The banlieues, the formerly marginalized, criminalized space of urban peripheries, and then the standardized product of urban modernity, have recently gained centrality in contemporary France. Églantine Colon studies the function of these urban peripheries in contemporary aesthetic production and critical theory in her book project, “Tenir la marge. Poétiques et politiques du précaire (Holding the Margin: The Poetics and Politics of Precarity).” The project starts from the identification of a “turn to the peripheries” in post-1990 French culture, and argues that the banlieues, unlike the now museified and gentrified Parisian city center, confront aesthetic figuration with a structurally conflicting space. Conceptualizing the French banlieues as precarious spaces, Colon analyzes texts and films that use the banlieues to show how the aesthetic figuration of urban peripheries have enabled a movement beyond the “spatialist” tendencies of the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s towards an aesthetics that she calls precarism.