Immigrant Narratives In Contemporary France

The first comprehensive survey of its kind in English, this book examines the experience of immigration as represented by authors who moved to France from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia after World War II. Essays by expert contributors address the literary productions of different ethnic groups while taking into account generational differences and the effects of class and gender. The focus on immigration, a subject which has moved to the center of many sensitive social and political debates, raises questions related to cultural hybridity, identity politics, border writing, and the status of minority literature within the traditional literary canon, all of which constitute vital areas of research in literary, cultural, and historical studies today. Included are broad socio-historical chapters on general topics related to immigration, along with chapters providing detailed readings of specific texts and authors. A key objective of the book is to consider the ways in which literary texts by authors of immigrant origin explore what it means to be French, and how these works shape debates about French national and cultural identity. The contributors discuss such issues as cultural hybridity, linguistic identity, and the textualization and theorization of otherness.

The expression "littérature migrante," coined by Québécois critics in the mid-1980s, reflected the emerging body of literary works written by recent immigrants to the province. Redefining the concept of migrancy, Subha Xavier’s The Migrant Text argues that global movements of people have fundamentally changed literary production over the past thirty years. Bringing together a corpus of recent novels by immigrants to France and Quebec, Xavier suggests that these diverse works extend beyond labels such as francophone or postcolonial literature to forge a new mode of writing that deserves recognition on its own terms. Weaving together literary theory and salient examples taken from numerous French-language novels, The Migrant Text shows how both external and internal factors shape migrant writing in contemporary French literature. The opening chapters trace the elusive concept of the migrant as it appears in extant theories of nationalism, postcolonialism, world literature, and francophonie. What follows are incisive analyses of fiction written for French audiences by authors from Algeria, Cameroon, China, Haiti, Iraq, and Poland, whose works reveal that the processes of troubling national categories and evading colonial power dynamics can be wellsprings for creativity. One of the most pressing social and political topics of our day, immigration challenges our ideas about homeland and citizenship. Celebrating the courage and tenacity of immigrants from around the world, The Migrant Text carves a new space for discussing the dynamics of global literature.

The essays in this volume provide an overview and critical account of prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investigations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging. They explore how two key stages in women’s lives—maternity and old age—are narrated and defined in fictions and autobiographical writings by contemporary French and francophone women. Through close readings of Maryse Condé, Hélène Cixous, Zahia Rahmani, Linda Lê, Pierrette Fleutieux, and Michèle Sarde, among others, these essays examine related topics such as dispossession, female friendship, and women’s relationships with their mothers. By adopting a broad, synthetic approach to these two distinct and defining stages in women’s lives, this volume elucidates how these significant transitional moments set the stage for women’s evolving definitions (and interrogations) of their identities and roles.

Turkish immigration, art and narratives of home in France argues for a cultural, rather than a sociological or economic, approach to understanding how immigrants become part of their new country. In contrast to the language of integration or assimilation which evaluates an immigrant's success in relation to a static endpoint (e.g. integrated or not), 'settling' is a more useful metaphor. Immigrants and their descendants are not definitively 'settled', but rather engage in an ongoing process of adaptation. In order to understand this process of settling, it is important to pay particular attention to immigrants not only as consumers, but also as producers of culture, since artistic production provides a unique and nuanced perspective on immigrants' sense of home and belonging, especially within the multi-generational process of settling. In order to anchor these larger theoretical questions in actual experience, this book looks at music, theatre and literature by artists of Turkish immigrant origin in France.

North African immigrants, once confined to France’s social and cultural margins, have become a strong presence in France’s national life. Similarly, descendants of immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have gained mainstream recognition as filmmakers and as the subject of films. The first collective volume on this topic, Screening Integration offers a sustained critical analysis of this cinema. In particular, contributors evaluate how Maghrebi films have come to participate in, promote, and, at the same time, critique France’s integration. In the process, these essays reflect on the conditions that allowed for the burgeoning of this cinema in the first place, as well as on the social changes the films delineate. Screening Integration brings together established scholars in the fields of postcolonial, Francophone, and film studies to address the latest developments in this cinematic production. These authors explore the emergence of various genres that recast the sometimes fossilized idea of ethnic difference. Screening Integration provides a much-needed reference for those interested in comprehending the complex shifts in twenty-first-century French cinema and in the multicultural social formations that have become an integral part of contemporary France in the new millennium.

Immigration is one of the most significant and pressing issues in contemporary France. This is the first comprehensive survey to be published in English covering developments in this field during the last twenty years.

The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France explains the causes of twenty-first-century global migrations and their impact on French literature and the French literary establishment. A marginal genre in 1980s France, since the turn of the century "migrant literature" has become central to criticism and publishing. Oana Sabo addresses previously unanswered questions about the proliferation of contemporary migrant texts and their shifting themes and forms, mechanisms of literary legitimation, and notions of critical and commercial achievement. Through close readings of novels (by Mathias Énard, Milan Kundera, Dany Laferrière, Henri Lopès, Andreï Makine, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Alice Zeniter, and others) and sociological analyses of their consecrating authorities (including the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, the Académie française, publishing houses, and online reviewers), Sabo argues that these texts are best understood as cultural commodities that mediate between literary and economic forms of value, academic and mass readerships, and national and global literary markets. By examining the latest literary texts and cultural agents not yet subjected to sufficient critical study, Sabo contributes to contemporary literature, cultural history, migration studies, and literary sociology.

This is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and memories of it, in the work of French authors of Algerian origin. The book considers a primary corpus spanning over forty literary texts published between 1981 and 2012, analysing the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse and apparently competing memories, and in the process present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. By setting up the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’, where the potentially explosive but also consensual encounter between former colonizer and colonized subject takes place, the book contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory, and the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children in dominant definitions of French identity.