What brought you to Paris?

In the early 1990s, just as I was fishing around for a subject for my Ph.D. thesis in anthropology, a filmmaker friend (Carlyn Saltman) invited me to join her in the making of a documentary about an African man who had been elected mayor of a small rural village in Brittany. I had already spent time in France as an undergraduate, and jumped at the chance to get involved on a project that would bring together my interests in French rural life and race and immigration. That experience, as well as our film, Kofi chez les Français, set me on the direction that resulted in my dissertation research on integration and notions of difference in contemporary France.

What keeps you here?

Love, of course. I met the man who would become my husband while doing my fieldwork. And everything else: life in France continues to charm me.

How did you first become interested in the suburbs outside of Paris?

It took me a while to realize that what I was doing had anything to do with the suburbs. At the time of its construction, the ville nouvelle (state-planned New Town) where I did my fieldwork was supposed to be a sort of anti-suburb, an improvement on the post-War suburbs that have become the object of so much anxiety. The planning that went into building the city is apparent on many fronts which is, among other things, what made working there so interesting: in all sorts of ways the city reflects ideas held by urban planners and various others about what should go into the making of a good community. At the same time, many districts of the city, including and especially the neighborhood where I focused my research, are virtually as run-down and socially and economically disadvantaged as other ‘problem’ suburbs of Paris and other large cities in France. But it wasn’t until after the riots in 2005, when someone asked me if the city where I had worked was like places where the riots had taken place, that I realized I could and had to make the connection. Since then, I’ve also come to realize that the suburbs in general are varied and often surprising places: they’re rarely only what the media make them out to be.

What were some of the challenges and rewards of researching your book?

I loved doing fieldwork. I lived in and studied the neighborhood at the center of my book for a period of 16 months, and don’t know that I’d ever felt as engaged with a place and the people who live there as I did then. It’s a very privileged and at times exhausting thing to do – not only to live in and among people whom you might not otherwise have the opportunity to meet, but to make the things they think and care about the center of your intellectual attention. It’s extremely intense. I’d love to take on another project of similar scope but the realities of work and home and family make that difficult, at least for now. That was probably the hardest part of getting the book done – finding the time. I have a full-time job and small children and luckily, a patient and understanding husband. But the book often felt like something I was able to work on only on the side.

What books are on your nightstand?

The Summer Without Men, by Siri Hustvedt, and Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, and The Fat Man in History, by Peter Carey, who is a writer I discovered not long ago and whose work I think is wonderful. I also read recently L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes, by the French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, which I thought was fascinating and smart and recommend for anyone interested in a critical view of post-colonial studies. And I’ve kept a copy of Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times nearby ever since I read it a year or two ago, because it’s so well done, and because there’s something about the passion and excitement and contradiction Wright felt upon coming to Paris that I need to understand.

What advice would you give to beginning writers?

Love what you do.

What is the best advice you have received?

When I was a senior in high school, close to graduation, my friends and I decided, along with probably everyone else who was a senior in high school that day, to participate in “senior skip day” – i.e. we didn’t go to school. But unlike everyone else who went to the beach, my friends and I went canoeing. Later in the day, when with some trepidation I told my mother what I had done – I was probably asking her for a note so I wouldn’t get in trouble – she said “good for you,” which rather surprised me. But then I realized it was just the kind of advice my mother would give: If you have to break the rules, she’d say, at least do it for something worthwhile.

What’s next?

I’m fascinated by the different ways race and what the French are now calling “diversity” are configured in France and the US, and the ways these issues serve – and have served for quite some time — as a lens through which the two countries look at each other. I’m hoping to put together a project that will allow me to look at this more closely. It’s not the differences per se that interest me, but rather what these differences can help us understand about how these notions are configured, their political, social, and economic implications, that I think are important to consider.