Abstract
This chapter studies the participation of migrants in the grassroots memorials which appeared in Paris after the 2015 terrorist attacks. Migrants took fully part in the immediate memorialization process as well as in the annual commemoration which has been taking place since 2016. Beyond memory entrepreneurs, this research suggests that the transnationalization of memory can also rely on the grounding of migrants who invest monuments with contemporary issues that can be foreign to any form of memory claims. It calls for not only studying the transnationalization of memory but also the memorialization of the transnational, asking how memorials sites have become a relevant place for migrants to speak publicly.
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Notes
- 1.
Unlike what happens in the English-speaking world, social science research in France does not have to be approved by a university ethics committee to proceed and no formal agreement is needed to reproduce interviews quotations. However, French researchers have, of course, also some ethical principles. In the present case, firstly, we made sure that the anonymity of anyone we spoke with was protected. Secondly, we tried hard to find writing style that was as free as possible from any moral or judgemental perspectives, in order to really give a voice to everyone we interviewed, encountered, interacted with or simply observed.
- 2.
Thanks to Sylvain Antichan and Brian Chauvel for their participation in some of these fieldwork observations.
- 3.
These three groups of data have been collected in the framework of the REAT research cluster, supported by the CNRS (https://reat.hypotheses.org)
- 4.
- 5.
See for example, in the Paris Archives, documents 3904 W71–107 to 114.
- 6.
Paris Archives, document 3910W8-8.
- 7.
Paris Archives, document 3904 W43–15.
- 8.
On 10 October 2015, an attack in Ankara left 102 people dead and more than 500 wounded. A double explosion targeted a pacifist demonstration organized by left-wing forces. This occurred in a context of political tensions in Turkey.
- 9.
On the evening of 15 January 2016, a bar, a restaurant and a hotel in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, all primarily frequented by foreigners, were attacked by members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
- 10.
During the night of 12 June 2016, the day of Gay Pride, a man opened fire in a crowded nightclub in Orlando, Florida, popular with the LGBT community. Fifty people were killed; Islamic State later claimed responsibility for the attack.
- 11.
Although such archival collection was unprecedented in France, this is not true for the set-up of grassroots memorials or collective gatherings after terror attacks, which were observed in Paris as early as the nineteenth century (Salomé 2010) and which have occurred more regularly since the twentieth century (Salomé 2015).
- 12.
The night of 13 November 2015 started with the attack of the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
- 13.
These observations were conducted with Sylvain Antichan, Delphine Griveaud and Solveig Hennebert.
- 14.
In the French language, two different pronouns exist for the English ‘you’. It may be noted that the black man used the familiar ‘tu’ when addressing the migrant, which is usually reserved for people who know each other quite closely. The migrant equally responded by using ‘tu’.
- 15.
Kabylia is a northern region of Algeria whose people have been claiming autonomy first from the French state and, after 1962, from the Algerian one.
- 16.
On 11 January 2015, 2 million people demonstrated in Paris, in protest against the attacks that had occurred the week before. Several commentators described this march as ‘republican’.
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Gensburger, S., Truc, G. (2020). From Here because from Abroad? Migrants and Grassroots Memorials in Paris in the Aftermath of 13 November 2015. In: Marschall, S. (eds) Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41329-3_8
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