Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature

Abstract

Abstract Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing engages with Whiteness in French literature to provide an unprecedented critique of the institutionally and symbolically hegemonic figure that has gone heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with the postcolonial subject matter. We focus on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, Édouard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu, representative of a larger body of works published by left-leaning, politically progressive writers who stand in stark ideological contrast while sharing certain thematic and aesthetic similarities with books published by neo-reactionary authors such as Michel Houellebecq, purportedly the epitomic French writer of our age. By positing the operative and transitional concept of White writer, our analysis surpasses disciplinary boundaries established in distinct historical and political contexts and maintained by institutional inertia and ideological inducements, to foreshadow the poetics of White writing in contemporary France and offer a replicable model for engaging with a literary field pervaded by (post)colonial themes. We argue that it is imperative to recast critically the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers. Ultimately, this epistemological gesture, stemming from the recognition that Whiteness constitutes a determining factor in the construction of the modern literary field, allows readers and scholars to grasp the relationality of contemporary writing and to uncover the ‘common library’ of literature in French.