間眅埶AV

Faculty

New Books in French Studies Podcast

Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013 by Kathryn Kleppinger

November 16, 2016
Print

Listen to Roxanne Panchasi's latest podcast, in which she interviews Kathryn Kleppinger about her book . Read Dr. Panchasi's summary below, and check out the podcast on the .

  • Kathryn Kleppingers  (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the paradox of ethnic minority writing in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thirty-year period. Organized chronologically as a series of portraits, the books chapters deal with the literary (and filmic) output of an impressive number of writers, including Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Soraya Nini, Samira Bellil, Rachid Djaidani,Faiza Guene, and Sabri Loutah. Considering literary works themselves, as well as the audio-visual media representation of texts and authors on French TV and radio, Kleppingers analysis pushes back against the tendency to understand beur literature in exclusively social and political terms at the expense of aesthetic or artistic readings.

    Drawing on a range of sources, from literature to television and radio archives, to interviews  conducted with the authors themselves, the book weaves together the analysis of form and content, spoken word and gesture, personal and professional biography, representational and political strategies and effects. Exploring the categories that have simultaneously gained these authors and texts attention and limited the ways they have been understood, Branding the Beur Author moves across three decades of tremendous change in contemporary France. Its pages explore the work of both men and women writing, reading, and interrogating the beuras a social and literary identity in a nation engaged both historically and currently in crucial debates regarding the meanings of difference.
Print

Other recent news