Starting from the basis that identity, individual or communal, is a narrative construct, the following study attempts to uncover the ways in which Jewish, Beur, and Antillean narrative is informing French national identity. Identity construction involves the positioning of boundaries, geographical or psychological, and engenders divisions separating human entities. The Jew, the Arab, the black, among others, including the lower classes and women, have traditionally been posited as Other in French national discourse. However, today, in a culturally plural France, Jewish, Arab, and black citizens are challenging inherited notions through their writing, which gives them a voice from the privileged position of narrative subject. Though these new subjectivities have had to speak from within the confinement of stereotypes, their use of narrative strategies succeeds in breaking through traditional discourse and, in effect, transforms it.
Through their testimony on the past, narration of the present, and projection into the future, the works I analyze, respectively Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Martine Dugowson's Mina Tannenbaum, Leila Sebbar's Le Chinois vert d'Afrique and Azouz Begag's Le Gone du Chaaba, and Maryse Conde's Heremakhonon and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco, are intrinsically concerned with the problematic of identity. Specifically, they engage in recovering the memory of the Shoah, integrating excluded ethnic subjects into the national space, and reconstructing the national idea toward a more pluralist vision, as opposed to France's traditional policy of assimilation. Their unique practices of cross-cultural hybridization make manifest both the literary and social changes occurring within the French narrative and nation.
Finally, the conclusion explores how these struggles for maintaining cultural specificity within France are reflected on the national level before American economic hegemony. In essence, government officials have adopted their discursive elements in order to defend the diversity of French culture and the vibrancy of its expression against the homogenizing pressures of globalization. The active protection of national culture through government patronage, however, is treading a fine line between reactionary cultural populism and Eurocentric elitism. Ultimately, the future vitality of the French nation may depend on how rigorously the State defends the multiple elements of its culture by fully liberating the voices expressing that diversity.