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, Leila Sebbar, Said
Mohamed, Rachid Djaidani, 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.
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