Abstract.
In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFrench state in its colonization of North Africa and particularly Algeria, and later in itsattempts to control the banlieues its policies of citizenship and cartographic controlyielded on the margins of Paris. In this context, I will explore the ways in which thenovel’s characters, living clandestinely in asquatt, simultaneously resist, put to use, andeven supercede state documents of control as they disrupt everyday life and conductheists across the city of Paris. The paper will explore unofficial cartographies of Paris,from those afforded by the radios libres and alternative publications such as Libe´ ration and Sans Frontierez, to oral and almost proverbial networks of knowledge criss-crossingthe city of Paris, while also tracing the uses to which supplemental cartographic sketchesand counterfeit identity cards are put in the pages of the novel. The paper will be indialogue with theoretical and critical formulations of space, cartography, and statecontrol put forward by Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and TomConley. The paper will conclude with a consideration of the means and limits of resistance by the novel’s characters in the context of this body of theory and criticis
