Fortress Europe and its metaphors: immigration and the law. CES Working Paper, vol. 3, no.1, 1999

Rosello, Mireille. (1999) Fortress Europe and its metaphors: immigration and the law. CES Working Paper, vol. 3, no.1, 1999. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

It is in that context that I would like to listen, obliquely, to two types of discourse that tend to ignore each other: first I want to listen to the legal discourse that manifests itself in this new immigration law, then I also want to listen to a simultaneous layer of discourse, a popular discourse made of images, metaphors, and quotable quotes that constitute a vast reservoir of seemingly spontaneous thoughts on immigrants and their presence in France. I would like to position myself at the intersection between those seemingly incompatible discourses. I would especially like to check to which extent the second type of discourse (those popular images that are so often devalued as a language) do not constitute a second type of law, a law that is sometimes even more rigid that the official one. So, instead of examining the official legal discourse as if it were a self-contained universe, a text that can be read as a finished product, I would like to concentrate on what happens before and after that drafting of the bill. I would like to focus on the ways in which such texts are written, prepared, argued (what happens upstream if you will), but also how the text is read and interpreted. Let’s see if a law on immigration is part of everyday life, if it finally turns into everyday life or if as I will suggest, it reflects what already exists in everyday life and in our culture.

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