Transcultural Teens

Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the housing projects, or cité, 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

"...the relevance and deep theoretical underpinnings of Transcultural Teens offers social researchers robust case studies and strong practical examples of discourse analysis at work....a very relevant book that has been very well developed and organized. Tetreault’s well-constructed ethnographic research collection methods and discourse analyses provide not only a very clear picture but further frame this active and increasingly important context in deep social theory." - Anton Vegel, AAA Book Forum, 2016 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.

The housing projects that ring modern Paris are a highly fluid linguistic and cultural melting pot, where youth culture combines North African, French, and American elements in a constantly evolving mélange. Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the cités. It shows how young people of Algerian Arab origins play with language and culture in fascinating and revealing ways, and in so doing afford us keen insights into youth culture and globalization.

The author’s observations demonstrate that, far from evincing the ‘clash of civilizations’ so feared (and anticipated) by Western and Arab cultures, youth in Paris housing projects steadfastly occupy a progressive social crossroads where cultural ingredients from North African and European traditions are fused – and thus transformed. The book contributes to an understanding of the emergent identities that arise through movement across geographic, cultural, and linguistic terrain, and includes vital commentary on the everyday experiences of young French Algerian women – notably absent from scholarly publications and popular media alike. The author shows how the experience of growing up in a cité is one of spatial and racial marginalization within the national context of France, yet is nevertheless highly receptive to the frequent encounters with people, cultures, and modes of communication from a range of disparate sources.

“Tetreault’s rich study of the communicative practices of adolescents of North African Arab heritage living in France conveys with lively specificity how these young people negotiate larger dilemmas of gender and ethnicity.”

Jane E. Goodman, Indiana University

"A beautifully textured and insightful ethnography of how Muslim teenagers in the French cités literally talk back to stigmatizing discourses and collectively build semiotically rich, morally structured, transcultural worlds."

Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College