Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migrations: Non-places, Affect, and Temporalities

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In this first edited collection in English on Abdellah Taïa, Denis M. Provencher and Siham Bouamer frame the distinctiveness of the Moroccan author’s migration by considering current scholarship in French and Francophone studies, post-colonial studies, affect theory, queer theory, and language and sexuality. In contrast to critics that consider Taïa to immigrate and integrate successfully to France as a writer and intellectual, Provencher and Bouamer argue that the author’s writing is replete with elements of constant migration, “comings and goings,” cruel optimism, flexible accumulation of language over borders, transnational filiations, and new forms of belonging and memory making across time and space. At the same time, his constantly evolving identity emerges in many non-places, defined as liminal and border narrative spaces where unexpected and transgressive new forms of belonging emerge without completely shedding shame, mourning, or melancholy. Cover Title page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Reconsidering Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migration Part I ON PLACE AND NON-PLACE 1 “Sortir de tous les territoires”: To Be a Racialized and Colonized Subject within France Today. Is There for Abdellah Taïa a There Where to Go and to Exist? 2 Sexual Fluidity and Movements in Abdellah Taïa’s L'armee du salut: The Birth of a Queer Moroccan Francophone Identity 3 Marginal Masculinities: Disidentifying Sexual Performativity across Abdellah Taïa’s Novels Part II AFFECTIVE MIGRATION 4 He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: Cruel Optimism in Abdellah Taïa’s L’armée du Salut 5 Queerness, Shame, and the Family in Abdellah Taïa’s Epistolary Writing 6 Mourning and Reconciliation: Anger, Politics, and Love Part III POSTCOLONIAL TEMPORALITIES 7 Abdellah Taïa’s Melancholic Migration: Oscillation between Solitude and Multitude 8 From the “Garçon du bled” to “Tintin’s Dog”: The Interplay between Race and Sex in Abdellah Taïa’s Un pays pour mourir and Celui qui est digne d’être aimé 9 Abdellah Taïa’s Transfilial Mythmaking and Unfaithful Realms of Memory Part IV NEW DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 10 The Voices of Reappropriation 11 Des hommes fatigués 12 Tired Men Conclusion: New Directions for Abdellah Taïa and the Field Index About the Contributors