Here, There and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, Tahseen Shams (2020)

Review of: Here, There and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, Tahseen Shams (2020) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-50361-069-9, h/bk, $90; ISBN 978-1-50361-283-9, p/bk, $28

Accents in Jean Malaquais’s Carrefour Marseille

This chapter extends further into the years of the Occupation, deepening the analysis of multilingual immigrant identities in French in the Polish-born writer Jean Malaquais’s portrayal of the accents of Eastern and Central European refugees trying to leave France for the Americas through the port of Marseille in 1942. In Planète sans visa (World without Visa), Malaquais reappropriates Jewish refugee accents from the mockery of the antisemitic press to show that accents do not reveal immutable and inassimilable racial traits. On the contrary, they are the spaces in which language plays as well as expressions of the ways intimacy and love are formed. As such, an attachment to the French language is not innate, inherited, or linked to the soil. Malquais’s text demonstrates that French literary language itself is capable of containing multiple registers of ethnicity, including a Jewish accented voice.