New Books In Literature

Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thirty-year period. Organized chronologically as a series of portraits, the book’s chapters deal with the literary (and filmic) output of an impressive number of writers, including Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Soraya Nini, Samira Bellil, Rachid Djaidani,Faiza Guene, and Sabri Loutah. Considering literary works themselves, as well as the audio-visual media representation of texts and authors on French TV and radio, Kleppinger’s analysis pushes back against the tendency to understand “beur” literature in exclusively social and political terms at the expense of aesthetic or artistic readings. Drawing on a range of sources, from literature to television and radio archives, to interviews Kleppinger conducted with t