Carceral States in Kaoutar Harchi’s Zone Cinglée

Abstract

Since 2005, literary representations of the banlieues have become increasingly complex. Authors continue to move away from first-person, semi-autobiographical narratives, choosing instead to explore new genres. The first part of this article examines banlieue narratives that use dystopian fiction and the anticipation novel to present alternative portraits of these urban peripheries, before focusing on Kaoutar Harchi’s Zone cinglée (2009) and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’. This approach provides a lens through which the aestheticization of spatial and social exclusion can be examined while also considering how these novels offer new ways of thinking about citizenship, agency, memory and reconciliation in contemporary fictions about the banlieue.

Keywords:

• Banlieue
• dystopia
• marginalization
• French literature
• state of exception
• citizenship
• memory
• alterity
• bare life

Notes

1 See novels such as En attendant que le bus explose (2009) by Thomté Ryam and Du rêve pour les oufs (2006) by Faïza Guène, amongst others.

2 These trends are by no means limited to literature as films such as Banlieue 13 (Morel, 2004) and Banlieue 13: Ultimatum (Alessandrin, 2009) were also quite successful upon their respective releases. It is also worth noting that this increased interest in dystopia is not only cross-generational but forms part of a larger global movement. Consider the phenomenal success of film franchises such as The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012), Divergent (Burger, 2014) or The Maze Runner (Ball, 2014), which are based on dystopian fiction trilogies geared towards young adults and have all recently been adapted for cinema.

3 Parallels can also be drawn with Tassadit Imache’s use of Greek mythology in Presque un frère (2001).

4 These scenes can also be seen in some ways as an inversion of what is described in Samira Bellil’s autobiography Dans l’enfer des tournantes (2002).