Since the 1980s, French cultural discourse has been preoccupied with history and memory. This preoccupation has manifested in works such as Les Lieux de mémoire, which have sought to classify and catalogue the contents of a “national memory” and in a heritage wave in literature and cinema that represents keys moments of an idealized national past. This focus on history and memory is related to a parallel preoccupations with cultural/national identity (francité), that is itself informed by demographic changes in France’s population resulting from (post)colonial (specifically Maghrebi) immigration into France. When read against the political discourse on immigration and integration, this cultural “retreat into memory” may be read as an attempt to bind national identity to past experience and to render such identity a mental space that can not be ooverwritten by the changes of the present. This, in turn, excludes those who do not conform to traditional notions of natural/cultural identity from the space of French identity by conditioning inclusion in the nation on a hereditary memory that itself implies an ancestral connection of relativity long-standing to national space.

In response to the dominant cultural discourse of memory, there has emerged a minority (counter?) cultural discourse. Dominated by the novels and films of those descended from Maghrebi immigrants (the Beurs), this cultural discourse appropriates the dominant culture’s focus on history and memory and reconfigures it to enlarge the space of French national identity by allowing for the existence of differences of both history and memory. Like French heritage production, “Beur” literature and cinema are haunted by the past and particularly by the relationship between the past and the present. Specifically, they point to commonalities of history and memory between traditionally French and French-immigrant populations, commonalities rooted in the history of French colonization and decolonization. However, unlike heritage production, “Beur” literature and cinema are focused on the instability of the present, dealing directly with questions of race, racism, integration and national identity. Moreover, they do not present the past as constitutive of identity of the present.

My paper is an exploration of the politics of memory and identity in both “Beur” and French heritage production. Through an analysis of the evolution of the heritage wave, I explore the way in which heredity and memory have increasingly been linked to national identity. Through a parallel analysis of the evolution and development of “Beur” narratives, I demonstrate that “Beur” writers and filmmakers problematize the dominant discourse on national identity by inscribing those descended from immigration firmly within the national while at the same time highlighting the differences between the idealized vision of cultural memory and the history, memory and experience of those descended from immigration. Ultimately, I conclude that Beur writers and filmmakers deliberately appropriate notions of memory, heritage and identity from the dominant culture only to rework them in order to propose a multicultural rather than a moncultural version of Frenchness.