century.93
SHIFTING BOUNDARIES
This history matters in understanding what Yacouba experienced and what many black people experience in French public spaces. It illustrates the centrality of racial distinctions in the creation of the French nation, and shows that racial profiling at the Gare du Nord emerged from earlier classifications and containment practices associated with efforts to repress so-called dangerous classes and ensure fluid circulation. The station has always been governed by an imperial logic. When it was constructed, the most important boundary the state and railway companies sought to enforce was not between French and foreign but rather between rural and urban, working class and bourgeois, in a system where these distinctions signified not only regional or class divides, but also cultural and moral differences that were difficult or impossible to overcome. Class divides and the division between rural and urban persist to this day. However, despite the long-standing practices of marginalizing rural populations, both groups are now incorporated into the ideology of what constitutes French identity.94 This incorporation continues to be denied to Africans and those of African descent.
Racial profiling at the present-day Gare du Nord is also a product of postcolonial migration policy. Until the 1970s, immigration was not a problem to be solved but rather a solution that helped propel the French economy during a period of unprecedented growth in the postwar period, referred to as Thirty Glorious Years. After the Second World War, France needed more workers. In 1954, there were 1,700,000 immigrants in France according to the census; twenty years later, there were almost 3,400,000 (not including naturalized citizens). These foreign workers would become labeled as a problem in 1973 when the oil crisis and recession hit.95 By then, almost all of the places colonized by France in Africa were independent.
New laws meant to curb migration would mean that legal workers already in France could find themselves in “illegal” status. Violent racist incidents were on the rise and being documented by activist groups. In the 1970s, xenophobic discourse was on the rise but was not yet an explicit center of public debate.96 By the mid-1980s, however, the “immigrant problem” would be at the forefront of electoral struggles. By the end of the 1980s, Muslim North Africans, marked by religious and ethno-racial difference, would come to signify the “new dangerous class” in France.97 During this period, as philosopher Etienne Balibar observes, racist discourse became more prevalent, and would come to be couched in cultural terms that imagined a homogenous set of French values, norms, and traditions as threatened by an influx of non-European foreigners.98 As in the 1860s, the development of the dangerous classes would also be accompanied by infrastructural expansion. To support flexible migrant labor, the state and private companies built shaky infrastructures—including substandard housing and the RER commuter line.
The geographer René Clozier argued in 1940 that the Gare du Nord “created the banlieues”—making a peripheral suburban belt where there had been rolling countryside.99 The périphérique highway would help to cement the boundary between the two spaces. When the RER—which workers like Yacouba take to and from the station each day—was inaugurated in the 1970s, it transformed the station. Today, the millions of inhabitants living in the northeast suburbs of Paris make up more than 80 percent of the station’s traffic.100 This traffic constitutes a continuous flow between center and periphery, and illustrates the impossibility of maintaining the separation between the two in a mobility hub.
UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?
The development of transportation links, from the Eurostar to London to the RER to the suburbs, has created the international crossroads that makes the Gare du Nord so dear to the West African adventurers who meet there. On a cold night in 2010, Lassana sent me a message with a photo of a stone statue of an enormous head. The head was as tall as the few people passing by at that late hour. It was the largest statue that had been made for the mid-nineteenth-century station, representing Paris at an apex above the other European and provincial cities of the erstwhile Northern Railway Company (nationalized into the SNCF, the National French Railways, in 1937). Workers were taking it down as part of a renovation project, power-washing out the gray dirt that had accumulated over the last decades to reveal the cream stone underneath. He took many pictures of the statue, staying late as they lifted it from the apex and maneuvered it to the sidewalk.
Lassana and his friends always paid homage to the importance of the station’s history, positing themselves as the heirs of an international vision that has existed from the station’s foundation. As black men in France, they have also inherited the label of the “dangerous classes,” a term that continues to have currency in French media and political speech. They stand at the crossroads of the question that has long guided the history of the station: Should the Gare du Nord be a space of progress and potential, or might it herald the undoing of society? And what role will they play in either case?
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
