ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the geographic and symbolic space of the Casbah as a barometer of the shifting narratives of space, settlement, and identity in two French films from the mid- and late twentieth century: Julien Divivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) and Mathieu Kassowitz’s La Haine (1996). I use the Casbah as a figure that designates the physical space of Ottoman Medina of Algiers in Pépé le Moko, as well as referring to the “Casbah-banlieue” in La Haine, defined as a zone that shares many of the colonial Casbah’s characteristics, but located in metropolitan France. If the Algerian Casbah in the 1930s was a site of French fantasies about the colony, the Casbah-banlieue of the 1990s offers similar projections, even if, as in La Haine, these projections are tempered with sympathy for the characters’ plight.
