I’m currently in Paris for the 2011-2012 academic year thanks to the wonderful support of one of Harvard’s post-graduate traveling fellowships. The project I proposed has to do with questions of national and social identities in first- and second-generation French immigrants of West African origin. Namely, I’m trying to understand the nature of the all-too-revered notion of “national identity” in France, and then also to see how West African immigrants and their French-born children fit into this schema. So far, I’ve noticed that words/phrases like « l’Islamophobie » and la question/le problème de « l’intégration » and du « communautarism » are used here to refer to the kinds of issues I’m interested in. But these terms also seem to have encoded in them multiple shades of meaning that I haven’t yet fully unpacked.
I’m clearly not an expert in these issues, especially since I spent the last four years studying evolutionary biology and global health. And I don’t think I’ll come up with some unique insight that the myriad of more learned and thoughtful researchers haven’t already expounded upon. But I do think that this will be a personally enlightening year for me, and I’m grateful to have the time to ponder a compelling intellectual and social issue that I have never had the opportunity to study before.
So I’ve been in Paris for almost exactly one month now, and I still have yet to write about what I’ve been doing here since I arrived. I’ve been trying for ages to start up some sort of Paris blog to chronicle this fellowship year, but I keep getting bogged down by annoying details about how I’m to properly present this material.
All I want is a space for me to jot down interesting conversations and interactions I’ve been having, and to share my thoughts on some of the books and articles I’ve been reading, without the pressures (albeit self-imposed) of having to come up with some sort of fully-formed opinion about them.
But I can already feel that those questions I initially wanted answered coming into my year in Paris are slowly being revealed to me in bits and pieces, and I don’t want these bits and pieces left forgotten in the dusty corners of my brain. I think that reviving my Tumblr and recording my experiences here might help me sort things out in a more haphazard way, but in a way that is more true to my day to day experiences.
