Cosmopolitanism and Beur Representation in Contemporary Literary and Film Genres

Grendi, Sarra (2025) Cosmopolitanism and Beur Representation in Contemporary Literary and Film Genres. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Preview

Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis addresses the shifting genres, themes, and modalities of what I term “a cosmopolitan register” in Beur diasporic writings and cinematic productions in French, spanning from the late twentieth century to 2016. It focuses on how these texts problematise space and borders shaped by racialised, colonial, national and religious dynamics. Central to the analysis is the tension between inherited legacies of French colonialism and Beur resistance to this, especially as they operate inside/outside private spaces of the Chaâba/banlieues. While mainstream French discourse often casts these spaces negatively, they are framed as vital reservoirs of Algerian religious, cultural and national heritage; a duality that both affirms Beur rooted subjectivities and undermines their potential for cosmopolitan mobilities. The study argues that Beur authors and filmmakers mobilise a diverse set of genres to reimagine Beur lives within and outside private spaces of deprivation. Realism offers critical insight into Orientalist frameworks that confine Beur identities to geographies of exclusion. The comedy, war and the road-movie genres facilitate a reorientation towards alternative diasporic imaginaries, either in French central areas or even in distant diasporic spaces, reflecting themes in a way that echo diasporic concerns. The diasporic experience of the characters represented in these texts chart gradually evolving pathways through which, what I refer to as, the “New Beur Man” transitions from private, and often marginalised settings to form what I term “homogeneous proximities” with the French mainstream population. This thesis contends that Beur literary and cinematic productions undergo a gradual shift from rooted and oppressed mechanisms towards more egalitarian, potentially rootless and assimilationist perspectives of cosmopolitanism. I see these writings’ changing cosmopolitan trajectories of Beur subjectivities as influenced by the contradictions of the French Republican model, wherein the dynamics of integration are governed by a logic of uniformity and dominant narratives of national identity.