Why reintroduce assimilation?

Assimilation is a rather unfriendly concept when used in a social context. In French, it generally means an act of the mind that considers (something) as similar (to something else). A relevant secondary meaning is the action of making (something) similar (to something else) by integration or absorption. This meaning has existed in physiology since 1495. Around 1840, the concept was related to social processes for the first time, as the act of assimilating persons and peoples; the process through which these persons, these peoples, assimilate (themselves). This connotation incorporates terms like ‘Americanisation’ and ‘Frenchisation’. The older physiological connotation shines through in early politico-sociological discourse about assimilation. André Siegfried, for example, one of the first French political scientists to become occupied with immigration in the mid-20th century, spoke of ‘the assimilation of these immigrants, inserted into the American organism in massive doses’ (quoted in Noiriel and Beaud 1989, my translation).

Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1989) provides a cruel and ironic summary of assimilation in the story of adolescent Indian Salahuddin Chamcha's arrival at an English boarding school. The first thing that we learn about Salahuddin's contacts with ‘the English’ is that his classmates giggle at his accent and exclude him from their secrets. Yet these exclusions only increase Salahuddin's determination to become English. He begins ‘to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognise, paleface masks… until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us’ (Rushdie 1989: 44).