Pluri-Culture et écrits migratoires/Pluri-Culture and Migrant Writings eds. by Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond (review)

Pluri-Culture et écrits migratoires/Pluri-Culture and Migrant Writings, edited by Elizabeth Sabiston and Robert Drummond, is a volume of thirty-three papers in French and English that emerged from a conference held at York University, Toronto in 2012. According to Sabiston’s introduction, the conference and, in turn, the volume offer an “interdisciplinary” approach to migration, with papers drawn from literary studies and the social sciences. In particular, it seeks to emphasize the “cultural values that each migrant takes with him” and how these mediate the “interaction of the immigrant’s original culture and that of the host country” (11-12). These claims position the volume within recent debates in migration studies, where scholars have submitted to critique such fundamental concepts as “culture” and the “nation-state,” have problematized the claim to an “interdisciplinary” approach and have called us to interrogate those categories and perspectives we take for granted (Dahinden 2016, Levitt 2012). What is unique in the way this volume approaches such concerns is twofold: the first is the frame provided by the keynote address from Patrick Imbert (Université d’Ottawa), and the second is the volume’s division into eight sections that approach migration through different perspectives based on a particular author, nation, methodology, identity or social activity.

Imbert’s keynote address asks us to consider our understanding of migration in light of the binary between a zero-sum and non-zero-sum attitude. The former assumes that to take on a second culture and language is to replace one’s first culture and language, while the latter would allow for a more open and fluid conception of the interaction between one’s different cultural engagements. This illustrates an important point in relation to Sabiston’s claim that the volume emphasises the interaction between a migrant’s “home” and “host” cultures: in doing so, it is important to break down assumptions about the position and role of each of these cultures. Thus, if we take Imbert’s paper as a frame for the volume as a whole, it asks us to read the papers that follow, not as attempts to explore a particular migrant experience in terms of the movement from A to B, but as opportunities to explore and problematize the unbounded movement they represent both between and within “home” and “host” cultures.

The eight sections that follow cover a lot of ground, but given that they have been dictated by the material available to the editors as a result of the conference, they are inevitably somewhat unbalanced in their coverage. For example, there are eight papers in the first section on an author-focused approach to migration. These explore the work of Hédi Bouraoui, a Tunisian-born writer who spent his childhood in France before moving to Canada and taking up a position as lecturer at York University. The impressive range of Bouraoui’s work and the strength of his reputation in Canada render him an ideal subject for the conference, and for the reader coming to this volume from outside a Canadian background, there is much to learn here about him. Several overlapping ideas are explored in the papers, and from these emerge an appreciation of the way Bouraoui’s work idealizes the world as a borderless society. The opening paper, for example, “Signes prémonitoires de crise et perspectives d’avenir dans les ecrits miratoires d’Hedi Bouraoui” by Nicola D’Armbrosio, considers how Bouraoui represents the migrant not as an exile but as someone who “fait de son mieux pour contribuer au progress culturel, scientifique, social et économique de son nouveau pays” (69). The ideal of progress highlighted here connects with the second paper, “Identité et altérité dans l’oeuvre de Hédi Bouraoui” by Rafik Darragi, which illustrates how Bouraoui’s work explores the extent to which everyone is a form of migrant; this...