Criminalizing the Casbahs

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 repres