What is urban about urban violence in France? Violence in marginalised neighbourhoods as body politics

In France, urban violence is associated with juvenile violence that concerns certain, marginalized, spaces of the city and specific, racialized, city dwellers. It has the specificity, in comparison to British and American contexts, that the term is used in reference to anti-institutional violence: what is called 'urban violence' in France is termed 'race riots' at the other side of the Atlantic. This contribution approaches urban violence, which in this context mainly means setting objects on fire and thereby provoking police intervention and altercation, as a form of self-defense by the subaltern. Youth turn the hypervisibilisation of urban violence by mainstream media into a means to publicize their anger. They choose fire as a means of public address, not because of their incapacity to speak but because of their refusal of interlocution. The riots that took place in Grenoble in 2010 serve as empirical grounding of this argument.