The French Mediterranean city of Marseille is typically imagined as a city of unparalleled multicultural diversity. Yet, this view overlooks how Marseillais residents of African, Arab, and Muslim origin are progressively driven out of their homes, since the 1990s, by urban renewal projects seeking to redevelop ‘unsightly’ working-class neighbourhoods downtown into upscale commercial zones. This article offers an account of a central paradox undergirding Marseille’s redevelopment: As working-class minority residents are expelled from downtown spaces, city authorities continue to mine them, as emblematic figures of Marseille’s multicultural diversity, for extractive cultural and economic capital to buttress the city’s cosmopolitan image.

Amir Aziz examines L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals), a 1970 play by the Franco-Algerian writer Kateb Yacine. L’Homme narrates the dramatic journeys of characters of disparate geopolitical and historical contexts, such as Mohamed, a North African peasant conscripted into the French colonial army, and Alabama, an African-American soldier serving in the Vietnam War. Aziz argues that L’Homme blends both history and fiction to produce an enduring historical and literary archive of subaltern voices that conveys the motifs of transcultural kinship and anti-colonial revolution characterizing North Africa and Indochina during the turbulent era of decolonization. Aziz contends that L’Homme shows how differing anti-colonial narratives may instead be conjoined as teachable lessons in national unity, where Vietnam functions metonymically as political exemplar to emulate and cautionary metaphor to bear in mind for a post-independence Algeria.