Abstract
Migrant faces and desert spaces symbolize the non-ideal limits of the relationship between “culture” and “nature” in Western minds. The “migrant crisis” may oblige European countries to face historical truths about this construction and accordingly change the relation to the “natural” universe maintained since European imperial and colonial expansion. Together, texts from Marie Darrieussecq, Abdellah Taïa and Clémentine V. Baron contribute to the genre of migrant narratives and appeal to efforts to reconstitute the Western self. Marie Darrieussecq says the figure of the migrant is angoissante and signals concern for migrants, in the journeys and conditions they endure, and for France as a collectivity, whose people must answer the question of who they are and mean to be in their treatment of migrants. Abdellah Taïa’s expression un vide organisé could describe French socio-cultural landscape where, despite pretty ideals, allows no easy flourishing for species outside of what might be considered France’s indigenous species. Writer-journalist Clémentine V. Baron’s slave narratives adjacent genre moves across borders of migrant testimony, journalistic reporting and pictorial illustrations and so moves migrants from a concept to the humans they are. These literary engagements in relation encourage a reexamination of existing French knowledge structures to help transit the barrenness of cultural fixities and to regenerate French democracy itself.
Published Version
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