Longing and Belonging in a Time of Post-Coloniality: Amel’s Chedda
Drawing on work on how politics shape kinship (Bennett, 2010; Lemons, 2019), this essay follows Amel’s chedda, a traditional western Algerian wedding garment, through four moments – her wedding procession, at a wedding show, at a meeting with friends outside of Paris, and in the preparations before the wedding party with her neggafa (bridal assistant) – to consider her transnational and trans-generational post-coloniality. I reflect on how both the benefits and burdens of Amel’s “postcolonial past” are woven into and negotiated through this garment and associated rituals (Guénif-Souilamas, 2000; Stoler, 2002; Surkis, 2010). Marriage partner preferences for “traditional” partners among my Muslim French of Algerian origin interlocutors in a northwestern Parisian suburb are part of a web of relations and desire tangled with post-colonial politics (cf. Salvatore, 2009:5). Prevalent scholarship characterizes “tradition” as a religious response to a secular France that, increasingly, demands the relegation of visible religiosity out of the public sphere, and surveils non-EU transnational marriage (see Robledo, 2007; Cole, 2014; Selby, 2017). In contrast, I aim to privilege desire and kinship to understand these preferences. Given how the control of intimacy and sexuality are central to colonial politics, including in France, I frame Amel’s desire for this marriage partner with specific “non-traditional” rituals as evoking her post-coloniality. Put differently, part of this seeking and reconstituting of traditionalism and the bled at the time of marriage is a bodily and emotional response to post-colonial identities. Islam is sometimes referenced and sometimes ignored. For many of my participants, like for Amel, the social bonds of tradition are best expressed through kinship ties in marriage.