Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France

by Susan Ireland (Editor), Patrice J. Proulx (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313315930
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/30/2001
Series:	Contributions to the Study of World Literature , #106
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

SUSAN IRELAND is Professor of French at Grinnell College. Her research interests include contemporary French fiction, Quebec women writers, the Algerian novel, and the literature of immigration in France and Quebec. She was one of the editors of The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature (Greenwood, 1999).

PATRICE J. PROULX is Professor of French and a member of the Women's Studies faculty at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research interests include the notion of identity and exile in the works of contemporary French and francophone women writers. Her articles have appeared in such jourbanals as The French Review and Women in French, and she was one of the editors of The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature (Greenwood, 1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Overview
Perceptions of Ethnic Difference in Post-War France by Alec G. Hargreaves
First-Generation Immigrant Narratives by Susan Ireland
Writers of Maghrebi Origin
Anamnesis and National Reconciliation: Re-membering October 17, 1961 by Anne Donadey
Balancing Acts: Family and Integration in the Fiction of Franco-Maghrebi Women Writers by Patricia Geesey
Translating Immigrant Identities in Mounsi's Territoire d'outre-ville by Susan Ireland
Voices of Change: Interlanguage in Franco-Maghrebi Texts by Farida Abu-Haidar
The Post-Colonial Writer between Anonymity and the Institution: Inscriptions of the Author in Chimo and Paul Smaïl by Michel Laronde
Le Jeu de piste: Tracking Clues to the Emergence of Maghrebi-French Literature in Farida Belghoul's Georgette! by Mark McKinney
On Natives and Narratives from the Banlieues by Sylvie Durmelat
Caribbean Immigrant Narratives
Negotiating the Metropole: Patterns of Exile and Cultural Survival in Giséle Pineau and Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie by H. Adlai Murdoch
Textualizing the Immigrant Community: Francoise Ega's Lettres a une Noire by Patrice J. Proulx
The African Dispora in France
Writing New Identities: The African Diaspora in Paris by Odile Cazenave
Daniel Biyaoula: Exile, Immigration, and Transnational Cultural Productions by Dominic Thomas
Migrating Genders in Calixthe Beyala's Fiction by Nicki Hitchcott
New Sans-papiers Rhetorics in Contemporary France by Mireille Rosello
Vietnamese Fiction in French
Linda LÊ and the Prosthesis of Origin by Martine Delvaux
Tainted Blood: On Being Impure in Kim Lefevre's Métisse blanche and Retour a la saison des pluies by Ching Selao
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Scholars of French literature and women's studies from the US, Britain, and Quebec offer both general socio-historical treatments and detailed analysis of specific texts and authors in order to address questions of the post-war literature of immigration in France. They also examine a number of issues dealing with specificities of the literary production of the different ethnic groups. They consider writers of Maghrebi, Caribbean, African, and Vietnamese origin. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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