In the last ten to fifteen years, at least twenty personal narratives and sets of essays have appeared, recounting attempts by Americans to fit in, to belong at some level in France. These texts, of which Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is probably the best known, have by now become a full-fledged genre, one that appears, moreover, to be more prominent on France than on any other country or culture, with Italy/Tuscany as the only competitor. Two became bestsellers (Gopnik and Sedaris) and a third (Kaplan) was a National Book Award finalist. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon, as Carolyn Durham demonstrates in the area of fiction elsewhere in this issue.
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Civic Integration at Issue
An Essay on the Political Condition of Migrants
José María Rosales
This article deals with the civic integration of migrants, focusing on the process immigrants undergo to become nationals of new states. Discussing some recent advances in immigration policies in European Union countries, it questions the gap that separates their normative principles from institutional practices. Many existing citizens would not meet the administrative requirements imposed on migrants to gain legal residence and nationality. Furthermore, the experience of non-nationals living in Europe suggests that integration challenges remain, well after naturalisation is achieved, as new citizens face ongoing discriminatory burdens at various levels, including the labour market and politics. Part of an ongoing study on the civic condition of migrants, the article argues that a liberal approach to immigrant integration should not cease with the granting of citizenship. It should address the urgent task of protecting new citizens from discrimination that impairs their rights in practice.
Schemata in the Graphic Novel Persepolis
Accommodation, Combination, Integration
Fredrik Strömberg
visual building blocks. In Persepolis , this would be a specific example of a depiction of young Marji. Assimilation and Accommodation The connection between what I have labelled visual building blocks and visual ideas is what Gombrich
Diplomat, Landlord, Con-artist, Thief
Housing Brokers and the Mediation of Risk in Migrant Moscow
Madeleine Reeves
, intermediary], identifying accommodation for Kyrgyz migrant workers to rent and then, unofficially, sublet, transforming apartments into mini dormitories for other migrant workers. Sanjar, who had arrived in Moscow three years earlier from Osh in southern
Ivi Daskalaki and Nadina Leivaditi
“hospitality” in the context of their temporary accommodation in a Transit Shelter for Unaccompanied (Male) Minors on the island of Lesvos. Specifically, by concentrating on the youths’ stance towards their expected participation in formal, remedial, and
“Two Wheels Bad”?
The Status of Cycling in the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales in the 1930s
Michael Cunningham
countryside, particularly by providing hostels or other simple accommodation for them in their travels.” 6 By September 1939, it had a membership of 83,418 and a complement of 297 hostels. 7 The establishment and success of the YHA reflected the popularity
Cutting the Face
Kinship, State and Social Media Conflict in Networked Jordan
Geoffrey Hughes
shaped by deeper histories of resistance and accommodation involving kin groups and colonial and postcolonial state policies. Like the Ottoman and British empires before it, the Jordanian state has long sought to stamp out raiding and feuding as some of
Mythili Rajiva
In this article, I examine how second generation South Asian Canadian girls negotiate their racialized position in peer culture, through various strategies of accommodation, denial and resistance. I use feminist post-structuralist theories of discourse and positioning with feminist and narrative methods to analyze my interviews with ten subjects about their racialized adolescence. I argue that girls use certain strategies of accommodation—'passing', wannabe-ism, and strategic Otherness—to fit in without abandoning their ethnicized identities. Strategies of denial surface through girls' internalizing of dominant discourses of racism; this leads them to rationalize racism or invoke assimilationist narratives that hold minorities responsible for their own experiences of exclusion. Girls also use strategies of resistance in which they identify hegemonic discourses of belonging, speak openly about racism or criticize aspects of white culture in the context of South Asian community and family norms.
Daniel M. Knight
The consequences of prolonged fiscal austerity have left people in Trikala, central Greece, with feelings of intense temporal vertigo: confusion and anxiety about where and when they belong in overarching timelines of pasts and futures. Some people report feeling ‘thrown back in time’ to past eras of poverty and suffering, while others discuss their experiences of the current crisis situation as reliving multiple moments of the past assembled in the present. This article analyses how locals understand their complex experiences of time and temporality, and promotes the accommodation of messy narratives of time that can otherwise leave the researcher feeling sea-sick.
Fabienne Randaxhe
From a French perspective, the relationship between the state and religion in the United States may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the American nation was the first one to have established, by constitutional means, a separation between religious bodies and the political realm. On the other hand, religious and political spheres in the US still seem to overlap to some extent. While French approaches tend to regard US laïcité as uncertain and incomplete, this article discusses whether laïcité is in the US incomplete or aware of tensions to be lessened among religious, political and social forces. I focus on legal regulation and consider the notion of accommodation as a particular form of legal laïcité.