Transcultural Teens
Performing Youth Identities in French Cites
New Directions in Ethnography Series

Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the housing projects, or cité, that ring Paris, showing how young people of Algerian Arab origins play with language in fascinating ways that subvert commonly held notions of intercultural animosity.

• Provides solid, real-world evidence in the often abstracted theoretical debate on globalization and transnationalism
• Offers detailed data on linguistic practices that is more focused than generalized anthropological studies
• Includes the experiences of French-Algerian adolescent girls who remain largely absent from academic and popular discourse
• Reveals the cultural richness and diversity of a population that is stigmatized and marginalized in a national context

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: Performing Transcultural Youth Identities 1

1 Ethnography in les Cités 8

2 Speech in the Cité: Style and Stigma 34

3 “Sans Problème” or “Cent Problèmes”? Revoicing Stereotypes about les Arabes 58

4 La Racaille and le Respect 91

5 “You Call That a Girl?”: Gender Crossing and Borderwork 114

6 Parental Name-Calling 154

7 Crossing Registers: Voicing the French TV Host 172

Conclusion 195

References 200

Index 213

Undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology as well as a range of social sciences featuring courses on migration, transnationalism and globalization; students and scholars studying the interplay of identity, culture, and language; students taking regionally focused courses on North Africa or the Middle East, European or French Studies.