‘Red suburb' and otherness: How migrant arts became legitimate in the Communist and working class Parisian suburb

As migrant people are generally – when they arrive in a country – dominated, many sociologists study them with miserabilist interpretative frameworks. To prevent this bias, it is important to have epistemological safeguards: studying segregation and métissage; studying cultural and artistic fields (and not only the economic one); having a diachronic perspective.

For my PhD research I study the different arts that have been recognized as legitimate since the 1960s in the Parisian former ‘red suburb’. In the French urban and social context, this space is marked by a long-lasting equivalence between a working class social world and a communist political administration. The establishment of the important economic waves of migration is also typical of this area. It has also been strongly influenced by the very dynamic artistic political program initiated by the French Communist Party. My work is based on an ethnographic approach of two cities of this suburb (Saint-Denis, Nanterre).

In this presentation, I propose to analyse how, in this dynamic artistic local context, migrant groups and migrant arts are included. How the local elite has been dealing with otherness through time? What are the social and historical conditions of possibility for a recognition of artistic forms that come from or refer to migrants?

(1) I will present a history of the relationships between the local elite and the different waves of migrants: from a very legitimate vision of arts defined by the communist white working class elite to the legitimization of word music and “urban cultures”. (2) I will try to understand how it has been possible, defining in a more precise way these social and ethnical groups and the process of acculturation of both following generations and white local elite. (3) Finally, I will compare this regarding to the national context.