This project would fit very well into the French program’s focus on issues of race and identity in France. Also, it fits in well with the work of the Winthrop-King Institute, in its interest in postcolonialism and its effects on France and the French-speaking world.

How do aspects of novelistic form respond to political contingencies and divergent political formations? How have authors’ treatments of questions on universalism and rights led to innovations in literary forms and conceptions of genre? Strangers to the Nation: Migrants, Citizens, and Foreigners traces the contested emergence of universalism within French Republicanism and its relationship to racial and religious minorities.
This project argues that literary and cultural texts are sites for articulating how Republicanism is constitutive of and constituted by its relationship with its minorities—colonial, Jewish, Black, and Muslim— while it is also constantly shifting their access to rights. Literary texts create space for configuring the constitution of subjecthood and citizenship as formations that are crosscut by multiple histories and migrations. The project considers the diverse range of permutations in which the parameters of universalism have been constructed, consecrated, and contested in literary works. It traces the lineage of the of political subjectivity articulated in cultural and literary works that emerge out of liminal spaces of French universalism, illuminating where the particular reworks and reconfigures its teleological ambitions.
Leonora Miano, Faïza Guène, Azouz Begag, Nadir Dendoune, and Fatou Diome respond to the conceptual incoherence of Republican citizenship in its exclusionary treatment of French citizens of Francophone African Diaspora. They place the inconsistencies of Republicanism at the center of their critical enterprise and create counter-narratives of French identity. These authors gesture towards a new way of thinking citizenship and subjectivity in general, showing how their characters negotiate colonial memory and non-normative cultures within a French republican frame that minimizes them.