Authorship at a Crossroads
Presenting a broad overview of the historical and literary context in which the descendants of North African immigrants to France began to write novels, this introductory chapter establishes the primary questions and stakes of the book. It provides readers with necessary contextual information such as the French presence in Algeria as well as government policies regarding audio-visual broadcasting. It also presents several related scholarly studies in the field and argues that this book presents new perspectives on a well-studied population by considering the role of the audio-visual media in creating a commonly shared idea of what types of novels these authors write. Theories by Stuart Hall (dominant, negotiated, and contestatory frameworks), Édouard Glissant (opacity), and Pierre Bourdieu (literary field) are used to place these authors in a broader context. The chapter concludes by arguing that scholarly studies of this literature, like other texts labelled as ‘Francophone’ or ‘Postcolonial,’ has been pre-determined by which texts have been promoted in the media and thus supported by publishers.