Criminalizing the Casbahs explores how French police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African—the "Casbahs"—with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently North African. Through local but connected histories of policing in these two cities, Danielle Beaujon traces how police practices mapped the racialization of North African colonial subjects onto urban space. By demarcating and racializing space, the French police created repressive methods for controlling North African bodies while proclaiming to uphold republican ideals of colorblind justice. The invasive, often violent, policing of North Africans in the French Mediterranean blurred the political and the personal, broadening the spectrum of police power with lasting consequences for post-colonial policing.
Danielle Beaujon is an Assistant Professor of History and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. Danielle is a historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and mobility in the French Empire. Her work has appeared in journals such as French Historical Studies, French Politics, Culture & Society and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques and has been awarded the Coordinating Council for Women in History's Nupur Chaudhuri Prize, the Society for French Studies' Malcolm Bowie Prize and the Urban History Association's Arnold Hirsch Award.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260324T210000Z DTEND:20260324T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR