Loubards : 1980s French-Algerian activism and the conceptual limits of Beur scholarship

Abstract

Beur literature designates artistic production by the second generation of Algerian immigration to France, gaining attention after the 1983 ‘Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racism’. Since the late 1980s, French and American scholars working with postcolonial and poststructuralist theories have tended to situate Beur literary production vis-à-vis French identity and conceptualise it as a site of social critique. This scholarship sees in Beur literary production an instance of hybridisation and ambivalence, estranging French identity. Useful and necessary as it is, historicising the Beur might require rethinking this approach. Following early activists’ struggles that constituted in part the historic conditions of Beur identity reveals a heterogeneous field of competing identities and political strategies. Activists’ accounts suggest a process of identity centralisation in which Beur identity, as a cultural hybrid, rewrote other more radical positions and rendered them illegible. These struggles, revolving around questions of work and alternatives forms of social organisation, allow us, first, to recognise the fact that current Beur scholarship has been, for the most part, limited to a critique of the French state, and, second, to situate Beur history and Beur literature in the larger context of globalisation.