A Network of Resistance: West African Immigration to France and the Struggle for Inclusion, 1960-1973 公开
Coyle, Isabel (Spring 2023)
Published
Abstract
The West African immigrant population in France during the 1960s and 1970s combatted unsafe and unsanitary housing and labor conditions, racism, and often uncertain immigration statuses through individual and community acts of resistance. This thesis adds to the growing body of work on West African immigrant experiences in France during the “postcolonial” era, by tracing the evolution of the activism of these migrants as they allied with French leftist groups and unions to work to protect themselves against poor housing and labor conditions and exclusionary border policies. French media narratives, economic stagnation, and fears of a racially diverse immigrant population combined to lead the French government to block labor immigration beginning in 1972 and increase its policing of undocumented immigrants. The backlash to this policy came from across the immigrant community in France including from West Africans who continued their legacy of resistance from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that their participation in the May 1968 movement as well as their leadership in a 1969 rent strike in Ivry-sur-Seine and in the protests following the deaths of five migrant workers in Aubervilliers in 1970 laid the foundation not only for future alliances between migrants and the French left and labor movement but also in the way they were able to shape their representation more effectively in the media, especially that from the French left. This has implications for the way scholars study and discuss more recent immigrant movements in France including the sans-papiers movement of the 1990s, as it shows that these forms of protest built on a history of West African immigrant resistance.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Locating the Roots of the Sans-Papiers Movement.....................................................1
Chapter 1: A Threshold of Tolerance............................................................................................17
Chapter 2: Building Networks of Resistance.................................................................................38
Chapter 3: Meeting the Challenge of the Circulaires.....................................................................58
Conclusion…………………..…………………………...........................................................................72
Bibliography…………………..…………………………........................................................................76
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