Zone indécise: périphéries urbaines et voyage de proximité dans la littérature contemporaine by Filippo Zanghi (review)

The recent passing of François Maspero will bring a renewed attention to his œuvre, which makes Filippo Zanghi’s monograph particularly timely. Zanghi’s study investigates one of Maspero’s most widely read works, Les Passagers du Roissy-Express(Paris: Seuil, 1990), together with François Bon’s Paysage fer(Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), Jacques Réda’s La Liberté des rues(Paris: Gallimard, 1997) and Le Citadin(Paris: Gallimard, 1998), Jean Rolin’s Zones(Paris: Gallimard, 1995) and La Clôture(Paris: Gallimard, 2002), Denis Tillinac’s Boulevards des Maréchaux(Paris: Dilettante, 2000), and Philippe Vasset’s Un livre blanc(Paris: Fayard, 2007). In so doing, Zanghi asks how urban spaces visited by contemporary writers — and particularly spaces in the periphery of the city — are perceived and represented as landscapes. His approach does not claim to be universal: Zanghi introduces his book by retracing the history of post-war urbanization in France and focusing on the specific case of the Parisian banlieueand the social issues connected to it. He places particular importance on the aspect of the writers’ ‘visits’ and argues that we can read their works as travel narratives as they focus on reflective journeys on foot, by train (as in Bon), and sometimes even by car (as in Maspero), narrated as a testimony by a single mediating voice. Drawing on Thomas Sieverts’ notion of Zwischenstadtto question the binary opposition between centre and periphery, Zanghi undertakes close readings through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, with six chapters focusing on issues of space, history, and sociability. His model is geographical, oriented around four poles (‘objectif-matériel’, ‘subjectif-individuel’, ‘culturel-esthétique’, ‘social-politique’ (pp. 29–31)), which enables him to investigate perceptions and literary representations of urban peripheries to argue for a requalification of the ‘urbain contemporain’ (p. 24). Zanghi’s selection of writers covers a broad political spectrum and a timespan from 1990 to 2007. The relative homogeneity of the corpus in terms of what he calls their ‘capital parisien’ — a term referring to privileged backgrounds of white French Parisians, thereby re-establishing the hierarchical opposition between French and francophone, and their prestigious publishing houses, such as Gallimard or Minuit — and the effect this has on their journeys, which he describes as ‘urbano-centré[s]’ (p. 220), provide him with sufficient material and evidence to describe the constructed character of the urban peripheries as ‘paysagement’ instead of ‘paysage’ (ibid.). This change in terminology emphasizes how the travel narrative exposes the ways representations of these marginalized spaces are limited, while also pointing up the genre’s problematic implications of gentrification (with Réda) and neo-imperialist tendencies (with Maspero). Despite Zanghi’s sensitivity to these problems of representation, his critique of privilege nonetheless seems incomplete. He does not, for instance, address the complete and striking absence of women writers in his study. A more heterogeneous corpus would not only have given voice to those who remain the encountered Other, but would also have contributed to representing ‘la littérature contemporaine’ (as the title of his book suggests) more comprehensively. Overall, however, Zanghi’s study makes a helpful contribution to the geocritical study of the growing body of literature in this field.