Blended Stories

This chapter introduces three important writers of migrant background in France who have written autobiographical and autofictional work about their youth since the millennium. The transcultural quality of their work is examined along with their mixed cultural heritage. Transculturality is discussed along with transnational and translingual approaches and Rainier Grutman’s notion of heterolingualism. Also explored are important questions in life writing, particularly in “other-embedded” narratives and autofiction, including intermedial and multimodal instances. The first writer, Azouz Begag, was born in the Lyon area to immigrant parents from Algeria and came to prominence in the mid-1980s. Begag’s works focus on the journeys towards societal recognition and self-affirmation of young people of Maghrebi cultural background. The other two writers, Laura Alcoba and Maryam Madjidi, came to France as child refugees fleeing the military dictatorships in Videla’s Argentina and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, arriving in 1979 and 1986. They have been publishing, respectively, since 2007 and 2017. This chapter introduces some of the commonalities and specificities of their works, as well as questioning some of the boundaries between postcolonial and “refugee” narratives. Key issues in the authors’ work are set out, along with a substantial discussion of societal issues in multicultural France, from 2000 to late 2023.