Carte de Séjour: revisiting ‘Arabness’ and anti-racism in 1980s France

Abstract

The French rock group Carte de Séjour rose to national fame in 1986 with their Charles Trenet cover 'Douce France', a North African-inflected song that provided an ironic commentary on the ties that bind Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants to France. Journalists and academics have hailed Carte de Séjour as the first example of an empowered beur music group in French popular culture, but their lack of extended success tells a different story. This article is the first full-length academic study to examine Carte de Séjour's exact contribution to French popular music and to the so-called beur and anti-racist movements of the 1980s. By questioning the common view regarding the 'subversive' power of French-Maghrebi artists, this article argues that Carte de Séjour's lack of success was due to their controversial representation of 'Arabness' in music and performance, their instrumentalisation by the Socialist Party, and their conflictual relationship with France's intellectual and political establishment at the time.

Sounding Arabic: postvernacular modes of performing the Arabic language in popular music by Israeli Jews

“…The core of the show, however, is cover versions of 1990s rock hits, such as ‘Lithium’ by Nirvana, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve and ‘You Oughta Know’ by Alanis Morissette, which Shefi calls the musical diet of her youth, all delivered with a thick Arabic accent. It is interesting to compare this aesthetic experimentation with Arabic accents with cases where Arabophone musicians such as Rachid Taha self-consciously exaggerated their own Arabic pronunciation, as a poignant commentary on the ‘foreignness’ of its sound for non-Arab audiences (Lebrun 2012, p. 335). Shefi revels precisely in this quality of accent as a marker of difference, yet without Taha's critical intention.…”

Performingl-ḥrig: music, sound and undocumented migration across the contemporary Mediterranean (Morocco–Italy)

“…As for the wise old boys in the square, who spoke as one on the matter, they swore that God was storing up that water for Judgment Day, when it would wash the earth clean of sinners. (Binebine [1999(Binebine [ ] 2012 Despite their popularity, the academic literature on contemporary Maghrebi songs about undocumented migration has remained considerably smaller than that devoted to songs about exile or to issues concerning migrants of later generations (among others see Gross, McMurray, and Swedenburg 1996;Daoudi and Miliani 2002;Miliani 2002;Marranci 2005;Gazzah 2010;Landau 2011;Lebrun 2012). In recent years, however, songs about l-ḥ rig have been discussed as creative interventions in Europe (Swedenburg 2015); as cultural productions and as the articulations of the longing to escape (Nair 2007;Friese 2013); and analysed in reference to their principal themes (Salzbrun, Souiah, and Mastrangelo 2015), and in the context of other arts in the Mediterranean (Abderrezak 2016).…”