Nadia Kiwan

A critical perspective on socially embedded cultural policy in France

This paper aims to show how in France, the synthesis of cultural policy and social concerns throws up a number of tensions and pitfalls. These tensions are perhaps most acute because these sorts of cultural policies are not merely about socio‐economic issues but are actually tied to France’s colonial legacy and the presence of a large and often marginalised population of migrants and their descendents. The pitfalls stem from the universalist starting point of French cultural policy, which, although designed to integrate “new” and migrant/postmigrant publics, emergent artists and cultural practices, seems to simultaneously marginalise them since it is already premised on a binary that opposes art as aesthetic expression and art as an expression of cultural (anthropological) identity or social cohesion.

Perspectives on Cultural Diversity

In the European and British context, the much referred to concept of ‘cultural diversity’ and its equivalent in French and German is often evoked as complementary to, a synonym for, or an advance on, the similarly omnipresent term ‘multiculturalism’. This is mainly due to shifts in the perception of ethnically-marked difference in the postwar period. Particularly in the British context, these shifts were characterized by moving from a policy approach based on support for ‘ethnic minority’ cultures to multiculturalism, and then most recently to cultural diversity (Bennett, 2001: 58–9) In many different contexts, where metropolitan (as well as national and European) cultural policy engages with the relationship between people of different cultural backgrounds in European cities, cultural diversity seems to suggest a progressive, anti-discrimination agenda. However, when examined in more detail within the linguistic and pragmatic context of policy documentation and political debate, ‘cultural diversity’ becomes ambiguous, difficult to pin down, as well as contradictory. Whereas ‘multiculturalism’ discourses explicitly thematize questions of cultural coexistence or integration, and have been met with highly politicized support, critique or rejection, cultural diversity discourses are more fluid in their implications, and more in need of contextualizing within their respective political and cultural environments. Drawing upon key policy documents and political discussion produced at the European, national and metropolitan levels, we will explore in detail some of the linguistic and pragmatic contexts of cultural diversity and the semantic fields within which the term acquires its significance. Our aim is to examine the extent to which the multiple meanings of cultural diversity across the different levels and layers of policy and public debate in European nations, disguise or even potentially hinder and misdirect the discussion about greater transnational coexistence, which the earlier debates about multiculturalism had begun. Our critique is not intended as a defence of multiculturalism insofar as this has come to mean ‘a carnival of nations within nations’, but rather as a critique and clarification of the shifting term of ‘cultural diversity’.

Freedom of thought in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks

The terrorist atrocities perpetrated against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015 led to a national and international outpouring of anger and solidarity with the victims. This solidarity came to be expressed most clearly via the social media hashtag #JeSuisCharlie which spread across networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the hours and days after the shootings. In the first part of this article, I explore how the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan was not universally accepted, and how it was problematic for individuals to express themselves if they condemned the terrorist attacks but did not want to proclaim ‘Je suis Charlie’. The second and main part of the article will focus in particular on the freedom of thought of certain intellectuals, whose voices have arguably been sidelined and discredited in the wake of the attacks because their analysis of events did not correspond to the logic of the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response.

Artistic identities and professional strategies: Francophone musicians in France and Britain

Abstract This article will focus on the ways in which musicians of North African origin—either born in North Africa or in France and living in France and Britain—define their musical and artistic identities in relation to their national origins, place of birth, migration trajectories and location in which they perform their music. In particular, the article will focus on how perceptions of musicians’ national and post-migrant identities vary according to their location on either side of the Channel but also according to how the musicians themselves choose to present their music, depending on whether they are based in France or Britain. In addition to the individual strategies adopted by musicians, the article also considers how the shifting socio-political contexts in post-9/11 France and Britain have affected the choices and opportunities available to artists of North African origin in both national contexts.

Introduction: Networks and Transnational Movements: A Theoretical and Methodological Challenge to Migration Research

This is a book about South-North, North-South relations between Africa and Europe, seen through the alternative prism of artists from North Africa (mainly Morocco and Algeria) and Madagascar, and of their complex networks within and across African, European and wider global spaces: a decidedly ‘bottom-up’ view, which privileges the voices of people ‘on the move’. Our study presents and analyses the personal narratives and practices of such musicians in different locations across Africa and Europe, and those of the people who constitute their networks within the wider artistic, cultural and civil society milieus of global or globalizing societies.

Capital Cities as Global Hubs

This chapter will trace the dynamics between African and European capital cities, taking as its theoretical backdrop recent and current thinking about global cities and cultural globalization. As such, the first part of the chapter will focus on these theoretical considerations and then move onto the main empirical discussion where we will first explore the more predictable role of Paris as a hub or passage oblige for North African and Malagasy migrants and their descendants, and then consider the lesser-known role of other major European cities such as London, Amsterdam and Vienna for North African and Malagasy musicians. We will show how Paris and these other cities in the North offer multi-layered opportunities for migrant and migrant-origin artists based there and furthermore how the presence of such artists has come, over time, to transform the cultural fabric of the cities they reside and work in.

Beyond the Capitals: Translocality/Transnationality in Europe and the South

This chapter goes one step further than the previous one in showing the ways in which artists’ networks across Europe and the ‘South’ are often inscribed in multiple locations beyond the highly visible concentration of diasporic musicians in capital cities such as Paris or London (see Chapter 3). Here, then, we explore two issues: firstly, the phenomenon of multi-sited individuals and groups who are simultaneously located in a capital and provincial towns and cities across Europe or countries of origin, and secondly, the resettlement of diasporic artists and cultural producers in their countries of origin. Both of these trends are interrelated in that they both highlight the spatial complexity of diasporic and transnational ties. Migrant and post-migrant musicians are not only located in ‘minority ethnic neighbourhoods’ of Europe’s capital cities but rather live and are part of networks which straddle two or more locales. So the fractal metaphor used by Arjun Appadurai (1996) in his reflections on cultural globalization as ‘cultural chaos’ resonate with the trajectories of these multi-sited artists who are part of a fairly complicated network of cultural flows and translocal or transnational ties.

Translocal Networking in Madagascar and Morocco

The main focus of our book is on migrant musicians whose main residence is at present in Europe. However, in this first part we start at the point of origin. More specifically, in this chapter we begin with the artists from the provinces, who live in or come from some of the rural regions and provincial towns of Madagascar and Morocco, and in Chapter 2 we add those in the countries’ metropolitan cities.

Mutual Supports: South North

In this chapter we will investigate an almost completely undocumented relationship existing or emerging between actors in civil society movements and socially engaged Malagasy and North African musicians. The civil society organizations in question are European-based NGOs and other more loosely structured associations and their transnational offshoots or links, whom we’ve encountered as a result of our work with individual musicians. Our own awareness of such links and what we will be able to document empirically in this chapter comes as one of the surprising results of our theoretical and methodological approach to the study of transnationalism. As discussed before, we are describing and analysing transnational networks as flows of individual actors rather than focusing on clustered diasporic groups in fixed locations. Only by extending beyond a study of spaces, places and localized groups of people were we able to discover links which at first sight had little to do with the musicians’ primary activity as transnational artists. Hence the combination of following individuals and conducting multi-sited ethnography at what we defined as ‘hubs’ was particularly fruitful in uncovering artists’ links to civil society movements and associations.

Mutual Supports: North South

In this chapter we will focus more closely on national cultural institutions in the North and the role they play in the facilitation and activation of transnational cultural networks. To what extent do institutions such as the British Council, the Institut francais, the Goethe-Institut and those associated with them in the South such as the Cercle germanomalgache/Goethe Cultural Centre, the Alliance francaise, the Centre culturel Albert Camus or cultural divisions of various embassies engage in ‘top-down’ initiatives with North Africa and Madagascar and to what extent do such initiatives work in tandem with other local cultural actors based in the South? This chapter will also focus on the complex nature of the relationship between cultural institutions attached to the former colonial power (that is, the Institut francais in the case of North Africa and Madagascar) and cultural actors (for example festival organizers, musicians) who are based in the former colonies. The first section of the chapter will provide a brief overview of the historical and political contexts surrounding the establishment of these institutions, before going on to consider the main ways in which such bodies intervene in the various cultural scenes in Morocco and Madagascar, taking as our focus a number of key case studies drawn from our field research with musicians, cultural producers and institutional representatives.