Une Ambiance Diaspora: Continuity and Change in Parisian Maghrebi Imaginaries

Abstract

This article is an investigation of ethno-commercial exchanges and interactions between Jews and Muslims of North African heritage that takes account of their cross-cultural antecedents and continuities. The ethnographic focus is a telecommunications company called M-Switch located in the Parisian neighborhood of le Sentier, the trajectory of which is part of a broader cultural and economic shift observable in the neighborhood from industry to new technologies. This particular company is a privileged site for witnessing how people work with and across religious differences between Maghrebi Jews and Muslims in France. The ethnography looks at how contemporary, non-nostalgic reconceptualizations of the past are utilized to negotiate an ethnically plural and potentially convivial present. Relationships within the company have a Maghrebi center made up of shared cultural memories, economic interdependency, and changing gender and class relations. More specifically, relationships between Jews and Muslims at M-Switch are often defined by a desire to re-appropriate and adapt a Maghrebi world. This project is complicated by French and geopolitical representations of ethno-religious conflict.

Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom

“…The constructions of Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe more broadly has been attracting growing attention of anthropologists and researchers from other fields, including explorations of complex examples of interactions between Jewish and Muslim actants in organised initiatives of Jewish-Muslim dialogue (Roggeveen, Vellenga and Wiegers, 2017;Van Esdonk and Wiegers, 2019), everyday encounters (Everett, 2020;Sheldon, 2022a;Sheldon, 2022b), the intersections between imageries that have become to be associated with the two groups (Anidjar, 2008;Judaken, 2018;Katz, 2015;Klug, 2014;Mandel, 2016;Meer, 2013;Meer and Modood, 2012;Meer and Noorani, 2008;Renton and Gidley, 2017) and the overlapping experiences of Jewish and Muslim communities (Arkin, 2013;Arkin, 2018;Bunzl, 2007;Everett, 2018;Everett and Gidley, 2018;Mandel, 2008;Özyürek, 2016;Özyürek, 2018;Silverstein, 2018;Werbner, 2013).…”

On Conceptualising African Diasporas in Europe

“…In this sense, it is relevant to speak of diasporic connections to cultural groups in Africa in terms of continuity, retention, survival, tradition, interconnectivity, networks, exchange, dialogue, translation, hybridity, transformation, and/or identity. Examples of studies on cultural African diasporas in Europe are how Maghrebi Jews and Muslims in the neighborhood of le Sentier in Paris interact, identify with and through each other in a shared sense of 'North-Africanness' via dynamic historical interactions in the Maghreb and postcolonial France (Everett 2020); how African Pentecostal churches in Belgium reproduce and transmute Pentecostal theology from Congo, Cameroon and other African countries in a secularised European context (Bangura 2018); or how African diasporas of artists, students and activists in the neighbourhood of Matonge in Brussels kindled decolonial consciousness in Africa and Belgium while occupying an ambiguous cultural space of not fully belonging to either (Arnaut 2018).…”

Ethics without borders: solidarity and difference in inter‐community dialogue

“…Researchers have pointed out that their relationship has been strongly mediated by the broader context of marginalization and minoritization of Jewish and Muslim populations in European societies (see, e.g., Atshan & Galor 2020; Egorova & Ahmed 2017; Kasstan 2022; Katz 2015; Mandel 2016; Özyürek 2018; 2023). They have also highlighted everyday conviviality in the interactions between the two groups (Everett 2020; Gidley & Everett 2022), explored the intertwined trajectories of anti‐Jewish and anti‐Muslim prejudice (Egorova 2022; Everett & Vince 2020; Judaken 2018; Klug 2014; Meer 2013; Meer & Noorani 2008; Renton & Gidley 2017; Romeyn 2017), and questioned the very assumption that Jewish‐Muslim relations should be used as a category of analysis rather than purely as a category of practice (Egorova 2018; Everett & Gidley 2018).…”