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Homo Mediaticus: Immigrants, Identity, and (Tele)Visual Media in Contemporary Francophone Literature A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Séverine Valérie Bates IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Judith Preckshot September 2016 © Séverine V. Bates 2016 Acknowledgements I would like to begin by giving thanks to God, my strength and my shield, who has so far not forsaken me. I will continue by thanking the members of my committee, Jaime Hanneken, Hakim Abderrezak, Bruno Chaouat, and Judith Preckshot, for your contribution, guidance and encouragement during these past few years. I want to thank in particular Bruno Chaouat, Chair of the French and Italian Department, whom I consider as a friend. Thank you Bruno for your support, encouragement and our many “controversial” discussions in the hallways of Folwell Hall. Thanks also to Hakim Abderrezak whose teaching and guidance allowed me to discover and explore a new set of texts from the Maghreb. I am also forever grateful to my advisor, Judith Preckshot, for her guidance, support, patience, understanding and incredible editing skills which have been more than I could have ever expected and which I have appreciated during the past few years. Judith, like Bruno, has become someone whose friendship I value greatly and will continue to cherish. Thanks is also due to the Department of French and Italian for its financial support without which this work would not have been possible. During my time in this program, I have been the recipient of two Summer Research fellowships as well as a recipient of the Armand and Madeleine Renaud Fellowship in 2015 which allowed me to complete my research and make valuable progress on my dissertation. I also want to acknowledge Noro Andriamanalina, Jasmine Tang, the Community Of Scholars Program and the Office of Diversity in Graduate education, for their continuous support and effort to help students of color like me achieve their full potential as future faculty and scholars. In 2012, I was fortunate enough to receive a Diversity pre- doctoral fellowship which allowed me to further develop my skills as a scholar and instructor at the University of Minnesota-Morris. My year in Morris has been determining for my training as a future scholar and teacher. There, I have met incredible i individuals who I am honored to call friends and to whom I want to express my gratitude. Among them are Tammy Berberi, Sarah Buchanan, Windy Roberts, Lisa Bevevino and Aaron Wenzel. Lisa and Aaron, for whose friendship I am grateful during these past few years. Thank you for welcoming me into your home during this time of discovery and loneliness; thank you for teaching me yoga, for introducing me to Haggis and for spending time editing this dissertation. I also want to thank all the friends that I have made during these years in Folwell Hall. I especially want to thank my personal cheerleaders: Deborah Lee-Ferrand, Marina Calas, Herman Koutouan, Isaac Joslin, Benjamin N’Gong, Mamadou Samb, and Satty Flaherty-Echeverria. Thank you as well to Morgan Fierst, my favorite “Violin mom” and to my pastor, Alethea Cheney. Finally, profound thanks and gratitude to my family, my sister, Sarah Kimboo, my children Thomas and Gabrielle, and my American family, especially my mother-in-law, Patricia Bates, and my sisters-in law, Samaria Bates and Conzi Bates. Most of all, to my husband, Juan, I cannot express the depth of my gratitude for all that you have done. Thank you for your patience, your love and support. Thank you for sharing this experience with me. At times, it felt like the whole “dissertating” experience would never end, but you never gave up on me even when I waivered. You have been as much as my rock as the “annoying” voice on one’s shoulder that one cannot get rid of. Thank you for encouraging me to persevere. Thank you for staying up late with me just to keep me company during what seems to be never-ending nights. Thank you for going to the library for me whenever I needed it. Thank you for taking care of our children when I needed a break. Thank you. I would not have accomplished this without you. ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my late mother, Irène Kimboo, who taught me to be a strong woman and to never give up in time of hardship. You will always be my Poto-Mitan. Thomas and Gabrielle, this is also for you. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgement i Dedication iii Table of Contents iv Introduction: Immigrant Literature and the Mass Media: A New Perspective on Historical and Literary Entanglements 1 Chapter One: Homo Mediaticus: The Birth of the Immigrant as a Haunting Media Figure. 75 Chapter Two: Covering Illegal Immigration: Literature, Media, and the Question of Death through Images. 115 Chapter Three: Television as the Evil Eye? Media H(a)unting of Immigrants in Beur and Banlieue Novels 171 Chapter Four: Pour un autre droit de regard: Re-imagining the Self through the Mediascape of Television 259 Conclusion: Of Immigrants, the Media and the Transmutational Power of Literature in the Visual Era 323 Bibliography 335 iv Introduction: Immigrant Literature and the Mass Media: A New Perspective on Historical and Literary Entanglements To say that migration and its corollaries, immigration and emigration, are in 2016 the many-headed hydra of our times is far from being an exaggeration. In a context of globalization, “[e]conomic, political, and social asymmetries account for transitions in migratory patterns within countries and continents and beyond strict national/ continental borders” (Dominic Thomas, “The Global Mediterranean: Literature and Migration” 140). Many in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities will agree that international migrants and especially immigrants—people who leave their country to settle in another one permanently—are the ultimate political and media symbols of a global social, political, economic and human crisis in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Over the last three decades, immigration, characterized by mass migrations from the so-called Global South to “more prosperous geographic zones in the European Union” (Thomas), has been among the most talked about issues in politics and in the mass media around the globe, and especially in a country with a long history of immigration such as France—host today to a large number of immigrants from the African continent. Most recently, in a context of tighter European internal and external border control, events like the Syrian refugee crisis,1 which saw the arrival of over a 1 This crisis (2015-2016) is not really “new” as some might think. It finds its roots in the wake of the events following the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” also known as the “Arab revolutions,” which started in Tunisia and then later spread to the neighboring countries of Libya, Syria, and also Egypt. These events have been the object of intense media coverage (i.e. radio, press, television, internet) worldwide. As we will see later, the role played by the media, especially by social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) has been particularly crucial to disseminating the news and bringing the tragic events closer to us. 1 million migrants—and more to come—in Europe2 since 2015, have been the object of intense political debates and have triggered a media frenzy worldwide. Likewise, in the past few months, the increased death toll at sea of refugees and other undocumented migrants trying to reach the European Eldorado by crossing the Mediterranean by boat has been covered in depth by all media. More than ever, our screens have been flooded with images of capsized boats, floating corpses, or “hordes” of immigrants walking alongside roads trying to reach northern European countries, especially Germany. In France, where immigration has been increasingly politicized, spectacular events like the famous 1983 “Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme,” famously known as the “Marche des Beurs,” the different “headscarf affairs” since the 1980s, the “Sans-Papiers” case ( also known as the “ Église Saint Bernard” affair) in 1996, the 2005 riots that struck major French cities while opposing ethnic minority youth of immigrant origin against the police, the 2009-2010 national debate on what it means to be French, or the recent Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks in 2015 have all contributed throughout the years to making France’s immigrant and ethnic minority populations more visible in the public and media sphere. Such hypervisibility would almost make us forget that these same immigrants and their children—mostly originating from the nation’s former colonies of North and Sub- 2 We should note that Syrians are not the only nationality in this migratory phenomenon, which gained full attention in 2015. Among these migrants are Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, and refugees from South Asia. According to the website of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in 2015, a total of 1,046,599 migrants arrived in Europe either by land or by sea. More recently, a “situation report” published by IOM and entitled “Europe/ Mediterranean, Migration Response” (May 19, 2016) stipulated that “[a]s of 18 May 2016, 196,325 migrants and refugees have arrived to Europe by land and sea routes since the start of 2016, the majority of whom have entered through Greece (155,975) and Italy (33,907).” Consulted online on May 23, 2016. ˂https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/situation_reports/file/Europe-Med- Migration-Response-Sitrep21-19May.pdf˃. 2 Saharan Africa—are most of the time invisible in the social and political arenas due to a lack of political representation and recognition and increasing social marginalization.