La narrazione delle « banlieues »: tra percezione del margine e impegno letterario

Abstract

Increasingly over the past decades, peripheries all over the world have failed to function as socializing agents. We are facing now a new "urban question", as the city margins seem to reduce possibilities of integration both within their boundaries and with the city centre. However, in France these seemingly voiceless and powerless banlieues express themselves through literature. The aim of this article is to explore their specificities through the analysis of some novels published one year after the urban riots of 2005 and labeled by literary criticism as “urban” or “banlieue literature”. This will give us the opportunity to rethink the notion of literary commitment through the broader notion of “critical fiction”.