Portrait of the transclasse as a White man: class and race in French contemporary literature

Abstract

This article examines unacknowledged influence of “ beur literature” (literature produced by second-generation French writers from North African descent) on Hexagonal literature. Whereas at the time of their publication in the 1980s works by authors such as Azouz Begag or Abdellatif Chaouite were dismissed as ethnographic texts largely devoid of artistic value, their autofictional status being invoked as an argument against their literary worth, since the turn of the century, White writers such as Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis have exemplified and championed the formal significance and political relevance of auto-ethnographies associated with the major new trend of “littérature de terrain” or “littérature d’intervention” in French literature. The article unpacks the changes in critical discourse attendant to the different types of reception afforded texts written by beur authors against those signed by their “French” peers. “Autosociobiographies” enjoy tremendous success when they are published by writers who identify as belonging to the ethnically White majority, thus subtending the dominant ideology of French Republicanism predicated on class matters and “la fracture sociale” to the detriment of the debate around racial and ethnic issues stemming from “la fracture coloniale.”