Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France

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.

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 journals as The French Review and Women in French, and she was one of the editors of The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature (Greenwood, 1999).