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.
