Contemporary French identity issues are often conceived spatially in popular imagination and political discourse. France and French identity have been mapped into a series of imagined exclusionary spaces through media representations and political rhetoric. This dissertation argues that artists in the fields of film, rap music and fiction are actively yet often indirectly intervening in French identity debates by reframing the question of “integration” and by demonstrating that not only can one be simultaneously French and “other,” but that French identity is always already more complex and transnational than prevailing discourses of “imagined” identity will admit. This is done most effectively, I contend, by avoiding the clichéd and reductive spaces and spatial categories that inflect the debate. The works I examine employ travel and motion to move beyond the discursive ghettos such as beur or banlieue cinema or “minority” music and fiction. While often less overtly political these responses are more effective than the more typical banlieue narrative of clash and confrontation with power. Taking examples from cinema, I argue that the road movies I address are effective weapons of the weak precisely because they avoid the traps inherent in representing the banlieue. My analysis demonstrates that the discursive ghetto is not always a bad thing for a filmmaker because referring to representational stereotypes can open the possibility of more readily “trapping” the viewer and therefore forcing him/her to actively participate in the process of decoding the author’s positioning. Often works attempting to contest spatial exclusion run the risk of simply falling into entrenched binary conceptions of society, reinforcing what the viewer already thinks they know about life in the suburbs or as a minority in general. Looking beyond cinema to music and literature, I demonstrate how artists are mobilizing narrative of space and identity to re-chart France with “hyphenated” perspectives, from African and Algerian to Portuguese and Pied-noir. / text

Ce travail de recherche a pour but de retracer l’évolution de la représentation cinématographique de la population d’origine maghrébine en France et de mettre en perspective l’analyse des procédés esthétiques et cinématographiques dans l’œuvre d’Abdellatif Kechiche.Les trois étapes constituant ce travail restituent les tournants majeurs qui jalonnent cette histoire, partant de l’émergence du « travailleur immigré » comme figure cinématographique, en passant par la prise en charge des jeunes Franco-Maghrébins, enfants des premiers immigrés, de leur propre image à l’écran, et aboutissant au cinéma d’Abdellatif Kechiche comme syncrétisme de ce mouvement.Une analyse esthétique d’un corpus de films choisis permet d’appréhender la spécificité de ce mouvement qui débute dans les années soixante-dix et s’affirme au milieu des années quatre-vingt avec la sortie du film Le Thé au harem d’Archimède de Mehdi Charef. Il s’agit par là même d’interroger l’appellation « cinéma beur » employée pour désigner les cinéastes franco-maghrébins qui émergent dans le sillage de Mehdi Charef. Le cinéma d’Abdellatif Kechiche se situe à la fois en continuité et en rupture avec ce courant. Cette recherche révèle les mécanismes artistiques à l’œuvre dans ses films et permet d’initier une réflexion sur la singularité de son écriture, ainsi que sur l’avènement d’une cinématographie qui interroge le cinéma français sur sa capacité à recomposer la réalité dans sa dimension actuelle et polymorphe. / The objective of this research is to trace the evolution of the cinematographic representation of the Maghrebi population in France, and to put into perspective an analysis of Abdellatif Kechiche’s aesthetic and cinematographic processes.The three steps of this analysis cover the decisive points marking this evolution, from the starting point of the “immigrant labourer” as a cinematographic figure, followed by the appropriation of their self-image on screen by first-generation Franco-Maghrebi youth and finishing with Abdellatif Kechiche’s cinema as a syncretism of this movement.An aesthetic analysis of a selection of films allows us to grasp the specificity of this movement, which began in the 1970s and asserted itself in the 1980s with the release of Mehdi Charef’s “Tea in the Harem” (“Le Thé au harem d’Archimède”). This allows us to question the notion of “Beur Cinema”, which was used to describe the Franco-Maghrebi directors who followed in Mehdi Charef’s footsteps. The cinema of Abdellatif Kechiche is both a continuation of, and a departure from this movement. This research highlights the artistic mechanisms at work in his oeuvre and initiates a reflection on the singularity of his writing, as well as on the establishment of a cinematography that questions French cinema in terms of its ability to recompose reality in its current and polymorphous dimension.