Jean Beaman’s Citizen Outsider (2017) addresses the experiences of middle-class second-generation North-African immigrants in Paris, and how processes of racialisation and racism affect their relative access to fully realised citizenship in the French state. Beaman’s overarching argument is that white supremacist practices of exclusion systematically deny these othered immigrants, full access to cultural citizenship. While these upwardly mobile second-generation immigrants are entirely French citizens in the legal sense, they are excluded from ‘true’ French identity. Beaman asserts that the French state’s refusal to engage with race has significantly undermined efforts to recognise and address this gatekeeping process, and that French Republican ideology is at odds with a meaningful engagement with coloniality. One of Beaman’s most significant contributions in Citizen Outsider is to complicate integration discourses which connect milestone achievements with being accepted and assimilated into a given society. By focussing on the middle-class Beaman convincingly demonstrates that people who otherwise meet the standards to be read as ‘respectable middle-class citizens’ are ultimately denied full-inclusion in the state because of structural racism.
While the North-African second generation’s integration experiences in France are a popularly discussed topic (Begag, 1990; Bouregba-Dichy, 1990; Lapeyronnie, 1987; Lefranc & Sefta, 1982; Meurs & Pailhé, 2008; Santelli, 2004), Beaman provides one of very few longer-form treatments of the topic – especially in the context of ethnography. Beaman’s ethnographic research was primarily conducted during the 2008–2009 academic year and included interviews with 45 adult children of North African immigrants living in the Paris metropolitan region (p. 25). These participants were of Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian heritage, and all held French citizenship with some holding dual citizenship from their parents’ country of origin (p. 25). All Beaman’s research participants were classified as middle-class according to having passed the baccalaureate and at-least attended some university-level education and worked in white-collar positions (pp. 25–26). Beaman’s nine-month long participant observation involved attending professional, social, and familial events with her respondents (p. 26). Through continued attention to how identities are both assigned and asserted (p. 83), Beaman uses her rich empirical findings to demonstrate the diverse ways in which the North-African second-generation have experienced barriers to their full enjoyment of cultural citizenship in France, the tactics and strategies by which they have sought out inclusion and recognition, and their reflections on how Frenchness figures in their own identity construction.
In her methodological reflections, Beaman makes a strong case for the utility and limitations of her own insider-outsider status as a Black American woman studying racism in France. Beaman emphasises that she was ‘conscious of not imposing an American-style understanding of race and ethnicity on the French context’ but notes that her respondents sometimes ‘invoked such a conception’ (p. 110). In a classroom setting, Citizen Outsider would make a useful case-study for discussing the extent to which interpretations of race and racism developed in the United States are applicable in other national contexts. Similarly, Beaman’s findings in Paris represent an interesting site for exploring how Blackness has been theorised in other Francophone contexts and scholarly movements, in particular, the great Négritude scholar Édouard Glissant’s (2020) interpretation of single root-identities and rhizome-identities in migrant and diasporic contexts.
Thinking through his identity as an Algerian, Frantz Fanon sense of being ‘a stranger in France’ was cemented when exposed to the white Parisian middle-classes whose consumption and petty interests contrasted Fanon’s compatriots who ‘suffered and died every day’ because of French colonialism (Fanon, 1967, p. 175). Beaman’s ethnographic and interview data demonstrate that several generations after Fanon, class identity in Paris is still powerfully informed by structural racism which renders the North African second-generation ‘strangers’, or, here, outsiders. Fanon ‘found only a bad conscience’ in Paris, when struggling to reconcile French identity with his knowledge of colonial violence and France’s deep-rooted anti-Black racism (Fanon, 1967, p. 175). Beaman’s study participants navigate and enunciate identities ranging from binational senses of belonging, through to presenting as an ‘Arabe de France’ (p. 79), being exclusively French or Maghrebi, or feeling alienated from both France and their North African heritage (pp. 79–81). Throughout Citizen Outsider, Beaman repeatedly emphasises the heterogenous ways in which her respondents understand and perform cultural identities, thereby complicating integration discourses which attempt to collapse second-generation identities into a crude binary.
Beaman acknowledges that the Paris metropolitan area is not representative of all of France (p. 107), future work which considers the same dynamics she identified in Paris in other urban contexts is much needed – although I suspect it will only further shore-up her arguments. On this note, while Beaman’s work is part of a rich literature on race and migration in large cities there remains a paucity of book-length studies which considers the same issues in smaller towns and rural settings. However, while discussion of site-selection for future work is deeply necessary, Beaman’s overarching theoretical argument, that racism is a crucial barrier to second-generation immigrants achieving fully realised cultural citizenship, transcends Paris and is deeply relevant across the continent, discrimination based on racial and ethnic differences pervade European migration politics. Beaman gives consistent attention to French Islamophobia, and directly addresses how the intersection of racial and religious identities figures in the second-generation Maghrebi experience (pp. 49–53). Beaman’s assertion that ‘Islamophobia, then, is not just about Islam; it is also about ethnoracial exclusion’ (p. 49) rings true across the European continent, where Islamophobia is deeply entangled with white supremacist anti-migrant policy regimes and far-right political platforms.
Theoretically, Beaman’s strongest contribution in Citizen Outsider is connecting the experiences of the North African second-generation to a framework for transnational Blackness, and the consideration of how Maghreb-origin people figure in Blackness (pp. 87–92). In particular, her considerations on how to interpret Blackness as a term which can ‘encompass shared experiences of otherness and exclusion from the nation-state’ (p. 91) contribute to ongoing discussions of how to interpret race in and across different transnational contexts (see also: Beaman, 2019; Beaman & Petts, 2020). On this topic, in a classroom setting reading Citizen Outsider alongside Orly Clergé’s The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia (2019), a study which addresses the Black diasporic middle classes in New York city, could yield fruitful and stimulating conversations about how space, transnationalism, and different heritages inform immigrant Blackness. While it fell outside of the scope of Beaman’s book, beyond passing references to the November 2005 riots, future work should build on previous attention to Maghrebi political action in France to look at how transnational Blackness and diasporic identities connect to contemporary social movement organising.
In labelling Europe as ‘indefensible’ Aimé Césaire wrote that ‘a civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization’ while one that ‘chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems’ is entirely ‘stricken’ (Césaire, 1972, p. 1). Beaman’s work highlights how French Republican thought structures a worldview which denies the existence of structural racism while simultaneously cutting off avenues by which it could be measured, discussed, and addressed. Beaman’s argument that ‘French Republicanism merely obfuscates differences; it does not minimize or eliminate them’ (p. 19) is substantiated throughout the text by a wealth of ethnographic evidence. The rich empirical findings in Citizen Outsider point towards a society which is, by Césaire’s logic, indefensible and stricken. Beaman’s well-evidenced claim that ‘citizenship does not confer the same benefits on other populations as it does on whites’ (pp. 82–83) could just as well describe migrant experiences in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany. In this way, in the classroom Citizen Outsider could function as an excellent gateway to discussing how racist exclusionary practices are entangled with, and at-times emergent from, European political traditions which are perhaps misread as progressive. If the enjoyment of cultural citizenship and the enforcement bordering practices across Europe are so bound up with racial politics of exclusion, is the European project, which so continues to profit from and reproduce colonialism, separable from white supremacism?
A well-crafted intervention, Citizen Outsider complicates discourses surrounding assimilation, integration, and European racial politics. Beaman critically addresses the differences between legal citizenship and inclusion and provides substantial evidence that neoliberal integration logics are flawed in suggesting that individual migrants need only tick through a list of good behaviours to be welcomed. Since Beaman’s fieldwork in 2008–2009 there has been a proliferation of transnational social movements which address state violence against Black, Muslim, and migrant lives – clearly there is ample room to expand on, and revisit, what she presents here. Discussions of migration sometimes shy away from explicitly naming the racist exclusionary practices which underpin the nation state, here Beaman triumphs by entirely centring the topic.