Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature - French Writers, White Writing

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature is the first scholarly study to engage with the figure of the White writer and explore the White literary gaze in contemporary France.

List of contents

• 1: The Universal Invisibility of the French White Writer: Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes by Marie Darrieussecq


• 2: Colonial Detail and Textual (Dys)Function: Au revoir là-haut by Pierre Lemaitre


• 3: The Postcolonial as Vanishing Point: Les Années by Annie Ernaux


• 4: Chaos and Convergence: Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes


• 5: Postcolonial Otobiography: Histoire de la violence by Édouard Louis


• 6: Authoring Postcolonial Normality: Leurs enfants après eux by Nicolas Mathieu


• 7: Calling Out the iNovel: Je ne suis pas une héroïne by Nicolas Fargues


• Conclusion: The Kairos of White Writing. Building the Common Library of Literature in French

About the author

Étienne Achille is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Villanova University. His publications include the monograph Mythologies postcoloniales. Pour une décolonisation du quotidien (2018, co-authored with L. Moudileno;) and the volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory. Sites and Symbols in Modern France (2020, co-edited with C. Forsdick and L. Moudileno).

Oana Panaïté is Ruth N. Halls Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Des littératures-mondes en français. Écritures singulières, poétiques transfrontalières dans la prose contemporaine (2012), The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French (2017), and Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory (2022).

Summary

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature is the first scholarly study to engage with the figure of the White writer and explore the White literary gaze in contemporary France.

Additional text

This book is a key intervention that no serious scholar of contemporary French literature can ignore. Debunking the claims to colour-blindness ingrained in republican universalist discourse, it challenges us to foreground the figure of the White writer in debates about race, culture and the afterlives of empire in France. The result is a robust refusal of any assumptions regarding the neutrality of Whiteness in French contexts and an assertion of the importance of postcoloniality for understandings of White and non-White authors alike.

Product details

• Authors: Étienne Achille, Etienne (Associate Professor of French an Achille, Oana Panaïté
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.03.2024
• EAN: 9780198893134
• ISBN: 978-0-19-889313-4
• No. of pages: 208
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; French, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary theory, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: postcolonial literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form