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Beur Travel Writing: Tassadit Imache’S Algerie, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

The particular cultural positioning described as the beur predicament and often summed up in the phrase “belonging neither here nor there,” is clearly a result of French colonial history. As such, it hardly refers to subjects able or willing to assume the vantage point of the classic European travel narrative or to employ its poetics. Beurs are children of North African immigrants (primarily from Algeria, but also Morocco and Tunisia) who arrived in France after the Second World War to work in the developing auto industries. While entitled to French citizenship (born in pre-independence Algeria, their parents are French subjects), …