Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers
2021
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite; Feindt, Kathrin
Video description of chapter in edited volume "Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication" (2018, CUP) Journal Article
In: Journal of Language Contact, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 489-495, 2021.
@article{Evers2021b,
title = {Video description of chapter in edited volume "Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication" (2018, CUP)},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers and Kathrin Feindt},
doi = {10.1163/19552629-14020008-03},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-12-14},
urldate = {2021-12-14},
journal = {Journal of Language Contact},
volume = {14},
number = {2},
pages = {489-495},
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Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
The journey from france to france: the spiritual moves of muslim youth from marseille Journal Article
In: Contemporary Islam, vol. 15, no. 3, 2021.
@article{Evers2021,
title = {The journey from france to france: the spiritual moves of muslim youth from marseille},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
doi = {10.1007/s11562-021-00466-2},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-04-01},
urldate = {2021-04-01},
journal = {Contemporary Islam},
volume = {15},
number = {3},
abstract = {Based on long-term ethnographic research with youth who were born to North, West, and East African families in northern Marseille, this article explores the common experience of alienation that practicing Muslims from Marseille report as they endeavor to live piously in their hometown, together with the mobility-oriented strategies they have devised to achieve belonging. Following these Muslim-Marseillais young adults longitudinally, it emerges that some relied on physical migration away from France (religiously conceived as hijrah) as a means of remaining pious and finding belonging. Others, meanwhile, navigated towards pious personhood and finding home in ways that still involved movement but transpired within France. Significantly, individuals who have chosen to remain in France carve out pious belonging by engaging in domestic movements to particular places in France, by pursuing occupational mobility, and by making advantageous use of prestigious linguistic registers like Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic. As such, the article suggests that hijrah is but one—and the most transnational—among various kinds of movement to which young Muslim-Marseillais turn as they grapple with discrimination, seek to improve themselves, and ascertain how best to belong.},
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Based on long-term ethnographic research with youth who were born to North, West, and East African families in northern Marseille, this article explores the common experience of alienation that practicing Muslims from Marseille report as they endeavor to live piously in their hometown, together with the mobility-oriented strategies they have devised to achieve belonging. Following these Muslim-Marseillais young adults longitudinally, it emerges that some relied on physical migration away from France (religiously conceived as hijrah) as a means of remaining pious and finding belonging. Others, meanwhile, navigated towards pious personhood and finding home in ways that still involved movement but transpired within France. Significantly, individuals who have chosen to remain in France carve out pious belonging by engaging in domestic movements to particular places in France, by pursuing occupational mobility, and by making advantageous use of prestigious linguistic registers like Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic. As such, the article suggests that hijrah is but one—and the most transnational—among various kinds of movement to which young Muslim-Marseillais turn as they grapple with discrimination, seek to improve themselves, and ascertain how best to belong.
2020
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
Cementing the Boundaries of Frenchness: Race/Ethnicity and Belonging in a Non-Color-Blind French Republic PhD Thesis
2020.
@phdthesis{Evers2020c,
title = {Cementing the Boundaries of Frenchness: Race/Ethnicity and Belonging in a Non-Color-Blind French Republic},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-11-19},
urldate = {2020-11-19},
abstract = {France is often portrayed as a case of color-blind civic ‘assimilation’ despite a shift to ‘integration’ since the 1980s. However, the creation of institutions such as the High Council for Integration (1989-2013) and the first ever census-based survey on the assimilation of immigrants and their France-born children (Mobilité géographique et insertion sociale, Tribalat 1993) signaled starting from the 1990s the foregrounding of cultural differentiation in public life and the promotion of ethnic origin as a framework and primary principle of classification (Bertaux 2016:1496). In this process, integration came to be perceived as a one-way ticket for ‘ethnic Others of foreign descent’ to embrace the cultural values and institutions of a purportedly homogeneous ‘non-ethnic’ core of Français de souche (‘French of French stock’). Papers in this panel argue that race/ethnic relations in France today have inherited this ideology. They show that audible characteristics of local French, a shared linguistic heritage in Marseilles, are dismissed in the speech of working-class youth (Evers), historically attested pronunciation features are recast as multiethnic innovations in working-class Parisian French (Fagyal), years of ‘banlieue literature’ addressing the themes of race and citizenship have suffered from distorted representations in the media (Horvath), and entire segments of the French population now consider themselves Citizen Outsiders for whom the cultural characteristics of the ‘uniform whiteness’ of the Français de souche remain largely alien (Beaman). The panel casts light on the utopia of a color-blind French Republic that, in its efforts at treating citizens equally before the law, makes it impossible for them to belong. },
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France is often portrayed as a case of color-blind civic ‘assimilation’ despite a shift to ‘integration’ since the 1980s. However, the creation of institutions such as the High Council for Integration (1989-2013) and the first ever census-based survey on the assimilation of immigrants and their France-born children (Mobilité géographique et insertion sociale, Tribalat 1993) signaled starting from the 1990s the foregrounding of cultural differentiation in public life and the promotion of ethnic origin as a framework and primary principle of classification (Bertaux 2016:1496). In this process, integration came to be perceived as a one-way ticket for ‘ethnic Others of foreign descent’ to embrace the cultural values and institutions of a purportedly homogeneous ‘non-ethnic’ core of Français de souche (‘French of French stock’). Papers in this panel argue that race/ethnic relations in France today have inherited this ideology. They show that audible characteristics of local French, a shared linguistic heritage in Marseilles, are dismissed in the speech of working-class youth (Evers), historically attested pronunciation features are recast as multiethnic innovations in working-class Parisian French (Fagyal), years of ‘banlieue literature’ addressing the themes of race and citizenship have suffered from distorted representations in the media (Horvath), and entire segments of the French population now consider themselves Citizen Outsiders for whom the cultural characteristics of the ‘uniform whiteness’ of the Français de souche remain largely alien (Beaman). The panel casts light on the utopia of a color-blind French Republic that, in its efforts at treating citizens equally before the law, makes it impossible for them to belong.
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
Views from within and without: Youth from Marseille’s housing projects enact belonging through Marseillais French and Arabic Journal Article
In: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, pp. 1 - 16, 2020.
@article{Evers2020b,
title = {Views from within and without: Youth from Marseille’s housing projects enact belonging through Marseillais French and Arabic},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
doi = {10.1080/01434632.2020.1724121},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-02-03},
urldate = {2020-02-03},
journal = {Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development},
pages = {1 - 16},
abstract = {This article examines the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that a group of youth born in the working-class, culturally Muslim milieu of Marseille’s northern housing projects navigates on a daily basis. A spotlight on their language practices reveals that these youth mix linguistic resources to express a project-centric (quartier) identity, drawing heavily on Marseille’s dialect of French (Marseillais) but also peppering their French with Arabic-sourced linguistic elements. Meanwhile, these young men and women assign a social meaning to this linguistically syncretic register of French that is highly divergent than that given by people from Marseille who are unfamiliar with the projects. That youth understand their speech to reflect their cultural belonging to Marseille, and more specifically their deep identification with the immigration history of the projects, while outsiders to the projects see indicators of foreignness therein, is argued to derive from a tendency for mainstream individuals to focus more readily on the ethnic or cultural minority status of young project residents than on the audible signs through which they point to their local belonging.},
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This article examines the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that a group of youth born in the working-class, culturally Muslim milieu of Marseille’s northern housing projects navigates on a daily basis. A spotlight on their language practices reveals that these youth mix linguistic resources to express a project-centric (quartier) identity, drawing heavily on Marseille’s dialect of French (Marseillais) but also peppering their French with Arabic-sourced linguistic elements. Meanwhile, these young men and women assign a social meaning to this linguistically syncretic register of French that is highly divergent than that given by people from Marseille who are unfamiliar with the projects. That youth understand their speech to reflect their cultural belonging to Marseille, and more specifically their deep identification with the immigration history of the projects, while outsiders to the projects see indicators of foreignness therein, is argued to derive from a tendency for mainstream individuals to focus more readily on the ethnic or cultural minority status of young project residents than on the audible signs through which they point to their local belonging.
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
In: Chapter 3, pp. 117-158, 2020, ISBN: 9782377470341.
@inbook{Evers2020,
title = {Parler "payot" vs."castellanois": Pratiques vernaculaires, insultes de genre et contrôle sociale entre jeunes des quartiers Nord de Marseille},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
doi = {10.4000/books.ugaeditions.12802},
isbn = {9782377470341},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-01-01},
urldate = {2020-01-01},
pages = {117-158},
chapter = {3},
abstract = {L’idée de ce chapitre est née d’un échange en apparence anecdotique qui a retenu mon attention au début de mon enquête de terrain dans les quartiers Nord de Marseille. J’observais un groupe d’une vingtaine d’élèves étudiant l’arabe standard moderne (désormais ASM), dans leur classe d’une école publique du 15e arrondissement de Marseille1. Les élèves, âgés de quatorze ans, étaient nés et avaient grandi dans les cités de La Castellane et de La Bricarde, leurs parents (ou, parfois, leurs grands-parents) étant venus d’Afrique du Nord, de l’Est ou de l’Ouest. Leur enseignante, Mme Chérif, demanda à Mohamed, d’écrire au tableau le nom d’un personnage fictif, « Nabil ». Mohamed se leva et commença à écrire Nabil, « ل- ي- ب- ن » (n-a-b-ī-l). Mais il ne fut pas appliqué et fit des lettres excessivement hautes. Dès qu’il eut fini, Mme Chérif, de quelques coups d’éponge, corrigea ses lettres.},
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L’idée de ce chapitre est née d’un échange en apparence anecdotique qui a retenu mon attention au début de mon enquête de terrain dans les quartiers Nord de Marseille. J’observais un groupe d’une vingtaine d’élèves étudiant l’arabe standard moderne (désormais ASM), dans leur classe d’une école publique du 15e arrondissement de Marseille1. Les élèves, âgés de quatorze ans, étaient nés et avaient grandi dans les cités de La Castellane et de La Bricarde, leurs parents (ou, parfois, leurs grands-parents) étant venus d’Afrique du Nord, de l’Est ou de l’Ouest. Leur enseignante, Mme Chérif, demanda à Mohamed, d’écrire au tableau le nom d’un personnage fictif, « Nabil ». Mohamed se leva et commença à écrire Nabil, « ل- ي- ب- ن » (n-a-b-ī-l). Mais il ne fut pas appliqué et fit des lettres excessivement hautes. Dès qu’il eut fini, Mme Chérif, de quelques coups d’éponge, corrigea ses lettres.
2018
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite; Cutler, Cecelia; Røyneland, Unn
Alienated at Home: The Role of Online Media as Young Orthodox Muslim Women Beat a Retreat from Marseille Book Chapter
In: pp. 27-50, 2018, ISBN: 9781107091733.
@inbook{Evers2018,
title = {Alienated at Home: The Role of Online Media as Young Orthodox Muslim Women Beat a Retreat from Marseille},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers and Cecelia Cutler and Unn Røyneland},
doi = {10.1017/9781316135570.003},
isbn = {9781107091733},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-08-01},
urldate = {2018-08-01},
pages = {27-50},
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Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
Not Citizens of a Classical Mediterranean: Muslim Youth from Marseille Elude a Linguistic Gentrification by the French State Journal Article
In: Signs and Society, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 435-474, 2018.
@article{Evers2018b,
title = { Not Citizens of a Classical Mediterranean: Muslim Youth from Marseille Elude a Linguistic Gentrification by the French State},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
doi = {10.1086/696933},
year = {2018},
date = {2018-03-01},
urldate = {2018-03-01},
journal = {Signs and Society},
volume = {6},
number = {2},
pages = {435-474},
abstract = {A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.},
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A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille’s year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille’s housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such “linguistic gentrification” programs reveals that the state’s reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people’s uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label “Mediterranean” functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.
2016
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
Diasporic Belonging: The Life-Worlds and Language Practices of Muslim Youth from Marseille (Dissertation Abstract) Journal Article
In: 2016.
@article{Evers2016,
title = { Diasporic Belonging: The Life-Worlds and Language Practices of Muslim Youth from Marseille (Dissertation Abstract)},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
urldate = {2016-01-01},
abstract = {Since the 1980s, when it became clear that immigrants from France’s ex-colonies were likely to settle with their families in France, the French have repeatedly questioned the cultural compatibility of Muslim immigrants and their descendants with French Republican values. Recent security concerns about Islamic terrorism in Western countries have reinflamed this debate about French Muslims’ “assimilability,” albeit with a novel focus on the cultural affiliations of French Muslim youth, in particular. The French State and politicians are concerned about survey data showing that, even as such youth have acceded to legal citizenship, they nevertheless exhibit a greater adherence to Islamic norms and more numerous transnational links than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and may, for these reasons, pose a threat to French sovereignty. This dissertation investigates these top-down claims of French Muslim youth’s unprecedented religiosity and transnationalism, seeking to ethnographically test the veracity of such hypotheses and to offer a more nuanced, historically emplaced account of youth’s cultural identifications and practices. Based on long-term research with youth ages 13 to 30 who grew up in North, West, and East African Muslim households in Marseille’s northern housing projects, I demonstrate that such youth embody various emic forms of belonging to France, many of which stretch mainstream definitions of what constitutes Frenchness. Through ethnographic observation of these youth while they partook in Arabic classes, spent time with their peers and family, and navigated public space, this work reveals that youth more often perform local cultural belonging than are accorded French cultural citizenship, or the right to be seen and heard as French within the public sphere. I document the forms of alienation from Marseille that youth experience as a result, quite notable among them a gendered reverse migration phenomenon whereby orthodox-identified Muslim young women are planning to leave Marseille for their parents’ home countries and the Gulf States. Two further foci of the dissertation are the role of Arabic language education, both publicly provided and denominational, in shaping youth’s cultural trajectories, and also the analysis of youth’s language practices. I contend that, as diasporic youth draw upon—and play with—standard and non-standard varieties of French and Arabic, they afford the listener unique insight into where they are coming from and where they are headed, or their life-worlds and aspirations.
},
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}
Since the 1980s, when it became clear that immigrants from France’s ex-colonies were likely to settle with their families in France, the French have repeatedly questioned the cultural compatibility of Muslim immigrants and their descendants with French Republican values. Recent security concerns about Islamic terrorism in Western countries have reinflamed this debate about French Muslims’ “assimilability,” albeit with a novel focus on the cultural affiliations of French Muslim youth, in particular. The French State and politicians are concerned about survey data showing that, even as such youth have acceded to legal citizenship, they nevertheless exhibit a greater adherence to Islamic norms and more numerous transnational links than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and may, for these reasons, pose a threat to French sovereignty. This dissertation investigates these top-down claims of French Muslim youth’s unprecedented religiosity and transnationalism, seeking to ethnographically test the veracity of such hypotheses and to offer a more nuanced, historically emplaced account of youth’s cultural identifications and practices. Based on long-term research with youth ages 13 to 30 who grew up in North, West, and East African Muslim households in Marseille’s northern housing projects, I demonstrate that such youth embody various emic forms of belonging to France, many of which stretch mainstream definitions of what constitutes Frenchness. Through ethnographic observation of these youth while they partook in Arabic classes, spent time with their peers and family, and navigated public space, this work reveals that youth more often perform local cultural belonging than are accorded French cultural citizenship, or the right to be seen and heard as French within the public sphere. I document the forms of alienation from Marseille that youth experience as a result, quite notable among them a gendered reverse migration phenomenon whereby orthodox-identified Muslim young women are planning to leave Marseille for their parents’ home countries and the Gulf States. Two further foci of the dissertation are the role of Arabic language education, both publicly provided and denominational, in shaping youth’s cultural trajectories, and also the analysis of youth’s language practices. I contend that, as diasporic youth draw upon—and play with—standard and non-standard varieties of French and Arabic, they afford the listener unique insight into where they are coming from and where they are headed, or their life-worlds and aspirations.
2011
Evers, Cécile Anne Marguerite
Orthographic Policy and Planning in Sénégal/ Senegaal: The Détournement of Orthograhic Stereotypes Journal Article
In: WPEL- Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 21-51, 2011.
@article{Evers2011,
title = {Orthographic Policy and Planning in Sénégal/ Senegaal: The Détournement of Orthograhic Stereotypes},
author = {Cécile Anne Marguerite Evers},
year = {2011},
date = {2011-01-01},
urldate = {2011-01-01},
journal = {WPEL- Working Papers in Educational Linguistics},
volume = {26},
number = {1},
pages = {21-51},
abstract = {This paper examines the interlocking nature of corpus policy and cultivation plan-ning through a case study of the Wolof orthography and its changing role in theSenegalese educational landscape. Until recently, local language orthographieshave been the purview of a very limited slice of Senegalese society. Absent, as theywere, from formal education in the post-independence period, Wolof orthogra-phies were practiced only by a small group of leftist Senegalese intellectuals, andlater by the informal education movement. I trace how the various orthographiesof Wolof (viz., French, indigenous, and standard orthographies of Wolof) have been taken up by (often) unexpected actors - new political players, international bodies, and many Senegalese youth - and look into what enables orthographies tofunction as useful tools in the construction of a post-colonial state, particularly onecomprising such different social projects for the future.},
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This paper examines the interlocking nature of corpus policy and cultivation plan-ning through a case study of the Wolof orthography and its changing role in theSenegalese educational landscape. Until recently, local language orthographieshave been the purview of a very limited slice of Senegalese society. Absent, as theywere, from formal education in the post-independence period, Wolof orthogra-phies were practiced only by a small group of leftist Senegalese intellectuals, andlater by the informal education movement. I trace how the various orthographiesof Wolof (viz., French, indigenous, and standard orthographies of Wolof) have been taken up by (often) unexpected actors - new political players, international bodies, and many Senegalese youth - and look into what enables orthographies tofunction as useful tools in the construction of a post-colonial state, particularly onecomprising such different social projects for the future.