In thinking about globalization and the nature of human relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a broad range of cultural, economic, political, and social issues generate conflicting interpretations of local and global identities. France has, perhaps more than any country in recent history, emerged as a delicate site for the investigation of these complex formulations. Immigration and the cultural productions that have emerged from within France’s postcolonial communities have generated radically new socio-cultural structures, displacing received notions of Frenchness that fail to accurately reflect the collective memory of those people for whom the “Hexagon” now represents home, a fact that has simultaneously compelled individuals and groups to acknowledge and recognize that memory is now also elsewhere. To talk about immigration in France inevitably places us at the intersection of these issues since to explore France from such a perspective is to embark on a journey across the arbitrary lines of demarcation that distinguish the colony from the postcolony in order to engage with immigration and identity politics, question the origins of the French Republic and challenge its foundational principles—in short, questions and challenges that are not “strangers” to political debates in other European countries and in the U.S.