“The Migration of Names:” Relating Immigration and Reflecting Loss in Contemporary Literature in French

The ongoing European immigration crisis has inspired a complex literary production in French spanning from Mathias Énard, Laurent Gaudé, and Nicole Caligaris to Patrick Chamoiseau and Alice Zeniter, which reflects but also critiques the contradictory political debates and media representations surrounding it. In Maylis de Kerangal’s genre-bending book, À ce stade de la nuit (2014), the shipwreck of October 3, 2013 that killed more than 300 migrants inspires a narrative that filters the encounter with the Other through a series of past and present reflections on identity, loss, relation, and migration as a world-making act. Drawing on Janet Roitman’s examination of “crisis” and Yves Citton’s “ecology of attention,” the talk will situate Kerangal’s book in the context of contemporary literature in French in order to examine the points of encounter and friction between current forms of literary commitment and paracolonial nostalgia.