Participants of an annual Solidarity Festival in a Paris suburb push against negative images of the outer-city that diminish the force of their vision for a more just world, raising questions about the interests such images sustain.
Paper long abstract:
Frequently portrayed as sites of breakdown and disorder, the disadvantaged French suburbs are less well known for their flourishing pluralism and dynamic associational life. In this paper I focus on a Solidarity Festival that takes place once a year in the city where I work outside of Paris. A fortnight of events that echoes recurrent themes from around the city, the Festival brings together local grassroots actors, officials, and international delegates for a series of film screenings, debates, international exchanges and performances that extol the city's diversity and celebrate its transnational ties. At once a spurn to dominant images of the suburbs that focus on immigration and economic hardship, the Festival is also a moment of affirmation for the several hundred local participants whose humanitarian engagements bear witness to the anguish of displacement and their desires to maintain meaningful connections to their erstwhile homes.
For its participants the Festival constitutes a powerful moment of communitas. Animated by visions of a more just and united world, the Festival pushes into stark relief the urgent appeal on the part of many to resist and surpass the ambient norms that reduce such actions to feel-good instantiations of diversity and doing-good, and raises compelling questions about the political and social interests that conspire to keep such norms in place.