Cultural Studies Scholars Research Articles

Speculative feminism and the shifting frontiers of bioscience: envisioning reproductive futures with synthetic gametes through the ethnographic method

Scientists are developing a technique called in vitro gametogenesis or IVG to generate synthetic gametes for research and, potentially, for treating infertility. What would it mean for feminist concerns over the future of reproductive practice and biotechnological development if egg and sperm cells could be produced in laboratory conditions? In this article, I take on the question by discussing the emerging technique of IVG through the speculative feminist analysis of ambiguous reproductive futures. Feminist cultural and science studies scholars have explored the transformative effects of biomedicine on reproduction through science fiction novels and other cultural products. I theorise the speculative and visionary in biomedicine in the context of ethnographic methodology by drawing on ‘thought experiments’ conducted with stem cell scientists as shared acts of future-oriented contemplation. I develop the figure of SF proposed by Donna Haraway to investigate how science facts and speculative fabulation together shape futurities of reproduction. I propose including shifting frontiers in feminist thinking of the SFs in bioscience. Biomedical research aims to shift the borders between what is known and not known in reproductive biology, subsequently raising new technical, ethical and political issues in terms of stratified reproduction. The article shows that synthetic gametes are anticipated to intensify selective procreation. Simultaneously, IVG is seen to forge new biogenetic relationships and possibilities for non-normative reproduction and kin-making. Following Haraway, I argue that by ‘staying with the trouble’ of these biotechnological visions, feminist speculative analytics on technoscience offers a valuable tool to envision more hopeful and equal futures together with scientists.

Notes on Transkids: an affirmative feminist study of transgender boyhood in Israel’s sexual modernity

ABSTRACT Transkids is a documentary on gender transitioning children in Israel. My interest is in the quotidian lives of the three transmasculine youths portrayed in the film. In reading the documentary, I draw on existing queer feminist cultural studies scholarship on Israel to frame the specific conditions under which these youths realize their boyhood and manhood. In this paper, I ask after three questions. One, what are the community support systems and options for gender affirmation available to transmasculine children in Israel? This is a question of gender transition. But I am also interested in the question of age; that is, the boy’s coming-of-age as men. Thus, my second question: what are the pathways available to these transmasculine children in their development from boyhood to manhood in Israel? Altogether, this paper looks at the possibilities for gender transition for transmasculine children, and also the pathways and promises of a futurity post-transition. Following the gender transitioning process of Ofri, Liron and Noam, Transkids offers an interesting case for the ease with which one becomes a boy and one becomes a man in Israel’s sexual modernity. How might we read this from an affirmative feminist perspective? In the third and final section of the paper, I ask after the ways in which existing feminist scholarships on queer politics in Israel might impact how we think and feel about the trans boys’ everyday lives, which in turn raises further questions for the development of an affirmative feminist boys studies.

Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland

Through their native languages, certain groups of people claim political, social, geographical, and ethnic identity and a legal base for their existence. Colonialism, however, has vanished minority spoken languages in many parts of the world. Additionally, despite claims of a “global village,” the advent of internationalization has further isolated indigenous languages in some parts of the world. Revitalizing and preventing those languages from dwindling from their spoken communities is crucial for scholars of linguistics, sociology, cultural studies, and education. Dunmore, in the book Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland: Linguistic Practice and Ideology, offers profound perspectives on preventing the potential loss of Gaelic language in Scotland drawing from empirical research.

Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation

Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation

"Worlds. . .[of] Contingent Possibilities": Genderqueer and Trans Adolescents Reading Fan Fiction.

Cultural studies scholars have long been interested in the nexus between people’s online activities and their identities. One activity that has drawn attention is reading/writing fan fiction (fictions written by and for fans that build upon the characters and worlds depicted in commercial texts). While fan fiction and its surrounding communities have long been understood as resistant to heteronormativity, previous work exploring the fans who produce and consume fan fiction has largely insisted that most of these fans are adult ciswomen. Little has been written about the experiences of trans and genderqueer fans. To remedy this elision, this article explores two trans and genderqueer individuals’ experiences with fan fiction. It closely examines the roles reading, and especially reading fan fiction, has or has not played in their understandings of themselves, their identities, and their places in the world.

Predicting Covid-19: wearable technology and the politics of solutionism

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 crisis has helped facilitate and amplify a set of articulations between technology, public health, and culture. Among these connections is the idea that wearable technologies – with their attendant claims to know more and know better about the relationship between human bodies and daily life – are able to predict the onset of COVID-19 symptoms and, in doing so, to help mitigate its spread. This article considers this imaginary through a case study of the Oura ‘smart ring’ and Oura’s partnership with medical researchers and the National Basketball Association. Through a close, critical reading of popular press reports, I examine how Oura is imagined as a productive articulation between technology and public health capable of compensating for the failure of the United States government to implement adequate COVID-19 testing. This analysis demonstrates one way cultural studies scholars might interrogate and map the politics of this unfolding conjuncture – that is, to understand how a series of public failings is offloaded to private companies in an effort to develop quick solutions that only further entrench existing crises.

Rearticulating football fans in Hong Kong: between activism, localism, and consumerism

ABSTRACT For a significant part of the twentieth century, Hong Kong was seen on the forefront of football development in Asia, and it was just in recent decades that the so-called “beautiful game” has been relegated to a less prominent spot in the cultural fabric of citizens’ everyday life. However, amidst the current socio-political conjuncture of the Special Administrative Region, which has been slowly unfolding over the last decade, football has again become a meaningful platform to imagine, articulate, and perform a local(ist) identity. Social scientists, cultural studies scholars and anthropologists have long examined the multi-faceted dimensions of football fan cultures around the world. The subject of study, however, has often been limited to European or American perspectives, with incomplete accounts of Asian experiences in this domain, calling for more interventions in the form of culturally informed research. First, this article aims to offer a qualitative overview of Hong Kong’s football fan culture, using a thick description of a supporters’ group that rearticulated and materialized subcultural practices of the popular local forum LIHKG – an online community that has later emerged as a central catalyst of recent protest movements. Second, the research attempts to provide an alternative understanding of the politicization of football fandom, by emphasizing the multiple fan identities being negotiated between consumerism, activism, and localism. By critically investigating common fan categorizations that have been put forward in the context of football’s hyper-commodification, the research questions the suitability of Eurocentric models on residual or emerging sporting cultures in non-European contexts. The paper further argues that the re-appropriation of football as a site of imagination and performance of identities reaffirms the idea of sport as a resource for cultural citizenship, as well as a decoding device for the ever-changing politicization of everyday life.

Years in Cultural Studies: 1986

Since its infancy, the pluralistic tendencies of the cultural studies project denied methodological and procedural consistency and resisted any disciplining of cultural studies as an attempt at authoritarian policing. Over the course of the 1980s, cultural studies continued to spread beyond the United Kingdom to Australia and the United States, initially, and the rest of the world soon thereafter. Movements towards the bridging of the longstanding divisions between fact and interpretation—between the social sciences and the humanities—under the sign of a principled approach to cultural democracy saw the Althusserian Marxism characteristic of earlier cultural studies scholarship expanded by way of a critical re/engagement of the works of Gramsci. This period of ideological critique allowed for a bold intellectual, political commitment to the re/conceptualization of culture as a site of class struggle, hegemonic formation, and structural signification. Particularly, the year 1986 saw major strides in this direction with the publication of monumental manuscripts by Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe.

Program of Russian art historians and training courses in this field

The suggestions about reprinting the program of P.V. Pavlov for discussion in the academic community of historians, cultural studies scholars and art historians are expressed. The proposed scholarly discussion around the propaedeutic heritage of art historians of the 19th – early 20th centuries should become one of the steps to prepare a new version of the history of Russian art criticism.

From Afrofuturism to afrofuturism

151 BOOKS IN REVIEW often supported the status quo, reaffirming certain conservative notions of the period—a balancing act that perhaps facilitated its continued popularity with audiences. A key theme across the book is the way in which Serling was forced to walk a fine line between his creative vision and the commercial imperatives of network television, often railing against the advertisers while simultaneously being required to promote their products. In this, Grant offers an insightful examination of the complexities of producing speculative fiction for television and shows how Serling had to negotiate his own middle ground between light and shadow. The book is enriched by a vast amount of production detail that firmly grounds the discussion within the show’s production history. Grant’s analysis is rich and convincing, and one of the strengths of this book across all the chapters is his ability to analyze multiple episodes in depth but without sacrificing the breadth of the series. Each chapter covers a great deal of ground and one comes away from the book with a clear sense of the richness, diversity, and complexity of the show, as well as of some of its inherent contradictions. Notably for the MILESTONE series, the book conveys how and why The Twilight Zone remains a landmark series for the science-fiction and television fan and scholar. As such the book provides an excellent overview of The Twilight Zone and its place in television past and present.—Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton From Afrofuturism to afrofuturism. Isiah Lavender III. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Ohio State UP, NEW SUNS: RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN THE SPECULATIVE, 2019. xi+230 pp. $29.95 pbk. Afrofuturism is to sf studies today what cyberpunk and feminist sf were to the field in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period in which the English departments which many in the field called home had finally begun to embrace sf studies and the field subsequently flourished through critical works that engaged feminism, queer studies, postmodernism, posthumanism, and the growing excitement of the digital. While literary and cultural studies scholars, especially in American Studies, were turning to multicultural, ethnic, and Black literature in significant numbers, however, sf studies remained pretty firmly white in its focus. Indeed, the mainstream of the genre we study had yet to embrace any significant number of writers of color. Though the occasional luminary of Black sf—such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Nalo Hopkinson—was regularly recognized as among “the greats,” they were rarely privileged with space in critical venues (Science Fiction Studies, always a leader in the field, did publish several articles on writers of color throughout the 1990s and 2000s). Carl Freedman’s inclusion of Delany’s Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984) in his groundbreaking Marxist study of sf, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), was the first time a major work of sf scholarship paid any such attention to Black sf. In the following years, works such as Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James’s The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003), De Witt 152 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Douglas Kilgore’s Astrofuturism (2003), Patricia Kerslake’s Empire and Science Fiction (2007), Adilifu Nama’s Black Space (2008), John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), and the occasional edited collection began to shape more nuanced conversations about race in sf. The efforts of scholars were paired with the efforts of authors and anthologizers such as Sheree Renée Thomas, who put together Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora in 2001 and a sequel in 2005. The snowballing of work on race in science fiction exploded in the last ten years, thanks in large part to new cohorts of Black scholars and scholars of color entering the professoriate in larger numbers after decades of (still ongoing) struggles against inequality in the academy. Enter Isaiah Lavender III, a scholar whose first monograph, Race in American Science Fiction (2011), defined a generation of scholarship on race in sf. Lavender’s book offered readings of sf by white and Black writers alike to look at the construction...

The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music by Licia Fiol-Matta

Reviewed by: The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music by Licia Fiol-Matta Maja Horn KEYWORDS Puerto Rico, Popular Music, Gender, Myrta Sylva, Ruth Fernandez, Ernestina Reyes, Lucecita Benitez, Queer, Race, Ela (Estado Libre Asociado) licia fiol-matta. The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music Duke UP 2017, 312 pp. Popular music and performers have long fascinated the field of Hispanophone Caribbean literary and cultural studies, not least because of their feature role in some of the most seminal literary works of the region. One may think of Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante's novel Tres tristes tigres (1967), Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez's novel La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976), and more recently Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000). Alongside [End Page 255] these fictional accounts of Caribbean popular music and performers, writers in the region have creatively approximated the lives (and deaths) of "real life" musicians, such as Puerto Rican Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's El entierro de Cortijo (1982) and Sánchez's La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988). Besides the impressive corpus of literary criticism these works have elicited, literary and cultural studies scholars have produced interdisciplinary studies of specific Caribbean music genres and their cultural ramifications—one may think of Frances R. Aparicio's Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (1998) or Juan Flores' From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000). Notably, Licia Fiol-Matta's study The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music follows neither of these predominant critical strands and in more than one way stands innovatively on its own in our field. Her study neither foregrounds popular music through its literary adaptations nor is it a genre study—in fact, the study addresses a range of genres as diverse as the guaracha, the bolero, operatic Afro-Cuban music, Afro-Puerto Rican music, jíbaro music, and the balada. More importantly, perhaps, the book does not take popular music as a point of departure for understanding and reflecting on broader issues of Caribbean and Latin American identity; instead, it foregrounds four Puerto Rican woman singers—Myrta Silva (1927–1987), Ruth Fernández (1919–2012), Ernestina Reyes "La Calandaria" (1925–1994), Lucecita Benítez (1942)—and how through their creative repertoires they negotiated in different ways the specific historical and cultural context in which they were inscribed. This is to say, the book foregrounds the conceptual contributions of these singers that resulted in what the author calls their "thinking voice." As Fiol-Matta describes, she aims to "really listen to women's voices, in the sense of paying attention to their conceptual dimension, away from notions of natural or intuitive performance" (4). And she considers these performers in particular "'great women singers' because a thinking voice took up residence in their careers, unleashing questions and providing answers—consciously or not—in response to the cultural moment of their time" (7). The cultural moment that these performers shared is the backdrop of Puerto Rico's new status as Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) in 1952 and the hopes and disenchantments it produced. This political project also newly invested "popular music with a degree of power and prestige" (10), and these singers had to negotiate their interpellation into this national cultural project, and were "under some kind of pressure to perform values" (3). Fiol-Matta traces how these artists pushed in different ways against this interpellation and critically interrogated it, thereby giving "lie to normative functions of music, showing the parallel ability of music to disrupt and reorder a variety of injunctions, among them how enjoyment should proceed and where, how patriotic allegiances should be expressed, how obscenity should appear in the repertoire, how politics should enter music lyrics, and how consumption should become the main activity of subjects in capitalism" (10–11). The first chapter foregrounds the life and work of Myrta Silva, a singer and renowned TV entertainer. Silva was "arguably the single most successful Puerto Rican twentieth-century pop star" (18), especially celebrated for her guarachas. Yet Puerto Rico was "viciously split about its biggest...

Centering Hawai'i: Lessons on and beyond United States Empire

Centering Hawai'i:Lessons on and beyond United States Empire Hōkūlani K. Aikau (bio) Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 275 pages. $95.68 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). Return to Kahiki: Native Hawaiians in Oceania. By Kealani Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 255 pages. $49.99 (cloth). $29.99 (paper). Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood. By Dean Itsuji Saranillio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 282 pages. 100.22 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1993, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease coedited the collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, a seven-hundred-page volume calling for a shift in American studies toward sustained analysis of US Empire. Kaplan identifies "three salient absences" in the academic study of American Empire and American Exceptionalism, which, she argues, contribute to an "ongoing pattern of denial across several disciplines: the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism."1 The three books under review are excellent examples of contemporary scholarship that heeds Kaplan's call. Their methodological, historical, and analytic breadth illuminates the complex and enduring forces and cultural dimensions of US imperialism. These authors go even further by demonstrating how indigeneity as an analytic category is central to understanding settler colonialism. Just as Kaplan and Pease identify "an ideological disjuncture" in the very foundations of the discipline, at a panel during the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Robert Warrior reminded the audience that another cognitive gap persists. American studies' ongoing articulation of whiteness with national culture has resulted in the persistent marginalization of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) within the field. Warrior's [End Page 867] content analysis of the ASA program from 1998 to 2014 found that topics focused on settler colonial studies significantly outnumbered those that featured NAIS topics. The exception was when NAIS scholars were on the program committee or serving as ASA president. Warrior's findings suggest that twenty years on from the publication of Cultures of US Imperialism the cognitive gap persists and has expanded. These three books fill this cognitive gap by centering indigeneity as an analytic and demonstrate how NAIS is essential to any analysis of US Empire and settler colonialism. Another cognitive gap that Native Pacific cultural studies scholars have highlighted is the absence of Oceania from the study of American national culture and politics. As the Chamorro scholar Keith Camacho explained in 2011, Oceania "[plays] a vital role in the making and unmaking of the American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present."2 "Oceanizing American Studies," Greg Dvorak's contribution to the special issue of American Quarterly that inaugurated the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as the new home of the flagship journal for the ASA, reiterates the need for American studies to center Oceania in research on US imperialism and settler colonialism.3 These three books provide illustrative examples of what can be learned about American Empire, specifically, and coloniality and imperialism generally when Hawai'i is centered methodologically and theoretically. Each book is an exemplar of how NAIS scholars offer analytic tools and methodological insights about American nationalism and US Empire from the viewpoint of those on the front lines of decolonization and anti-imperialism. In a time when the United States is yet again grappling with disease, racism, and antidemocratic legislation, these texts provide crystal clear evidence that this is not new or unexpected. Rather, when the history of US imperialism and settler colonialism in Oceania and Hawai'i are placed at the center of analysis, we learn that "democracy" has been a rallying cry of white supremacy, capitalist greed, and heteropatriarchy all along. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book chronologically bookends the historical periods addressed in these three books. As she explains, "Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty … seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation and in...

Transformations of Gender Identities and Roles in Novels of Flight and Exile by Olga Grjasnowa and Shida Bazyar

Over the last several years, cultural studies scholars in Germany have closely examined the subject of refugees in recent German literature, focusing largely on aspects of spatial theory, the causes of migration and the figure of the refugee. However, while the migrant as cultural Other has received extensive attention, gender issues remain largely underrepresented. This contribution explores the ways in which forced migration, due mostly to war and violence, affects the gender identities and roles of characters in the novels of Olga Grjasnowa (Gott ist nicht schüchtern) and Shida Bazyar (Nachts ist es leise in Teheran).

Transformations of Gender Identities and Roles in Novels of Flight and Exile by Olga Grjasnowa and Shida Bazyar

Over the last several years, cultural studies scholars in Germany have closely examined the subject of refugees in recent German literature, focusing largely on aspects of spatial theory, the causes of migration and the figure of the refugee. However, while the migrant as cultural Other has received extensive attention, gender issues remain largely underrepresented. This contribution explores the ways in which forced migration, due mostly to war and violence, affects the gender identities and roles of characters in the novels of Olga Grjasnowa (Gott ist nicht schüchtern) and Shida Bazyar (Nachts ist es leise in Teheran).

Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work

This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices. The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work. Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

Shifting the Anthropocentric Paradigms Embedded in Film and Classification (ratings) Systems that Impact Apex Species

Human interactions with nature reveal contradictions and misunderstandings based upon anthropocentric colonising behaviours. Cultural forms such as film and media have played a key role in creating and perpetuating negative affect towards nonhuman species, particularly apex species, shark, crocodile, bear, and snake. From early Hollywood films through to contemporary online series, these majestic species have been subjected to vilification and denigration onscreen, resulting in speciesism, subjugation and colonisation of animals, whilst simultaneously extending human ‘authority’ over nature and perpetuating fear – particularly of apex species. A range of hybrid genre textual examples from screen and media, from fictional (feature) and factual (documentary) film and television (docu-nature series) will illustrate these paradigms. An ongoing issue is the anthropomorphising of species onscreen. Drawing upon extensive work since 2009 with international classifications (ratings) systems, this paper will also examine the positionality of the American Humane Association in monitoring the role and treatment of ‘animal actors’ in film; developing a compelling empirical case for the necessity for reform in classifications (ratings) systems, expanding classification Codes to include non-anthropocentric perspectives and the rights of nature with regard to nonhuman actors in public awareness. The necessity for a nuanced understanding of ontological damage to species is currently not a classifiable theme under any existing classification (ratings) systems. An outcome of this article is the proposed development and implementation of a new classification symbol designated as ‘Animal Shield’. This interdisciplinary article will be presented from the perspectives of an environmental ecologist and cultural film studies scholarship, building upon research into decolonising nature.

Letting go: economies of detachment

Recent scholarship in STS and cultural studies has shown that understanding attachment as an inherently positive social process and detachment as an inherently negative market process is highly deb...

May Joseph. Sea Log, Indian Ocean to New York.

Even in 2020, with cultural studies scholarship exploring ever more hybrid methodologies, this volume is difficult to assess synthetically. Not only does it convoke a cluster of theoretical standpoints, but it also reads like an essay or an autobiographical piece, multiplying the modes of address. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2013) is mentioned as early as the introduction: May Joseph is tackling the Indian Ocean in ways that expand Sharpe’s discussion of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean...

“Where I’m From”: Jay-Z’s “Hip Hop Cosmopolitanism,” Basketball, and the Neoliberal Politics of Urban Space”

This article examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that year, Jay-Z organized a team for the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC) in Harlem’s Rucker Park and joined a team of investors aiming to move the New Jersey Nets to a new arena in Brooklyn. Informed by cultural studies scholarship, the paper explains the context through which basketball and hip hop were articulated with authenticity, and were deployed towards the goal of managing a career transition for Jay-Z, and was also used to gain public support for a controversial proposal to build an arena in the Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn.

Representations of Maghrebians' Immigrant Life in France in Two Literary Generations: A Multilevel Cognitive Stylistic Reading of Driss Chraibi’s Les boucs and Azouz Begag’s Le gone du Chaaba

<em>While political analysts, economists, cultural studies scholars have all been offering insightful analyses of the different matters relating to immigrant life in different parts of the world, this article reaches for a first-hand testimony in two autobiographical novels by two internationally recognized Maghrebian novelists who respectively represent the first and second generations of Maghrebian immigrants in France. In a rather innovative manner, the portrayal of immigrant life in the two novels is analyzed from a cognitive stylistic perspective, and informed by the author’s multiple research viewpoints, those of a Maghrebian literature critic, a francophone postcolonial studies researcher and a frequent visitor to France carrying the concerns of an extended family based there. The interest in style during our close reading of these largely autobiographical narratives is based on the assumption that an author's style is a reflection of their attitude and worldview. Chraibi’s novel Les Boucs (1955) is as timely now as it was in the day of its first appearance for its balanced and largely objective analysis of the sociological, psychological and economic conditions of North African immigrants. Stylistically, Les boucs features a close correlation between its form and content in that the chaotic nature of immigrant life is formally embodied in Chraibi's non-linear mode of writing. In contrast to the bleak picture presented throughout Chraibi's text, Begag's convivial approach oozes hope for his readers who come to realize the futility of continuing to curse the state of deprivation and inequity while there can always be ways setbacks can be turned into opportunities. The study uses a qualitative method of stylistic analysis and applies the two necessary principles of 'contextualization' and 'comprehensiveness' to ensure a high degree of analytical and interpretive validity.</em>