Unpublished Paper
Republic and Nation are just metro stations: Value, Language and Play in Urban France
CHESS - Culture and Heritage in European Societies and Spaces
(2016)
Abstract
In times of crises over economics, migration, and terrorism France asserts republican values to reaffirm national unity, strengthen national borders, and calm bourgeois anxieties. Yet as republican values are seen to be embodied in particular national symbols and linguistic forms, they become the values of empire (Negri 2000), silencing minority voices and narratives. Ann Stoler describes this as France’s “colonial aphasia” (2011), the lack of a verbal or a conceptual vocabulary for the colonial past. In contrast to this silence and forgetting, young people of diverse origins on France’s urban periphery are coming up with new words and new values to shape the post-colonial present. Turning words on their heads with the fluid use of multiple codes, they challenge the linguistic ideals of the French Republic - purity, clarity and universality – and her values of secularism, liberty, and fraternity. With provocative statements like “Republic and Nation are just metro stations” they show their exclusion from the ideals of the Republic, and question those values all together.
Keywords
- Language,
- Nationalism,
- Minority Students
Disciplines
Publication Date
Winter January 1, 2016
Citation Information
Cat Tebaldi. "Republic and Nation are just metro stations: Value, Language and Play in Urban France" CHESS - Culture and Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (2016) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/cat-tebaldi/2/