Laura Reeck - Böcker

Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond explores the Beur/banlieue literary and cultural field from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present. It examines a set of postcolonial Bildungsroman novels by Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Leïla Sebbar, Saïd Mohamed, Rachid Djaïdani, and Mohamed Razane. In these novels, the central characters are authors who struggle to find self-identity and a place in the world through writing and authorship. The book thus explores the different ways all these novels relate the process of "becoming" to the process of writing. Neither is straightforward as the author-characters struggle to put their lives into words, settle upon a genre of writing, and adopt an authorial persona.Each chapter of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond focuses on a given author's own relationship to writing before assessing his or her use of the author-character as a proxy. In so doing, the study as a whole explores a set of literary questions (genre, textual authority, reception) and engages them against the backdrop of socio-cultural challenges facing contemporary French society. These include debates on education, cultural literacy, diversity and equal opportunity, and the "banlieue" environment. Finally, it argues in relation to the authors and novels in question for the particular relevance of "rooted and vernacular" cosmopolitanism, which suggests both that exploration of the world must begin at home and that stories are crucial for such explorations.

Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond explores the Beur/banlieue literary and cultural field from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present. It examines a set of postcolonial Bildungsroman novels by Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Leïla Sebbar, Saïd Mohamed, Rachid Djaïdani, and Mohamed Razane. In these novels, the central characters are authors who struggle to find self-identity and a place in the world through writing and authorship. The book thus explores the different ways all these novels relate the process of "becoming" to the process of writing. Neither is straightforward as the author-characters struggle to put their lives into words, settle upon a genre of writing, and adopt an authorial persona.Each chapter of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond focuses on a given author's own relationship to writing before assessing his or her use of the author-character as a proxy. In so doing, the study as a whole explores a set of literary questions (genre, textual authority, reception) and engages them against the backdrop of socio-cultural challenges facing contemporary French society. These include debates on education, cultural literacy, diversity and equal opportunity, and the "banlieue" environment. Finally, it argues in relation to the authors and novels in question for the particular relevance of "rooted and vernacular" cosmopolitanism, which suggests both that exploration of the world must begin at home and that stories are crucial for such explorations.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, “Frenchness” and national identity, and contemporary cultural production in France. In mobilizing a range of approaches and methodologies pertinent to their specialist fields of inquiry, contributors to this volume share in the common objective of elucidating the cultural productions of what we are calling post-migratory (second- and third-generation) postcolonial minorities.The volume provides a lens through which to query the dimensions of postcoloniality and transnationalism in relation to post-migratory postcolonial minorities in France and identifies points of convergence and conversation among them in the range of their cultural production. The cultural practitioners considered query traditional French high culture and its pathways and institutions; some emerge as autodidacts, introducing new forms of authorship and activism; they inflect French cultural production with different ‘accents’, some experimental and even avant-garde in nature. As the volume contributors show, though post-migratory postcolonial minorities sometimes express dis-settlement, they also provide an incisive view of social identities in France today and their own compelling visions for the future.