'Beurs' Rewriting the French Tradition

This book takes up the analysis of ‘beur literature’ as an integral part of diasporic literature and a contesting site of negotiation. The study has mainly capitalised on two major novels, namely Azouz Begag’s Le gone du Chaaba and Faiza Guene’s Kiffe kiffe demain, pertaining to the second-generation and third-generation of immigrants, respectively. The major argument of this study reveals how these writings are meant to raise the eyebrows of the French majority to the existence of a disadvantaged group. Emerging from a space denying them recognition, Beurs or children born to second-generation and third-generation immigrants have tried ever since to bounce back the social injustices endorsed against them through the writing medium. Henceforth, writing has become an instrument to run counter the French tradition- a word reappropriated from F.R. Leavis's thrust 'The Great Tradition- and achieve autonomy.