This paper examines current debates on multiculturalism and the Arab Orient present in France by looking back at the history, plot, and reception of one of the most successful French novels of all time: Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. Dubbed “a 19th-century version of The Arabian Nights,” this fictional story is also historical text binding East and West in the identity of 19th century Europe. Unfolding between 1815-1839 (serialized between 1844-45), the immensely popular tale of retribution for inflicted wrongs includes an Orientalizing metamorphosis that begins in an island prison. The Marseille sailor Dantes who transforms into the mysterious and foreign Count of Monte Cristo uses the entire Ottoman Mediterranean as both a distinct geographical yet fluid cultural-moral space to wreak vengeance. Details of the revenge plots carried out by means of multiple disguises customized for each of the characters constitute an aspect of the intertwined island social world of the 1830s Mediterranean. The traffic in goods, people, technologies, and ideas; the web of symbolic interaction through imperial conquest; relations of trade and finance with the Orient, usually treated as background, are indeed central to the moral universe of righteous retribution in the tale. The story’s immediate and stunning popularity--translated into over 100 languages-- reveals how audiences understood their world at a precise post-Napoleonic moment when Europe was constructing itself as a community of nation-states. Racial politics of the Other frame the work, touching Dumas the author directly: his half-Haitian father fought as a free officer in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Within this autobiographical 19th century milieu, the paper explores distinctions between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that illuminate the politics of contemporary France.

Violent attacks in Paris, targeting the “Charlie Hebdo” newspaper in January 2015 and across multiple sites in November 2015, were sobering illustrations both of a new form of Islamist terror as perpetrated by the Islamic State, and of France’s permeability to social and political processes centered outside her borders. The renewed urgency around discussions and dialogues regarding the place of Muslim, North African, and Middle Eastern ‘others’ in French society. These were not the first attacks, however, that used French soil as a venue to further political and ideological conflict based elsewhere, nor were they unusual in that they roused fears of Muslim and Middle Eastern minorities in France, leading to discussions often couched in terms of immigration. Two decades earlier, in 1995, the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée) brought the Algerian Civil War to French soil with metro and railroad bombings intended to further destabilize their opponents in Algeria. This paper places reactions to these two sets of attacks in dialogue through a comparative analysis of media coverage of the 1995 and 2015 attacks. This qualitative analysis focuses on perceptions of Islam; Muslim, Middle Eastern, or North African minorities in France; immigration; and national identity, pointing to continuities and discontinuities in the ways that French unity has been constructed against, or including, these others. Much has changed in the last twenty years: global flows of people are more highly regulated, in part due to fears of terrorism; information and ideas enjoy increased rates of dispersion thanks to the spread of digital technologies. Within France, government and civil society initiatives have focused on promoting increased intercultural integration and developing a new, inclusive, national identity, while at the same time government policies and social practices continue to engender the opposite effect when it comes to some of the Muslim, Middle Eastern, or North African populations. All of these processes and more have altered the stage on which these acts of terror take place, and the terms by which they are understood. Yet, twenty years later, Paris again stands as a symbol to be attacked and defended: one element in overarching conflicts over religious ideology, political control, identity, and national membership.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s openness toward Syrian refugees has ignited a public backlash against Muslim migrants in Germany. These anxieties have deeper historical roots. This paper uses Turkish and German government documents, media sources, and firsthand accounts to offer a case study of personal and public reactions to official policies aimed at the reduction of Germany’s Muslim population. Amid heated discussions about integration and multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, the West German government provided various forms of cash incentives to persuade primarily Turkish workers to return to their homeland. This analysis of the reactions to these measures, which critics denounced as discriminatory attempts to “kick out” the Turks, illuminates three previously overlooked aspects of the Turkish migrant experience. First, official efforts to encourage Turks to leave soured relations between Turks and Germans on everyday and international levels. As rising anti-foreigner sentiment in West Germany compelled thousands of Turkish migrants to take the cash incentives and return home, the Turkish press and government condemned the perceived mistreatment of their countrymen as reminiscent of Nazism. Thus, at the same time as westerners were citing Turkey’s 1980 anti-democratic turn as evidence of its incompatibility with European culture and supranational institutions, Turkish critics countered that West Germany itself was far from realizing its post-fascist conception as a human rights state. Second, West Germany’s remigration policy fueled European development politics in the Middle East. Surveys of Turkish migrants revealed that the poor economic prospects in their homeland made them reluctant to leave Germany. To assuage this concern, the West German government funneled money into the Turkish economy through low-interest microloans to remigrants establishing businesses in Turkey. While personal accounts demonstrate that these generous measures helped the remigrants build self-sufficient lives in their homeland, they also appeased early iterations of the same anti-foreigner sentiment that has reinvigorated today. Finally, the sources reveal a great irony: although non-migrant Turks lambasted Germans’ mistreatment of their countrymen, they were wary of their return. In everyday life, remigrants’ acquaintances disparaged them as a nouveau-riche class of hybrid Turkish-German Almancilar. In high politics, the Turkish government deemed its floundering economy incapable of sustaining an influx of remigrants, whose remittance payments constituted a crucial source of national income. These difficult experiences integrating in West Germany as well as reintegrating in Turkey shaped Turkish migrants’ identities as undesired and unwelcomed by two places they called home.

Within Europe today, questions of regional or national identity and attendant debates over multiculturalism have a particular valence in southern Spain and Portugal, where they inextricably entangle with the contested historical legacy of al-Andalus, the 800-year span of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. While competing notions of al-Andalus as an “interruption” in an otherwise eternally Christian Spain and Portugal (Aidi 2006) or as the source of Spain’s multicultural heritage (Castro 1954) loom largely in the public imagination, such ideas speak mostly to European anxieties and desires. Often lost in these debates are the variety of lived experiences, beliefs, and creative agency of Europe’s contemporary population of Middle Eastern or North African descent. This paper redresses this lacuna through an exploration of two Moroccan-born musicians who have long resided in Granada, Spain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on both sides of the Gibraltar Strait, I chart the divergent trajectories of these musicians who, in collaboration with European colleagues, each compose new musical mixtures that incorporate Iberian and North African musical resources. I argue that through their work these transnational artists articulate two rather distinct sonic conceptions of multicultural belonging in Europe, along different time scales. Specifically, I describe how Amina Alaoui’s Arco Iris project takes up the distant Andalusi past and its reverberations in the present. I show how her music intercedes in Spanish, but especially Portuguese, collective memory in order to bear witness to the past, to remind her audience of their long-obscured cultural heritage, and to creatively reimagine an inclusive Iberian present. By contrast, Jalal Chekara’s music speaks to his more immediate predecessors— his father and uncle’s generation—and to a series of intimate encounters and greater cultural distances, and to a life spent betwixt and between two continent’s shores. I relate how in live performances, recordings, and a documentary film, Tan Cerca, Tan Lejos, he lays bare the tantalizingly close gap that remains, both cultural and geographic, between people of North African and southern Spanish descent. As a comparative case study this paper illuminates some of the complex and divergent positionalities of Spain’s Moroccan community of long residence, with broader implications for Europe’s populations of North African and Middle Eastern origin.