The Voice of the Beurs in the French Literature of the 1980\u27s: A quest for a Multicultural Identity

The main purpose of the present research is to develop a critical reading of the double identity such as it is expressed in the novels of the North African immigrants living in France. But, and far from proposing another socio-historical analysis on North African immigration in France, the interest of this work is in filling the surprising lack of critical literary works on the subject. It is based on the concept of the wandering, which forms the imaginary identity of the Beurs . This perspective reactivates older debates about the significance of us , the other , the races, the Nation-State and the nature and limit of the concept of national culture. It will also allow us to present some of the main characteristics of the Beurs\u27s identity, and from there, will help us to redefine the myth of the modern stranger. The thesis of this research proposes that the Beurs\u27s identity is mainly built through denunciation and subversion of the Nation State\u27s official discourse and finally produces an original formulation. From the study of the themes, the form the way the story is told, and from the subversive character of the discourse about otherness (which refuses the idea of unity and wholeness that the French national culture is still pushing forward today), this paper shows, finally, how this new discourse on one\u27s identity (coming from the world of the North African immigration, but from within the occidental world), could very well be a modern inversion of the concept of Orientalism. The novelty, which for us is capable of renewing the way the Western world looks at the Stranger, is that the latter is at once subject and object of the discourse, and that this neo-orientalism is itself a production of the western world, with the clear intent of ruining it