The historicity of 'mixité' within each community touches upon shifts in perceptions of outsiders-insiders of dominant cultures. By attending to the life stories of several francophone Algerian women who have married outside and away from their Muslim families, we see how orientalist clichés are challenged by a feminine dialectic of the insider-outsider involving three distinct national histories: Algeria, France and Britain. These women translate the Saidian paradigm of tragic exile into a journey towards cultural hybridity, understood here as a utopian metaphor for integration worked out in dialogue with myths of origins. If British-Algerian unions resemble other types of Maghribi-European families, such transnational families exemplify the current paradigm of cultural hybridity: fragmented affective codes, converging family gender roles, innovative tradition, neo-orientalist representations of 'chez nous', contradictory images of nationhood and, finally, the metaphoric language of a historicised self. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd.

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World Algeria Africa ethnicity Hirundinidae cultural relations cultural change Eastern Hemisphere marriage womens status North Africa