How can we define our identity in an unstable global framework caught between clash of civilizations and dialogue among cultures? The current identity crisis, which we witness at several levels, offers many valuable insights, upon which this paper wants to draw. The questions left open by social sciences (and often closed by political rhetoric) are accompanied by narrative discourse. Our contemporary French authors of immigrant origin, who constitute the multifaceted category of the so-called littérature beur, using a problematic designation, elaborate on hot topics, describe today’s French society and transpose into writing the heterogeneity of oral traditions, thus voicing an opposition to universalism and to its linguistic standards. In this way, the boundary between identity and its revealing attribute (i.e. otherness) moves from the periphery to the heart of today’s French identity, whereby the national model and its multicultural transgression merge in a hopefully polyphonic coexistence.
Algeri, V. (2018). Beur Literature and Identity: Transmission, Transgression, and Polyphony. In Ettore Finazzi Agrò (a cura di), Toward a linguistic and literary revision of cultural paradigms: Common and/or Alien (pp. 47-62). Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Beur Literature and Identity: Transmission, Transgression, and Polyphony
Veronic Algeri
2018-01-01
Abstract
How can we define our identity in an unstable global framework caught between clash of civilizations and dialogue among cultures? The current identity crisis, which we witness at several levels, offers many valuable insights, upon which this paper wants to draw. The questions left open by social sciences (and often closed by political rhetoric) are accompanied by narrative discourse. Our contemporary French authors of immigrant origin, who constitute the multifaceted category of the so-called littérature beur, using a problematic designation, elaborate on hot topics, describe today’s French society and transpose into writing the heterogeneity of oral traditions, thus voicing an opposition to universalism and to its linguistic standards. In this way, the boundary between identity and its revealing attribute (i.e. otherness) moves from the periphery to the heart of today’s French identity, whereby the national model and its multicultural transgression merge in a hopefully polyphonic coexistence.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
