Young, liminal, and (anti)racist?
Academic and political conversations about contemporary
“youth” in France do not typically include Jews. Since
the first “headscarf affair” in 1989,2 French scholars have
explored “Arab” teenagers’ rejection of universalist social
norms and embrace of totalizing ethnoreligious imaginaries
(Bensoussan 2004; Brenner 2002; Gaspard and Khosrokhavar
1995; Kepel 1987; Lorcerie 2003; Taguieff 2002;
Trigano 2001; Wieviorka 2005).3 For many of these social
scientists, Muslim youth make up a “new dangerous class”
that threatens the French social order through archaic values
and violence (Beaud and Pialoux 2003). In different
ways, both the Right and Left link this threat specifically to
Islam. On the right, commentators privilege an imagined
Muslim will-to-domination that makes minority status intolerable
(Brenner 2002; Taguieff 2002). On the left, writers
see fundamentalist Islam as the only stable source of values
in destitute communities abandoned by the state and
excluded from the nation (Cesari et al. 2001; Kepel 1987;
Wihtol de Wenden 1999). Both sides often view Muslim
youth practices as a retreat from “modernity,” emphasizing
young people’s supposedly premodern, essentialist assumptions
about gender, race, and social organization.
Whereas French social scientists accuse Muslim youth
of dragging French society back to the dark ages, much
English-language theoretical and ethnographic literature
emphasizes the potential for liberation contained within
youth identity and culture (Bhabha 1994; Hall 1990;
Hebdige 1979). Although theorists of this bent acknowledge
that this potential is not always realized, it seems to