ABSTRACT
Mainstream French cinema has, until recently, tended to ignore, marginaiize, or stereotype representations of its ethnic minority "Others," working to maintain the hegemony of a White, patriarchal, Eurocentric understanding of Frenchness.1 However, "Beur cinema"2 of the mid-1980s (fiims by and/or about the problematic identity of "second-generation" postwar immigrants from France's former empire in the Maghreb) and banlieue cinema of the mid-1990s (fiims set in the multi-ethnic working-class housing estates on the periphery of France's major cities) have turned French cinema into a site of struggle for alternative constructions of French national identity.
