Introduction

Twenty years ago, when we edited the first book devoted to creative works by writers, film-makers, musicians, cartoonists, and other artists born of immigrant parents originating in former French colonies, this was in many ways an unusual development. While France has long been a country of immigration, and many foreign-born artists have contributed to the nation's cultural creativity, until recently immigrant minorities have seldom been regarded as distinctive components within the cultural fabric of France. Since the 1980s, when young artists from post-colonial immigrant backgrounds first began to attract attention, they have been assumed by many among the majority-ethnic population in France to be imbricated in alien cultural traditions that make it impossible for them to be truly or fully French. Yet the vast majority of these new cultural practitioners feel and are French. In our 1997 volume, it was clear that their frequent marginalization arose far less from irreconcilable cultural differences than from a politicized system of ethnic differentiation inherited from the colonial period and reconstructed in post-colonial France. Today, it is equally clear from this new volume edited by Kathryn Kleppinger and Laura Reeck that, despite the passage of time, more than half a century after the liquidation of the vast majority of the French empire, the ethnic hierarchy that underpinned the colonial system overseas lives on in many ways within the Hexagon in neocolonial perceptions of the cultural practices of ‘Arabs’, ‘blacks’, and ‘Muslims’ as inherently extraneous and inferior to French norms even when the artists concerned are natives and citizens of France. We place the terms ‘Arabs’, ‘blacks’, and ‘Muslims’ in inverted commas to mark the fact that, as widely used in France, these terms and the notions they designate are social constructions that are both empirically questionable and often negatively connoted, stigmatizing minority-ethnic groups whose self-perceptions are frequently at variance with the attributes projected onto them. Tensions of this nature have been fundamental to the body of creative works produced by post-colonial minorities.