University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Writing Verdicts: French And Francophone Narratives Of Race And Racism Andrea Lloyd University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Recommended Citation Lloyd, Andrea, "Writing Verdicts: French And Francophone Narratives Of Race And Racism" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3538. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3538 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3538 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Writing Verdicts: French And Francophone Narratives Of Race And Racism Abstract Inspired by Didier Eribon's La société comme verdict, this dissertation examines how the novelistic representation of racism and racialization in French-language texts can push back against a collective social verdict in France that stigmatizes non-white peoples as lesser and as other. Though discussing the existence of race is still taboo in France, I show that this stigmatization is in fact a racial verdict, or one that operates through racialization, as opposed to a verdict predicated on sexuality, gender, or class. To do so, I analyze the representation of racial hierarchies and the experience of racism in six novels written in French: Daniel Biyaoula's L'Impasse, Gisèle Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia, Leïla Sebbar's Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, Zahia Rahmani's "Musulman" roman, Cyril Bedel's Sale nègre, and Bessora's 53 cm. As I argue, these authors resist racial verdicts by writing about and examining the place of the ethnic minority individual in French society. In so doing they also issue counter verdicts that condemn society, individuals, and the state for their complicity in maintaining an unjust status quo.