RESERVED AREA
Database of Document
Homepage > Documents > Reviews of Pubblication
The dual absence – From the illusion of immigrant to his suffering.
Abdelmalek Sayad. Préface de Pierre Bourdieu
1999 - Paris - Editions du « Seuil »
Book
French
This book presents a summary of twenty years of research conducted in France and Algeria, on emigration and immigration, two phenomena that are as much interrelated as both sides of the same sheet and yet very different in appearance, so much so that we think we can understand the one without knowing the other. Abdelmalek Sayad returns to immigration everything that gives its meaning, i.e its non sense via admirable interviews full of delicacy and comprehension ; he brings immigrants round to delivering the deepest intimacy of their collective privacy, the heartbreaking contradictions whose shifted existence is the consequence.
Summary (13 chapters)
• The original sin and the collective lie
• The Three ages of immigration
• An examplary immigration
• Nationalism and immigration
• The backlash on a society of origin
• A relationship of domination.
• The faults of the absent
• The immigrant « unskilled worker » for life.
• Disease, suffering and the body.
• The weight of words.
• « Naturalzsation ".
• Immigration and «the thought of the state".
• Récapitulation
Sayad died before he could complete the selection and organization of the texts he wanted to see (re) appear to give coherence to all its analysis on immigration / emigration from the example of Algeria, this very topic he will deepen throughout his life. Before he died, he entrusted Pierre Bourdieu to complete his manuscript and the task of reaching the target he had set himself.
There are the contradictions of all orders that are inscribed in the condition of immigrants, away from their families, villages, countries, and struck with a sort of unpardonable guilt, but also absent, because of the exclusion there are victim of, the destination country, which treats them as simple labor. So many things that are not only said in the usual langague of litterature criticism, but also in the language used by immigrants to share with great intensity and accuracy their own experience.
After reading this book, we can no longer look in the same way, immigrants we meet casually in the underground or in the street, nor listen with the same indulgence the speeches they are subject of and which, even the best intentioned ones , confine them more deeply in their strangeness.
Not available
Marika Kovacs / Frédéric Rousselle
CNFETP
Teachers
Routes - Copyright 2009 - This project has been funded with support from the European Commission