Family Time: The Bonds and Bondage of Transnational Francophone Kinship

This dissertation examines cultural depictions of immigrant families that lie at the intersection of the Francophone Maghreb and France. Throughout, it conceives of a transnational/cultural family that stretches the boundaries of previous notions of kinship. Some of these families have immigrated from North Africa to Europe, others have roots in North Africa and seek to return from their time in a "host" country to the "homeland," and a third category finds itself split or divided by the Mediterranean Sea. This study reads these families using the vocabulary of bonds and bondage to conceive of relationships differently and move past previous binaries of family vs. not family, normal vs. abnormal, assimilated vs. unassimilated, etc. These ideas that can be found in more detail in the project's introduction. Chapter one examines Nina Bouraoui's La voyeuse interdite (1991) and argues maternally-enforced forms of gendered bondage are disguised as gender bonds. The novel's protagonist seeks solidarity to avoid the slippage between bond and bondage at three sites of rupture in her relationship with her mother: birth, menstruation, and marriage. Chapter two focuses on divorce and paternity in Azouz Begag's Salam Ouessant (2012). Here, the protagonist struggles to form intimate bonds with his daughters because he is impeded by his intersectional position as a North African, immigrant, masculine man and experiences with saudade. Chapter three is dedicated to an analysis of Fouad Laroui's coming-of-age story, Une année chez les Français (2010). It posits that this Bildungsroman complicates the relationship between "family" and "familiar" and concludes that the bonds the protagonist forms in his surrogate family remain inadequate, due to the bondage of his origins, despite how familiar they may feel. Chapter four takes up Leïla Sebbar's Mon cher fils (2009) and reimagines familial estrangement. Instead of portraying estrangement as the product of a "lack," the novel requires that it be understood as a force that exerts pressure on the lives of the characters. Finally, the epilogue examines previous theories of becoming, including those of Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Rosi Braidotti. It ties the notion of becoming to the rest of the dissertation and asks what it means to become family.PHDRomance Languages & Literatures: FrenchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144117/1/frelier_1.pd

Surrogacy: Temporary Familial Bonds and the Bondage of Origins in Fouad Laroui’s Une année chez les Français

Embargo ends September 1, 2020Previously published in the Journal of North African StudiesThis article examines Fouad Laroui’s 2010 novel, Une année chez les Français, and charts the protagonist’s development to argue that it offers a new model for Moroccan coming-of-age in a postcolonial context. While Une année is a Bildungsroman, it breaks away from patterns seen in the genre before it to illustrate the possibilities of creating ‘Third Spaces’ (Bhabha 1990). The protagonist, Mehdi, arrives at his moment of ‘apprentissage’ thanks to his pseudo-adoption by a French family and French boarding school, where he experiences what I have termed a pull-push sensation. I outline the sources and effects of the pull-push Mehdi perceives and then turn to argue that these experiences allow him to destabilise the relationship between the concepts of family and familiarity. It is through his newly found understanding that what is familiar is not always family and what is family does not always feel familiar that Mehdi is able to articulate the third space he desires for himself and come of age. While this article focuses on the experiences of a single, fictional character, Une année chez les Francais introduces readers with a framework for imagining the identity-formation of a multiplicity of individuals who have grown up at the intersection of postcolonial North Africa and continental France.World Languages & Culture

Feminist Theories of Development in Farida Benlyazid’s Double-Bildung story, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (2005)

Embargo ends June 30, 2020Farida Benlyazid’s film, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (2005), offers viewers a novel iteration of the classic coming-of-age genre. As a film, it lies outside the preferred medium of expression for the genre and it features not one, but two distinct protagonists: Juanita (for whom the story is named) and her city, Tangier. Each half of this double narrative provides a feminist critique of the masculine projects traditionally associated with the Bildung genre. When read as a narrative of development, both the form and content of the film open up the possibility of gendering theories of development. The film’s feminist interventions destabilize the aims of Enlightenment thinking, which produced the Bildung genre, along a three-pronged axis: the film questions the processes that lead to the solidification of national boundaries; it challenges progress-oriented ideals as they relate to time and development; and it dissolves the construct of linguistic purity.World Languages & Culture