1 Chapter 1 Overture: a Call to Listen As the Twentieth Century Gave Way

Chapter 1 Overture: A Call to Listen As the twentieth century gave way to the new millennium, a particular cultural phenomenon emerged on the French landscape: the call to listen, issued to French society from Mediterranean culture in French. As the predominant use of analog sound and radio shifted to the digital age, the digitized movement of media made cultural works (including literature, graphic novels, film, theatre, and music) and journalistic enterprises (including newspapers, blogs, and news aggregates) more accessible to the general public. Access became far more efficient and quick. The shift from analog recording and radio broadcasting to digital media allowed for a more efficient transmission of national and regional cultures, as well as the immediate transmission of historic events. As a global community, our everyday cultural experience has become enmeshed with sounds from around the world, ranging from voices, to music, to advertising, to bombs, and beyond. Many times, we bear witness to events through both sight and sound mere moments after they happen, at times simultaneously as they do. This cultural weave into the texture of daily life has given us the heretofore unimaginable possibility of experiencing the world through not only the eyes, but also the ears, of others, with dizzying immediacy. Mediterranean culture in French appropriated twentieth century cultural shifts in sound technology and distribution through a phenomenon I have named the call to listen. By Mediterranean culture in French, I refer to French-language cultural works that, first, originate in either North Africa or the Middle East, whether through authorship, 1 performance, or content, and that second, were all published or released in France. Thus there is a fluid movement across the Mediterranean, between countries and geographic regions, among these works. At times, this movement happens so quickly that it renders geographic distance moot. What sets these works further apart is that, in a variety of ways, the sounds and silences in these texts issue a call to listen to the immigrant and postcolonial other, rather than to impose a Republican narrative—this is to say, a narrative that is both assimilationist and secular in ways particular to France—upon Francophone experience. This call to listen evokes the particularities of gender, ethnic, and national identities of its subjects, which—as the texts addressed in this work demonstrate—results in cultural play with French media and political representations of Arab femininity as either docile or aggressive, and Arab masculinity as inherently aggressive. The call to listen engages sound and silence as dynamic elements in cultural works in order to bring forth questions, to complicate, to subvert, and/or to transgress the Republican narrative imposed upon Mediterranean peoples within French society. These Mediterranean peoples include native French-speakers living in former French colonies and protectorates, first-generation immigrants (referred to as français de papiers, as opposed to the native French designation français de souche), second-generation immigrants (Beurs, or français d’origine followed by country or ethnicity of extraction), or third-generation immigrants. I define silence as the imposition of a dominant narrative. Social narratives in former colonizing countries, such as France, assert that Islam and all of its cultural variants are antithetical to universal, or Republican, values. In France, such social narratives have lead to further oppression and subjugation of both men and women of North African and Middle Eastern extraction who are either French citizens or live in France. France’s social narrative imposes its own brand of secularism (infused with the history of French Catholicism) and 2 assimilation (which turns a blind eye to the shortcomings of mixité, or the demand for citizens of anonymous sameness in the public sphere, ostensibly leveling gender, ethnic and class difference) upon peoples for whom these narratives do not fit.1 As a cultural phenomenon that counters the imposition of a dominant narrative as a form of silencing, the call to listen utilizes representations and themes of sound and silence as a vehicle for questioning representations of Arab masculinity as inherently aggressive, and Arab femininity as either victimized by Arab men or aggressive to French society. This definition of silence is an intentionally politicized one, which may not be accepted by all readers. However, this definition works in tandem with the political possibilities that the call to listen as a cultural phenomenon asserts. The call to listen acts as a cultural counterweight to the silences imposed by dominant social and political narratives in France. Calls are intended to produce some kind of effect: think of a call to prayer, a call to arms, calling a meeting to order. It is worth noting, of course, that as western Europe virulently protests visual signs of Muslim immigration, whether minarets or veils, Islamic culture privileges human sound over image. On this view, Islamic art is anti-representational. Islamic cultural traditions of dress indicate the centrality of hiding parts of the face (beards and niqab) and the body (headscarves, niqab, and full-body veils). Islamic architecture secludes women and children through walled spaces contained within larger walled spaces. But at least one Islamic voice rings out: minarets were built taller and taller over time as cities grew so that people everywhere could hear the call to prayer.2 1 Throughout “Sounding the Text,” I follow the lead of sociologist Riva Kastoryano in using the term assimilation to refer to the French notion of intégration. See John Bowen’s chapter “Remembering Laïcité” in Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves (2007) for a helpful assessment and analysis of the legacy of assimilation and French Republicanism. 2 I point to the the privileging of the calling voice over image as a cultural trope, rather than a social aim. The way these anti-visual traditions have been interpreted in fundamentalist Muslim cultures as a means of oppressing and subjugating people in different parts of the world goes without question: these are serious 3 As a cultural phenomenon, then, the call to listen issued to French society from Mediterranean culture in French makes use of sounds and silences as signals and sirens. When sounds and silences are evoked or represented in these cultural works, these evocations and representations give way to explorations of what it means to speak French, to be marked as feminine or masculine in ways particular to French media and political representations North African and Middle Eastern identities and experience. As an intrinsic part of the cultural landscape in modern France, French-speaking Mediterranean culture is woven not only from visual cues and culture (that which is privileged in rational thought and the universalizing tendencies of French Republican ideals), but from listening practices that reveal narratives laced with sound, as well as the recuperation of voices from imposed silences. In some ways, honing in on sound rather than image might seem antithetical to modern culture. For example, in The Audible Past (2003), Jonathan Sterne argues that within cultural studies and theory, there is a “pervasive narrative that says that, in becoming modern, Western culture moved away from a culture of hearing to a culture of seeing” (3). That the shift to rational thought as the dominant paradigm is named through a reference to light demonstrates the significance of seeing in modern culture. Yet, it could be argued that listening to imposed silences is the sine qua non discursive practice for philosophers and critics in and of modern France. As Sterne continues, listening “certainly charts a significant field of modern practice” (3). There is not so much a call to envision as a call to listen, and to hear. Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern breaches of basic human rights. Indeed, the traditions I cite here have also been interpreted in places such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as justifications for literally silencing women in situations both social and cultural. 4 Speak?” (1991) is an obvious point of departure here: in her examination of the absence of a subaltern voice in both history and intellectual discourse, she writes, When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of “the utterance.” The sender—“the peasant”—is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. (287) Here, Spivak establishes a relationship between the sender (or the silent, and silenced, subaltern speaker), the social text (a metaphorically sonic field of intellectual inquiry), “the utterance” (the voice of the sender, which can only be traced rather than heard), and the intellectual, who makes a choice to listen or not to listen for the utterance of the speaker upon the social text (here referred to as “we,” which rolls Spivak, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, the community of deconstructionist thinkers into an assemblage of intellectual listeners). Later, in her analysis of the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri in 1926, she demonstrates that the utterance of the subaltern speaker can only be heard in traces: Bhaduri waited to hang herself until the onset of menstruation in order to disprove sure conjecture that her suicide “would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion” (307). Those who speak in this social text, however, write over Bhaduri’s assertion: “One tentative explanation of her inexplicable act had been a possible melancholia brought on by her brother-in-law’s repeated taunts that she was too old to be not-yet-a-wife” (307). In Spivak’s exploration, two of Bhaduri’s nieces assert that “it appears that it was a case of illicit love” (308). Spivak thus pulls a silenced voice from the reverberations of more dominant voices in the social text.

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