L'invention de la culture beur.

This dissertation focuses on the implications and significance of the emergence and evolution, throughout the 80s and the 90s, of what has been termed beur literature. This literature consists of about thirty texts written by authors born of immigrants from the former French colonies in North Africa, mainly Algeria, and educated in France. While examining the social and historical contexts of their emergence, I argue that these narratives articulate the ambivalence and the differential function of the Beurs as a social body that is dominated, yet struggling for integration in the French nation, and in so doing redefining it. In the first chapter, I concentrate on the controversial denomination beur, used to designate the so-called second generation. I study the shifts in denomination (from second generation to beur) and how these shifts affect the representations that designate, as well as construct, these individuals as a group, and the self-representations of French society. The coinage of the word beur (derived from the word 'arabe') corresponds to a process of mediatization and an increase of visibility that culminated in the middle of the 1980s. The second chapter assesses the problematic relation that exists between visibility, representation, and actual social power and influence, and examines what is gained or lost through this process of recognition at the national level. In this context, the question Does a beur literature exist? is often asked by critics as well as by the authors themselves. The point of the third chapter is to understand why this question is being asked, and to determine the status given and/or denied to these narratives in the literary and cultural fields. The last two chapters emphasize the texts themselves. Using oppositional tactics, authors such as Farida Belghoul and Azouz Begag appropriate the national language while foregrounding its heterogeneity. Through their work on language and national representations, these texts make metropolitan literature francophone, and make literature serve a decolonizing function and become an overt arena of negotiations.PhDEthnic studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129601/2/9542831.pd