Emancipate Your Self: Political Agency in Najat El Hachmi and Farida Belghoul

This presentation explores the apparent contradictions between what Jonathan Laurence has called the political emancipation of Muslim communities throughout Europe and the growing number of Maghrebian intellectuals that consider their work as representative of a post-ethnic discourse. I analyze the transition from Beur to Banlieu literature in the last decades in France, and compare it with a similar transition currently taking place in the work of Spanish writers of Maghrebian origin. My presentation focuses on Farida Belghoul’s Georgette! and Najat El Hachmi’s La Caçadora de Cossos both of which exemplify a struggle to reject the cooptation of their political agency that conservative multiculturalism, or to put it in Amartya Sen’s words: plural monoculturalism, entails. Both Belghoul and El Hachmi reflect on the abject nature of ethnic identity in the Eurocentric societies in which they live. Beghoul, as prefigured in Georgette!, has since the late 1980s chosen silence rather than being voiced by the conservative discourse of Eurocentric multiculturalism. El Hachmi’s controversial last novel, La Caçadora de Cossos, echoes Belghoul’s disdain for embracing ethnic subjectivity as mediated by the Eurocentric hegemonic discourse, but departs from Beghoul’s abject withdrawal in her reluctance to give up agency. This presentation compares the French social context that led Belghoul to literary silence followed by the flourishing of a post-ethnic Banlieu literature with the Spanish circumstances that have informed El Hachmi’s efforts to trust in the possibility of political agency beyond Eurocentric co-optations.