedly incompatible values held by Muslim immigrants from North and West Africa. Dominant republican political rhetoric and policies concerning immigration, citizenship, and national identity have thus moved increasingly towards the racially

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. EXCEPTIONAL CITIZENS 387 and culturally essentialist positions adopted by the Front National, a process that has not gone unnoticed (Chombeau 2005; Fassin 2006). Although Fassin does not link them explicitly to extreme-right arguments, he contends that emblematic republican intellectuals like Pierre-Andre´ Taguieff and Alain Finkielkraut have described and defended French national identity in racialist and culturalist terms, imagining race and religion as reified forms of alterity. Nonetheless, I find that despite the increasingly essentialist tenor of mainstream republicanism, there remains a fundamental distinction between the racial and cultural chauvinism of the Front National and that of mainstream republicans, a distinction that goes back to the dual character of republican citizenship as both cultural and contractual. It is important to underscore this distinction because it helps us to understand the emergence of secular Muslims like Fadela Amara in the French public sphere. In assessing this distinction, and the discursive and ideological effectiveness – perhaps even the ideological need – for figures like Amara, it is useful to revisit Julia Kristeva’s Nations Without Nationalism (1993), focusing in particular on the discursive structure of her argument about French identity. On the one hand, Kristeva argues that the French/European attitude of pluralism and openness to foreigners is embedded in a specific history, which contains key moments integral to the formation of this attitude: namely, the Greek polis, Judaism, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. Thus European values like democracy, liberty, equality, and pluralism are particular (best embodied, naturally, by France), formed in the crucible of European history that remains distinct from the history of what Kristeva calls ‘the Arab masses’ across the Mediterranean. On the other hand, however, while seemingly restricting these values to Europeans, Kristeva simultaneously unlocks their access to non-European immigrants. ‘The right of foreigners to be integrated,’ she claims, ‘is a right to participate in this contractual, transitional, and cultural [French] nation’ (1993: 47). Elsewhere she writes: ‘Let us not be ashamed of European and particularly French culture, for it is by developing it critically that we have a chance to have foreigners recognise us as being foreigners all, with the same right of mutual respect’ (38). On the face of it, Kristeva seems to offer foreigners the chance of recognising ‘us as being foreigners all’ – in other words, by coming to Europe, foreigners have the opportunity to give up their essentialist, particularist rootedness and to embrace Kristeva’s enlightened position. Yet that embrace of French national values is not only a chance for foreigners, but also for France as well. After all, Kristeva writes that ‘we [French] have a chance to have foreigners recognise us as being foreigners all’ (my emphasis), i.e. to recognise the universality of the pluralist principle of mutual respect. Why would such recognition on the part of foreigners be a chance for the French? Because it would fulfil the universalist ambitions of republicanism and establish the universality of its principles. In an important way, then, the universalising imperative of republicanism depends on the presence of assimilated foreigners, whose acceptance and integration of republican values prove the latter’s universalist promise. Silverstein (2004), drawing on Balibar (1991) and Silverman (1992), has argued that universalism and particularism, and assimilation and difference, are not opposites but rather two sides of the same coin, and together constitute the continual avowal and disavowal of difference that forms the basis of French national identity. Building on such analysis, I wish to highlight the discursive necessity of commensurable difference to republicanism. Kristeva’s short treatise illuminates how the dual nature of republican citizenship – its historically generated particularism (its ‘cultural’ nature) and its principled universalism (its ‘contractual’ form) – both exclude ostensibly

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 388 MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO incommensurable forms of difference and, simultaneously, depend on commensurable forms of difference. Hence the discursive production and public embrace of ‘integrated’ subjects-of-difference (Kristeva’s ‘foreigners’) like Fadela Amara, Loubna Meliane,´ and Chahdortt Djavann. The necessary discursive production of commensurable forms of difference represents one of two interconnected ways in which contemporary republicanism, even as it moves increasingly toward the chauvinism of the extreme-right, remains distinct from the latter. Certainly, republican discourse and state practices have recently seemed to approach the policies advocated by Jean-Marie Le Pen (leader of the Front National), witnessed in the tightening of laws concerning citizenship and naturalisation, in deportation policies, in securitarian measures that disproportionately target Muslim immigrants and Muslim citizens, and in the popular election-time theme of ‘insecurity.’ Nonetheless, while integralists like Le Pen appeal to primordial loyalties (Holmes 2000), republicans like Kristeva trumpet non-rooted, non-primordialist, cosmopolitan identities. In fact, it is precisely the purported rootedness and exclusivity of Muslim identity that delineates most Muslims as not French, or not European (Hirsi Ali 2007; Taguieff 2005). Moreover, although many republicans may propose a fundamental and incommensurable distinction between the values of Islam and those of the Enlightenment West, they also insist, in contrast to the neo-racists of the extreme- right, that individual Muslim immigrants can, and must, surmount the barriers between the two opposed ‘civilisations.’ This may seem a difference of degree, but it remains an important detail, for it goes to the heart of republican citizenship’s ambivalence towards difference. On the one hand, republicanism forecloses the possibility of belonging to France to those who do not embody secular French values, and it excludes those forms of incommensurable difference deemed threatening to the racial and cultural nation. On the other hand, the very universality claimed for French values like freedom, equality, tolerance, and secularism means that all forms of immigrant-Muslim difference cannot be excluded wholesale. Thus republicanism produces and depends on, discursively and ideologically, commensurable forms of difference, and foreigners and immigrants, in a way that the integralism of the extreme-right does not. Exemplary ‘integrated’ Muslims like Fadela Amara are effects of the universalising imperative of republicanism. In addition, they not only prove the universality of French values by underscoring both these values’ desirability and their transferability to the not-yet-French, but they also forestall claims about the inherent exclusiveness of French national citizenship advanced by both the extreme right (as a virtue) and the non-republican left (as a critique). We would do well here to remember that the republican project’s discursive production of and dependence on a few paradigmatic assimilated subjects is not new. For most of its existence, the French colonial state refused citizenship to most of its native subjects in Algeria and West Africa, usually on the basis that these indigenes` were not (yet) civilised enough to properly exercise the rights accrued to citizens (Conklin 1997; Lorcin 1999; Wilder 2005). But the denial of citizenship to ‘natives’ was not total, and the colonial state practiced a form of selective assimilation, opening citizenship to a few exceptional individuals who demonstrated what Wilder calls ‘French cultural competence’ (2005: 130). Wilder understands these exceptional citizens as effects of the contradictory republican imperatives to universalise and particularise. He argues that the duality of republican citizenship – what I would term its concurrently contractual and cultural bases – made it impossible for the imperial Republic to ever extend full citizenship to Africans as Africans because they were always/already culturally

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. EXCEPTIONAL CITIZENS 389 particular; rather, it could only offer citizenship to exceptional individuals. I propose that the contradiction at the heart of these dual imperatives has also been consistently deferred through the selective assimilation of a few exceptional subjects. As Conklin notes in her discussion of the mission civilisatrice in French West Africa, even though it was thought impossible and undesirable to make all Africans citizens – due to their incommensurable racial and cultural difference – selective assimilation underscored the republican principle that a West African subject could become a French citizen (1997: 104). In a sense, the tension between particular and universal that underpins republicanism, which I elaborated in my earlier discussion of Renan, was deferred onto the ostensible barbarity and incommensurability of African (and, in Algeria, Arab Muslim) difference itself. The exceptional few who were granted citizenship stood as testaments to the universal promise of republican citizenship, and to the seeming failure of their African and Arab brothers and sisters to embrace French/universal values, forestalling the contradiction between universal and particular at the heart of the republican project. These exceptional citizens of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries prefigure the discursive production, and ideological effectiveness, of secular Muslims like Fadela Amara, Loubna Meliane,´ and Chahdortt Djavann.

Conclusion

I have so far contended that the tension between universal and particular in French conceptions of citizenship, and the consequent ideological dependence on the assimilation of commensurable forms of difference, are central to analysing the emergence of secular Muslim women in the French public sphere. In making this argument, I may have seemed to assume that such a process of inclusion entails the successful erasure of these women’s particular racial, cultural, and religious differences, and the transformation of a few paradigmatic ‘foreigners’ into abstract French citizens. No such assumption was being made, and I would like to conclude by examining whether figures like Fadela Amara can, in fact, ever transcend their difference and become truly universal republican citizens. Consider the final step of the 2003 Ni Putes Ni Soumises march across France: an exhibit entitled d’aujourd’hui (today’s Mariannes) that covered the fac¸ade of Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly. Unveiled on July 14 (Bastille Day), the exhibit consisted of photographic portraits of fourteen young women from the march, each wearing the red cap (bonnet phrygien) of Marianne, the emblem of the French Revolution. The exhibit ostensibly drew these women into the Republic’s fold, presenting them as exemplars of the original French citoyenne, Marianne. (And once again, the politics of citizenship was performed upon and through the gendered body.) Yet the press also insisted on identifying them not simply as Mariannes, but as Mariannes black-blanc-beur,10 and on emphasising that these new Mariannes were ‘housing project girls’ (filles de cite´) ‘from the immigrant suburbs’ (issus de banlieues). The consistent particularisation – indeed, racialisation – of these women at the moment of their celebration as citizens underscores the extent to which they are effects of the

10 Black-Blanc-Beur (Black-White-Beur) became the slogan of France’s multi-racial 1998 World Cup football team. Beur, slang for Arab, is a term developed in the 1980s by the children of immigrants; it is now used in mainstream circles to describe people of North African descent.

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 390 MAYANTHI L. FERNANDO dual universalising and particularising imperatives of republicanism that place subjects- of-difference in what Wilder (2007) calls ‘an impossible predicament’: they must yet cannot assimilate. I would go further: this impossible predicament is not only generated by the dual imperatives of republicanism, but also sustains and performs the universalism of republicanism. Even though the ‘Mariannes d’aujourd’hui’ are, like Fadela Amara, paradigmatic figures symbolising the universality of republican citizenship, figures who have ostensibly transcended their communal origins and their Muslim-immigrant difference, the universal citizenship that they represent seems to depend simultaneously on the erasure and recognition of commensurable forms of difference, since it is precisely the existence of such a difference that makes its erasure meaningful. In other words, it is only by marking the new Mariannes’ difference – their race, their religion, their immigrant origins – from the purportedly universal norm that their adherence to the universal norm makes any sense as a narrative of transcendence to universality. As representations of republican citizenship’s universal promise, women like Amara and her co-marchers must be simultaneously similar and different, for it is the very moment of the transition from difference to non-difference that performs the universality of republican citizenship. Their difference, even as it must be overcome in order to fulfil the universal promise of republican citizenship, cannot, in fact, ever be overcome: the universality of republican citizenship depends on that moment of transition, which depends in turn on the simultaneous existence of the two poles of difference and non- difference. As much, then, as Amara is fetedˆ as a model of ‘integration’ and a paradigmatic republican citizen who has cast aside her particular identity to embody the abstract universalism of republican citizenship, she is consistently demarcated by – indeed, marked with – terms that signal her bodily and civilisational difference. The same politicians, journalists, and public intellectuals who laud her as a model citizen usually refer to her with supplementary terms like beurrette (politically acceptable slang for second-generation Arab woman), fille d’immigres´ algeriens´ (daughter of Algerian immigrants), d’origine immigree´ (ofimmigrantorigin),andd’origine maghrebine´ (of Maghrebi origin). Even the term musulmane laıque¨ , which Amara herself seems to have embraced, in suggesting as it does a distinction between commensurably secular and incommensurably non-secular Muslims, underscores her difference. She is not secular like other secular French people – who do not require supplementary qualifiers – precisely because she will always remain Muslim. The phenomena of pious Muslim and secular Muslim women in the public sphere, then, and the debates to which they give rise, should not be understood as opposite occurrences. Rather, they are inextricably interlinked effects of the tensions of a republican citizenship that produces and depends on both the incommensurable difference of the veiled women and the commensurable difference of the unveiled musulmane laıque¨ .

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Wilder, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Ruba Salih, Annelies Moors, and Dorian Bell for their comments at various stages of this article. Parts of the article were also written with institutional support afforded me by an Andrew W.

C 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. EXCEPTIONAL CITIZENS 391

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mayanthi Fernando Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Anthropology 361 Social Science 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA [email protected]

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