Ethnic Minority Womens Writing in France: Publishing Practices and Identity Formation, 19982005

In Ethnic Minority Womens Writing in France, Mouflard argues that the identity politics surrounding the immigration discourse of early twenty-first century France were reflected in the marketing and editing practices of the Metropoles key publishers, specifically with regards to non-white French womens literature. Echoing the utopic Black-Blanc-Beur model of integration which surfaced during the 1998 soccer World Cup, select publishers fashioned unofficial literary categories based on neocolonial racial and gender stereotypes, either lauding integrated Beur authors or exploiting Black political dissenters. Concurrently, metropolitan women writers in their autobiographies, autofictions, and manifestoes, problematized notions of French multiculturalism and literary hierarchies, thereby exposing the dangers of utopian thinking. Mouflard ultimately reveals that the absence of the Franco-Vietnamese identity from the Black-Blanc-Beur paradigm enabled authors of Southeastern Asian origin to establish themselves outside of the eras reductive multicultural utopia, within a realm directly adjacent to littérature française, if not in a newly-designed, truly multicultural French literature category. Overall, Mouflards research highlights the discrepancies between Frances official discourse on immigration, and the actual identity formation processes created by the institutions and exploited by influential publishers, in the years leading to the historic 2005 banlieue civil unrest.