A critical perspective on socially embedded cultural policy in France.

This paper aims to show how in France, the synthesis of cultural policy and social concerns throws up a number of tensions and pitfalls. These tensions are perhaps most acute because these sorts of cultural policies are not merely about socio-economic issues but are actually tied to France's colonial legacy and the presence of a large and often marginalised population of migrants and their descendents. The pitfalls stem from the universalist starting point of French cultural policy, which, although designed to integrate "new" and migrant/postmigrant publics, emergent artists and cultural practices, seems to simultaneously marginalise them since it is already premised on a binary that opposes art as aesthetic expression and art as an expression of cultural (anthropological) identity or social cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]