La Haine: Framing the ‘Urban Outcasts’

Authors

  • Amy Siciliano Department of Geography, University of Toronto

Keywords:

Parisian banlieues, political-economic crisis, La Haine, hegemonic conceptions, hegemony, terra incognita, urban, suburban, neo-racism, cinema, outcasts

Abstract

The Parisian banlieues, long absent from the dominant French imaginary, have materialized as spatialized, racialized markers of political-economic crisis, social fragmentation, crime and violence. In this paper I consider how the film La Haine (1995) confronts this contemporary spatialized and historicized anxiety by critiquing assumptions behind such dominant representations. I begin by situating La Haine alongside other ‘banlieue films’ that have challenged hegemonic conceptions of France’s imagined geographic identity. I then outline some of the key historical moments that transformed the banlieues from ‘terra incognita’ into the ‘fractures at the end of the 20th century’. I go on to examine La Haine’s combined narrative style and cinematic form to argue that the film’s attention to spatiality – or the social relations shaping the boundaries between the ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ – explicitly confronts the hidden foundations of neo-racism in France. The film, through both content and form, exposes historical and emergent forces framing banlieues and youth, offering a critical reflection on the many levels of mediation between the film itself and the material conditions which gave rise to its production.

Downloads

How to Cite

Siciliano, A. (2015). La Haine: Framing the ‘Urban Outcasts’. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(2), 211–230. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/775

Issue

Section

Themed Section - Media Spaces, Mediated Places (Guest Edited by Jim Craine)