Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cites (New Directions in Ethnography)

Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the housing projects, or cités, that ring Paris, showing how young people of Algerian Arab origins play with language in fascinating ways that subvert commonly held notions of intercultural animosity.

• Provides solid, real-world evidence in the often abstracted theoretical debate on globalization and transnationalism
• Offers detailed data on linguistic practices that is more focused than generalized anthropological studies
• Includes the experiences of French-Algerian adolescent girls who remain largely absent from academic and popular discourse
• Reveals the cultural richness and diversity of a population that is stigmatized and marginalized in a national context

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: Performing Transcultural Youth Identities 1

1 Ethnography in les Cités 8

2 Speech in the Cité: Style and Stigma 34

3 “Sans Problème” or “Cent Problèmes”? Revoicing Stereotypes about les Arabes 58

4 La Racaille and le Respect 91

5 “You Call That a Girl?”: Gender Crossing and Borderwork 114

6 Parental Name-Calling 154

7 Crossing Registers: Voicing the French TV Host 172

Conclusion 195

References 200

Index 213

 

Chantal Tetreault is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, USA. A specialist in linguistic and cultural anthropology, her work focuses on issues relating to migration and social change in France. She has contributed articles to journals such as Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language and Communication.