Strasbourg, the crossroads and the borderline: Poetics of heterotopia in contemporary literature

ABSTRACT

A city defined by centuries of geographical displacement, historical mobility, and linguistic hybridity, Strasbourg has a long literary tradition as a site of transaction, translation, and travel. Recent writings in French and German reveal a new imaginary that envisions the crossroads city as a postcolonial heterotopia. The novels Les nuits de Strasbourg (The nights of Strasbourg, 1997) by Assia Djebar and Soharas Reise (Zohara’s Journey, 1996) by Barbara Honigmann, and Jacques Derrida’s philosophical essay “The Place Name(s) – Strasbourg” (2004) encapsulate this imaginary. Taking Strasbourg as an object more than a location, they draw multilateral trajectories from Germany to France and from Algeria to Alsace, exploring traumatic memories, colonial legacies, and postcolonial identities. This article analyses representations of Strasbourg in which the double-sided geographical peripherality and cultural liminality of a border-city that is also a symbol for transnational Europe challenge traditional spaces of belonging and transcend the boundaries of national literatures.

KEYWORDS:

• Border-city
• heterotopia
• periphery
• postcoloniality
• Strasbourg
• transnational literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Derrida ([2004] 2014, 14–15). Launched in 1992, it has evolved in later years into the International Network of Cities of Asylum (see Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 2004, 19).

2. On the parallelisms between the inner trajectories and narrative structure of Djebar’s and Lawrence’s “The Border Line”, see Frank Wygoda (n.d.).

3. All translations are mine unless mentioned otherwise.

4. In another instance of street renaming, Derrida ([2004] 2014, 15) even suggests that the rue Charles-Grad should bear the name of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

5. Paris’s aura as the “world capital of literature” envisions the French capital as a city “freed from the national folklore, national politics, national careers” (Harold Rosenberg, quoted in Casanova 1999, 179).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tsivia Frank Wygoda

Tsivia Frank Wygoda earned a PhD in literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2017). A former Fulbright fellow (2018–19), she has conducted research at Yale and Harvard universities. She is the author of Edmond Jabès and the Archaeology of the Book: Text, Pre-texts, Contexts (forthcoming, Berlin: De Gruyter 2021).