When African migrants occupy public places as anyone else : the presentation of private life in a French Parisian suburb (Aubervilliers)

Abstract

This PHD deals with a public place located in a Parisian suburb named Les Quatre-Chemins. The neighborhood is divided into two areas. The main one is part of Aubervilliers and the second one of Pantin, two cities of la Seine Saint-Denis (93). Quatre- Chemins is very poor and a lot of migrants from different waves of recent migrations live here. As it is full of food shops, drugstores and coffee shops, and as it hosts a subway station, urban life is very intense there. Secondly, the PHD deals with a second public sphere composed by the residents who apply to different social and cultural local policies dedicated to migrants in the city of Aubervilliers. The goal of the PHD is to reveal how sub-Saharan African migrants take place in these two public places and talk about themselves and their private life. How they define what is public and what is private and how they present the private part of their lives. The PHD reveals that in both public spaces, the cultural background of these migrants is neutralized in first place. This means that a few unconscious tricks work so that it seems impossible for the audience to interpret the acts of migrants as something which would be completely determined by their supposed belonging to an assigned migrant community. They can then act as individuals. In the urban public place of Les Quatre-Chemins, the neutralizing operator is composed by different interactional situations. Quatre-Chemins is then close to what Elijah Anderson calls a “cosmopolitan canopy”. In the political and local public space, the neutralizing effect is due to a political and ideological position of the municipality itself. Then, the PHD aims to understand how distinct groups of African migrants from different big cities of Senegal, Ivory Coast and Mali, take place in the streets and coffee shops of Les Quatre- Chemins. How they interact with different people who don’t come from the same regions and how they present themselves, their ethnic