Introduction: French Literature and the Unquestioned White Writer

Abstract

Abstract This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical and historical rationale of the book by defining the central yet silent figure of the ‘White writer’, which emerged in the French literary field in 1921 when René Maran won the Goncourt Prize. The ‘Maran moment’ sparked an unprecedented controversy around his Blackness and status as consecrated author, setting in motion the racial partitioning of the field around its hegemonic centre: the White writer. A definition of this figure as well as an overview of late twentieth-early twenty-first-century literature in French are provided from a perspective that combines historical contextualization, sociological analysis, and theoretical discussion, exploring long-standing practices, institutional reflexes, and behaviours that undergird the separation between writers hailing from the former colonial empire and their Hexagonal peers. The presentation of the primary corpus, which includes Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, Pierre Lemaitre, Nicolas Mathieu, and Nicolas Fargues, is followed by a summarizing conclusion.