CASBAHS · Controlling the Casbahs: Policing Race and Space in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954

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Project objective

Tracing the imagined criminality of the “Casbahs” of Marseille and Algiers, this project examines the intimate and oppositional everyday relationship of police officers and North Africans during the politically tumultuous period from 1918-1954. Beginning with the surge of Algerian immigration to France after World War I and ending with the first battles of the Algerian War of Independence, CASBAHS examines how both national policy and local concerns shaped the interactions of police officers and North Africans. Focusing on connected histories of migration, repression, and crime, I argue that the police of Marseille and Algiers helped to create the putative criminals they sought to control. Interrogating the interpersonal experience of structural police power, I demonstrate that the racialized policing of North Africans in these Mediterranean urban centers built not just on visual codes of race, but on mapping racialized bodies in particular urban spaces. The thin line between public and private, personal and political, blurred in police interactions with North Africans in Marseille and Algiers. By emphasizing the interpersonal level of policing through a novel bottom-up methodology, CASBAHS highlights the fissures within colonial policing, challenging narratives of monolithic colonial power while also revealing the capacity individual officers had to shape the lives of North Africans. Through an innovate, interdisciplinary, and comparative approach to the study of policing, this project creates new ways of examining historical questions with continued contemporary relevance.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS · LeedsCoordinatorUnited Kingdom

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101024176