ABSTRACT
France, with its long history of large migratory inflows (Lequin et al. 1988; Noiriel 1988; Weil 1991) has been the birthplace of many hundreds of newspapers and other periodicals created by groups of foreign origin. Almost 2,000 periodicals were listed at the 1989 exhibition “France des étrangers, France des libertés” [France of Foreigners, France of Liberties], and this is certainly an underestimate; the figure will no doubt rise when the findings of research currently in progress are known (Génériques 1990). These publications are a key source for the study of international migration in general, and more particularly for the study of the political and cultural movements that have evolved among minority groups. They also offer many valuable insights into the complex relationships between people of majority and minority ethnic origins. Within this “French melting-pot” (Noiriel 1988), vast areas of which are still largely unexplored, research on post-colonial immigrant minorities is still notably lacking. We cannot understand these diasporic minorities without knowing something of their origins. Yet mainstream French society and, in some cases, minority groups themselves seem to suffer from a form of amnesia about this history, which we can divide into two main periods. The first stretches from the beginning of the century up to 1962, when Algerian independence marked the end of France’s colonial empire. The second covers the period from 1962 to the present. This chronological division sets the framework for the present analysis of the periodicals produced by France’s post-colonial minorities.
