Christina Horvath

The Banlieues as Sites of Individual and Collective Memory and Oblivion in French Postcolonial Literature

Built largely in the 1960s, housing estates known as banlieues are ageing urban environments undergoing renovation, demolition, demographic change and symbolic re-signification. They have become sites where individual, familial and collective memories intersect with urban transformation, social marginalisation and spatial stigma. While literature emerging from these suburban spaces since the late 1990s has predominantly focused on urban youth, in recent years a marked memorial turn has emerged in contemporary French banlieue writing. Writers of immigrant descent are increasingly confronting the passing of the parental generation who migrated to France in the post-war period, and, with it, the realisation that much family and collective memory was only partially transmitted, silenced, or actively resisted. Memory — and the difficulty of remembering — has thus become a central thematic and narrative concern.

This paper examines how postcolonial memory is narrated and spatialised in contemporary banlieue fiction, focusing on Faïza Guène’s La Discrétion (2021), Mabrouck Rachedi’s Tous les mots qu’on ne s’est pas dits (2019), and Ramsès Kefi’s Quatre jours sans ma mère (2021). In these texts, the past must be actively excavated, reconstructed, and sometimes wrested from silence, against an urban backdrop that itself carries layered histories. While reconstructed memory reconnects families to their origins across the Mediterranean, memory work also produces forms of local rootedness within the banlieue housing estates where these narratives unfold.

Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory and Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire, the paper analyses how banlieue narratives articulate overlapping temporalities, transnational memories, and urban attachments, challenging linear models of heritage, identity and belonging. It argues that contemporary banlieue literature constructs the banlieue not merely as a space of deprivation, but as a dynamic mnemonic landscape where postcolonial memory, urban change and narrative agency are continuously negotiated.