Islam and Far-Right Politics in Post-contemporary Francophone Speculative Fiction: An Ethical Call to Resistance or Revival of French Orientalism?

Abstract

France’s literary landscape has been dominated in the last years by novels mirroring the country’s current political situation and party leaders’ speeches. In 2015, on the same day as the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq published Submission (Soumission) a novel in which a passive, cynical intellectual has to decide whether giving into something bigger than himself, as the entire France seems to embrace Islam, is ultimately the way to go. Published a year later, Karim Amellal’s Bleu Blanc Noir (Amellal, Karim. 2016. Bleu Blanc Noir. La Tour D’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube.) novel offers the opposite perspective: when France’s far-right political party wins the elections and subjects French citizens of immigrant origins, especially Muslim ones, to inhumane treatments, the notorious French banlieues, rally to form a Resistance movement. While analyzing the social and political references on which these two novels are built, this chapter also answers the question whether, as a literary genre, these examples perform an ethical function of calling society to resist the evils of extremist political and religious factions or they slide into the stereotyped glorification of Eastern culture’s exotic attributes, as defined by Edward Saïd in Orientalism (1979).