Almost but not quite eating pork: Culinary nationalism and Islamic difference in millennial French comedies

Abstract

almost but not quite eating pork: culinary nationalism and islamic difference in millennial French comedies aBstract As the anti-immigration sentiment swells in France, cuisine becomes increasingly laden with nationalist discourse. In a post-9-11 European market, the halal label is lucrative, but also inflammatory. In this setting, pork, religiously forbidden to Jews and Muslims, is embedded in xenophobic concepts of nation, as well as in mainstream views of Franco-French identity. The pork restriction remains a primary tool for marking the Muslim Other. The Franco-Maghrebian comedy, a production starring actors of North African origin, thrives largely on this tension, promoting and teasing nationalism with pork humour. This article uses The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord to describe the relationship of pork humour to political practice in millennial France; contemporaneous events (such as the Bloc Identitaire anti-halal protests) also reflect and encourage a similar simplistic reading of Islam. After establishing pork humour in the Franco-Maghrebi features, it closely studies what Homi Bhabha would label a hybrid, Mohammed Dubois (Ona, 2013). Ona's film contributes and yet subverts the pork-humour formula with a Franco-French protagonist who seeks to appear North African when eating a lamb eye, reversing the common pork-humour formula. 108

Beur–French romances in French comedies: Postcolonial mimicry or a challenge to essentialist identities?

“…The ever-inappropriate Mohamed wears a pig mask to the party – an inside joke not only because Muslims are forbidden to eat pork and abhor pigs, but because the mask is similar to those worn by members of the Bloc Identitaire, an extreme right-wing group whose members wear pig masks to rallies to protest against Muslim presence in France – as described by Anne Leffeter (2011). Film scholar Nicole Wallenbrock reads the placement of the mask, which at times rests on top of Mohamed’s head, as an image suggestive of ‘paradoxical meanings, its multiplicity dismantling its once dominant exclusionary nature … revealing and concealing Frenchness’ (2016: 123). When Mohamed and Sabrina are sitting at a bar after the party, they admit who they really are as amusing suppositions – she saying it would be funny if she were a policewoman and Mohamed retorting it would be ridiculous to think he could be a French banker.…”