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

Abstract

During the last 50 years, descendants of Maghrebians who immigrated to France ( beurs) have received French citizenship. Their societal position is paradoxical: French citizens by birth and soil, they live in French society; however, for many French de souche, they are still considered immigrants. Although the French government has a policy of assimilation, many beurs do not participate in the French way of life. They live in the projects, their children go to sub-standard schools, and beur youth unemployment rate is at least double that for the French population as a whole. Their practice of Islam alienates them further. However, while the anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim party is gaining in numbers, beur culture is increasingly a part of French culture: Arabic words have made their way into French, beur music is popular, and there is a strong beur presence in film. In this article, I will explore the portrayal of mixed-ethnicity couples in two films, Il reste du jambon (Anne Depetrini, 2010) and Mohamed Dubois (Ernesto Ona, 2012). These films reflect a growing preoccupation with mixed couples and their conflicts, and are paradigmatic of the process of assimilation of Arabs into French culture. In the first, a beur doctor, Djalil (Ramzy Bedia) integrates and wins a blond, middle-class French reporter; in the second, Arnaud, the son of a rich French banker renounces his French identity, and adopts an Arab heritage to win a beur policewoman. Although both are French productions, the principal beur roles may be seen as breaking through the French stereotypes of Muslims/Arabs and therefore as counter-narratives of the nation, which, according to Homi Bhabha, ‘continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – [and] disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’. I suggest, however, that while the beur ‘essentialist identity’ is challenged in the films, there are strains of neo-colonialism, with its accompanying ambivalence toward the beur characters, who are subject to mimicry, which consistently maintains the position of the dominant French film-consuming culture.