Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Transit II - Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
My holistic strategy, characteristic of pragmatism … is to reinterpret every … dualism as a momentarily convenient blocking-out of regions along a spectrum, rather than as a recognition of an ontological, or methodological, or epistemological divide (Rorty 1991: 84).
Laïcité creates the religious by turning it into a separate category, which has to be isolated and circumscribed. It reinforces religious identities instead of letting them dissolve into more diversified practices and identities (Roy 2005: 167, my translation).
The struggles for recognition by minorities in the 1990s acquired a particular sensitivity in France, where the myth of Republican, universal and difference-blind citizenship was less corroded than in many other Western countries, a phenomenon that was also experienced by, for example, sexual and gender minorities, and that has delayed the introduction of postcolonial studies and multiculturalism in France (Nordmann & Vidal 2004). Nordmann and Vidal aptly summarise the central problem:
All questioning of the universalism of the national/social, (post)colonial and heterosexist State, automatically incurs the accusation of communautarisme … And yet, if there is communitarianism, wouldn't it rather be found on the part of the State? For it is true that the majoritarian character of this communitarianism enables it to ignore itself as such and to claim a universal status (ibid.: 7, my translation).
Around 1989, public intellectuals who called themselves neo-Republicans found the public assertiveness and the struggle for recognition especially problematic when religion was involved, and Islam in particular. We already saw that this singling out of religion from the philosophies of difference and multiculturalism also quickly emerged in other European countries partly as a result of the Rushdie Affair. But they did so most strongly in the context of the French headscarf affairs.
The affairs more or less began with the question of whether three Muslim girls from Creil (a Parisian suburb) had been rightly expelled from school after they had refused to remove their headscarves in class. This question grew into a public conflict when in November 1989, five neo-Republican intellectuals placed an advert in Le Nouvel Observateur about the threat of the ‘Republic's Munich moment’ at the time of the ‘bicentenaire’ of the French Revolution, when the wearing of headscarves in public education was not forbidden by law.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 195 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013