L'Autre en Mouvement: Representations of the Postcolonial Urban Other in Contemporary French Art, Literature and Cinema

Abstract

The official representation of the Other (formerly the colonized, today the first- and second-generation immigrant) in French media is fixed in terms of gender, race and ethnicity and part of a larger national identity building process. This dissertation aims to reveal a pattern of resistance in contemporary literary and film depictions of the Metropolitan urban Other, one that privileges expressions of mobility and fluidity in relation to gender and sociocultural norms. This work is composed of three chapters relating to the fields of museology, literature and film. The study of the three archives exposes varying degrees of media control in each artistic domain and, conversely, a discourse of dissidence in postcolonial works that seeks to redefine the concepts of spectatorship, gender norms, and urban identity in contemporary Metropolitan France.