Competing Visions of Minority Authorship

This chapter examines two opposing viewpoints regarding minority authorship in France in the mid-1980s in the context of the aftermath of the Marche des Beurs period. In his interviews for his quasi-autobiographical novels Le gone du Chaâba (1986) and Béni ou le paradis privé (1988) Azouz Begag strongly promoted his special expertise as a representative of the beur population. He readily volunteered to educated his interviewers and viewers about life in France’s North African immigrant communities and rarely discussed his books in detail. Farida Belghoul, on the other hand, argued forcefully for an exclusively artistic reading of her novel Georgette! (1986). She attacked journalists who imposed an ethnic frame on her work and criticized other authors of North African descent of writing too simplistically. In the end Belghoul’s commentary did not attract television journalists and she only appeared on a few highly specialized radio shows. Begag’s arguments therefore reached a much wider audience and played a stronger role in contributing to how novels by authors from the beur population were read in the mid- to late-1980s.