Maghrebi figures and the French crime novel of the 1970s

I was invited to present my research at the international conference “Le roman français des années 1970, une rétrospective,” held at the Université de Lorraine and co-organized by the Université de Lille, the Université de Lorraine, and the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia.

My paper examined the figure of the Maghrebi delinquent in French crime fiction of the 1970s. Drawing on a corpus of novels published between 1972 and 1976, I explored how these texts register the emergence of anti-immigrant discourse in postcolonial France and how literary representations of Maghrebi characters intersect with broader political, media, and social anxieties of the decade. The talk forms part of my current book project on Maghrebi characters in contemporary French fiction and visual culture, and traced an earlier genealogy for figures that would become increasingly central in later decades.