Algeria In France: Transpolitics, Race, And Nation By Paul Silverstein

Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation by Paul Silverstein, provides ethnography of the Algerian existence in France as well as the transnational Berber movement. Silverstein approaches his subjects through the medium of everyday life, following the random individuals he met during his field work in the 1990s, using an ethnographical methodology with a very critical and self-reflexive alertness of the environment he shared with them. His book is a critical work where it gives a broader consideration of the complex set of identifications that are going between France, Algeria, and the wider Arab and Muslim world. Algeria in France, captures the book's argument that Algerian immigrants' subjectivities are forged through "the processes of collusion and contention, of appropriation and transformation, that link Algeria and France--Algerians and Franco-Algerians" across the Mediterranean (p. 7). This thesis departs in subtle nonetheless essential ways from earlier sociological work on the "divided lives" of immigrants in France, and from the concepts of "hybridity," "creolization," …show more content…
Also I think Silverstein’s discussion of the contrast between second and third generations is very interesting by revealing facts or voices that were really convincing. He makes an importance on the experience of Kabyle immigrants and their descendants in France,

3 noting how both civil war in Algeria and immigrant experiences in France have led to a new declaration of Berber culture, such as one that rejects Arab hegemony and at times draws upon the “Kabyle myth” of the colonial