Reimagining North African Immigration

Bol Partner

An interdisciplinary collection of essays examining the depiction of immigration from North Africa in contemporary French culture. Taking the pulse of French post-coloniality, this volume invites the reader to explore the many different faces of Frenchness at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The essays explore the challenges and hopes facing the multicultural country of today, in relation to the legacies of its colonial past. The contributors invoke the transformative powers of literature, film, and television, pleading for an honest and open recognition of the centrality of post-beur authors and directors on France’s cultural scene, and of their vital role in overcoming monocultural norms. The variety of approaches – sociological, historical, political, literary, and cultural – celebrates recent films, television programs, and novels produced by citizens of so-called ‘immigrant’ and North African heritage, who use French as their language of choice. Located at the intersection of migration studies and diaspora studies, as well as film and literature studies, the various chapters throw fresh light on challenging works that deflate stereotypes regarding France’s post-immigration population. They foreground themes such as urban culture and globalization, cultural metissage, racial diversity, transnationalism, mobility, and connectedness across generational, social, and racial divides, as well as the healing of historical trauma, the decloistering of memories through post-memory, and ‘illiterature’. The contributors draw on a wide range of seminal literary and film authors, from Tahar Ben Jelloun, Faïza Guène, Dalila Kerchouche, Mohamed Teriah, Samuel Zaoui, to Merzak Allouache, Yamina Benguigui, Rachid Djaidani, and Abdellatif Kechiche, while also revealing important new voices. This volume takes the pulse of French post-coloniality by studying representations of trans-Mediterranean immigration to France in recent literature, television and film. The writers and filmmakers examined have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the state of multiculturalism within – and in spite of – a continuing Republican framework. Their work deflates stereotypes, promotes respect for cultural and ethnic minorities and gives a new dignity to subjects supposedly located on the margins of the Republic. Establishing a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch’s ground-breaking concept of postmemory, this volume provides a much-needed vocabulary for rethinking the intergenerational legacy of trans-Mediterranean immigrants.

Bol

This volume takes the pulse of French post-coloniality by studying representations of trans-Mediterranean immigration to France in recent literature, television and film. The writers and filmmakers examined have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the state of multiculturalism within – and in spite of – a continuing Republican framework. Their work deflates stereotypes, promotes respect for cultural and ethnic minorities and gives a new dignity to subjects supposedly located on the margins of the Republic. Establishing a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch’s ground-breaking concept of postmemory, this volume provides a much-needed vocabulary for rethinking the intergenerational legacy of trans-Mediterranean immigrants.