This session explores the representation of work in French and Francophone migrant writing. Migrant writing has attracted significant critical attention in recent years. In “From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature” (2002), for example, Carine Mardorossian noted a paradigmatic shift in which writers position themselves as migrants rather than as exiles, thus moving beyond categories of postcolonial literary criticism, such as hybridity, in-betweenness, belonging, nostalgia and resistance. More recently, Oana Sabo extends this discussion, pointing to how late twentieth century texts “transition from the literature of migrant authors’ homeland to that of their hostland” (2018, 8). What has not been studied in these texts, however, is their representation of the conditions of economic migration: that is, how migration and work are interconnected.

The first paper analyses Sub-Saharan African writing. Christopher Hogarth’s presentation begins by showing that the majority of the Francophone African writers who contributed to the Négritude movement were educational migrants in France. However, Sembene Ousmane’s novel Le docker noir, written while the author was a dockworker in Marseilles, is testament to the simultaneous presence of sub-Saharan African economic migrants in France. The career of Fatou Diome is a salient contemporary example. Hogarth analyzes the portrayal of work in Diome’s early texts. He compares these to other grim portrayals of migrant working lives in the work of Congolese author Alain Mabanckou, who wrote while working as a banking executive in France. In the final section of this paper, Hogarth considers the development of African writers with middle class working careers in France and beyond, considering the cases of Nafissatou Dia Diouf, a writer-business executive, and Felwine Sarr, who has followed Mabanckou into academic life in the USA. This study is testament to the diversity of writers’ working lives but also underlines the privileged social status of such writers in the 21^st century.

In the second paper, Natalie Edwards analyses the representation of work in contemporary travel narratives. In particular, she compares the work of female solo-travellers who represent their journeys and the work they do to support them in their literary writing. Indeed, travel writing has become popular among writers, readers and critics since the 1990s. Charles Forsdick analyses this rise in popularity, observing a fin de siècle aesthetic predicated upon an uncertain present, a sense of ill-ease, a questioning of home and identity, and an exclusion of the elsewhere. Edwards takes a gendered approached to this theory, examining female-authored travel writing of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. She compares three texts by solo women travellers of this period, who each represent their tales of working travel: from the story of a finance executive who abandons her career to become a writer, to a performance artist who performs in order to fund her travel, to a seasonal worker who records her migration around manual labour. The primary texts are Michèle Decoust’s L’inversion des saisons, Patricia Gotlib’s Australiades, and Catherine Rey’s Une femme en voyage.

The third paper is Amy Hubbell’s Memory Wars, Reconciliation, and France’s Depiction of Algerian Migrant Workers. In the catalogue Algériens en France: 1954-1962, la guerre, l’exil, la vie (2012) for the exhibition Vies d’exil, 1954-1962, Benjamin Stora and Linda Amiri represent the lives of Algerian laborers and their struggles in the shantytowns around Paris during the Algerian War for Independence. During that period, the Algerian population in France increased from 220,000 to 350,000, yet the workers were not given better conditions. Despite the essential role Algerians played in France’s growing economy, they were treated as suspicious and undesirable. Often silenced in the national story, Algerians workers were invisible until 2001, the 40^th anniversary of the 17 October 1961 massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters in Paris. In this paper, Hubbell examines contemporary works that depict Algerian migrant workers in the context of Stora’s 2021 Report on the Memory of Algeria. As France considers creating a Truth and Memories Commission to reconcile its past with Algeria, this paper analyzes in what ways reconciliation might extend to the memory of Algerians who came to work in France.

Together, these three papers will expand upon, and add nuance to, current understandings of migrant writing. By paying attention to the working conditions of migrants in different geographical contexts, they cast new light upon the material conditions of migration and how these are represented in literary texts. Papers will be 20 minutes each, followed by 15 minutes for questions.