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Muslim mothers and French daughters: women caught between religion and secularity in a post-beur film culture
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bigley, Heather Ann |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | Even the message, if it isn’t in the environment, it doesn’t become internalized (Hargreaves 19, my translation). Tadjer attributes this loss of transmission to the first generation’s widespread illiteracy, explaining that many parents could not read the Koran themselves, so their own knowledge of Islam was reduced to a list of dos and don’ts (19). Also, authors restrain from critiquing Islam because of their strong affective ties to the community and a wish to protect parents from offense (19). As well, authorial desire to remain unperturbed by what Hargreaves terms “ideological harassment” from the burgeoning fundamentalist groups in European city centers may lead to silence regarding a critique or engagement with religious questions (19). Lastly, many second-generation citizens in the North African immigrant community may have wanted to distance themselves from the growing civil war in Algeria between the army-backed government and the Islamic Salvation Front; laying claim to French secularism may have been one way of dismissing Women Caught between Religion & Secularity in a Post-Beur Film Culture 117 an Algeria now characterized as increasingly fundamentalist in the international press. I argue that one way to understand the increasing discussion of Islam within French films from North African filmmakers is to contextualize these filmmakers within their religious community of origin. This is not to claim that these filmmakers are or are not practicing Muslims, but instead to locate the impetus for this development in the narrative content of the films. Due to globalization, migration, and the technological ease of film production and distribution, international filmmakers affiliated with reterritorialized religious communities have also begun to produce films that discuss similar issues as those found in post-Beur films. Religious Affiliated Film in a Global Context Films produced by religious communities embody and negotiate the anxieties facing these communities, brought on by globalization and the changing structure of the nationstate, through representations of religious women. Yet, religious communities engage in multiple ways with forces of modernity, globalization, nationalism, and cultural change and so the cultural representations of women will vary from community to community. Immigrant and ethnic populations in the North African community in France must assimilate to French normative cultural practices for economic, social, and physical security. The French state perceives the French-Maghrebi as Muslim first, French second, if at all. For many Franco-French, who see themselves as secular in spite of their Catholic heritage, Islam typifies the alien status of the immigrant North African community. “Muslims today are seen as challenging basic tenets of French republican culture and identity [secular education being one of the most important aspects of this culture]” (Laurence and Vaisse 55) because of their demands to be recognized as a religious community in the public sphere (54). Thus, “becoming French” has been interpreted by both Franco-French and members of the North African immigrant community as leaving behind Islam and its attendant religious markers, like the foulard |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.transitionsjournal.org/volumes/Volume%207.%202011/Heather%20Bigley.%20Muslim%20Mothers%20and%20French%20Daughters.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
