Robin de Jong
“How To Be French If Your Parents Weren’t” is a project designed to study the second generation immigrant experience in France with connections to art, specifically the contemporary art exhibit Persona Grata. Second generation immigrants lack a so-called cultural citizenship; they are not viewed as “French”, even though in technical terms, they are very much French.
The second generation immigrants struggle to fully assimilate into French society because of the history of immigration, the French ideology of republicanism ideals, and French policy, past and present.
Being a second generation immigrant in France is difficult, for a multitude of reasons, and art collections such as Persona Grata depict these hard-to-express sentiments, allowing the affected to express themselves to society around them in an attempt at a more unified French society.
How To Be French if Your Parents Weren’t by Robin de Jong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.