Mobilités d’Afrique en Europe: récits et figures de l’aventure par Catherine Mazauric (review)

Reviews 263 d’adaptabilité à la modernité française et juive” (261). In this way, Kahn contributed to the“fondation d’une nouvelle conception de l’identité juive”(261) by reformulating religious Judaism in terms of ethnicity and culture, and by repositioning the place of Jewish traditions within the French way of life and characterizing the two as inseparable.At a time when issues such as la laïcité, French identity, and the role of art in politics continue to find their way into public debates, this volume on the rich social, political, and aesthetic legacy of Gustave Kahn seems particularly pertinent. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Mazauric, Catherine. Mobilités d’Afrique en Europe: récits et figures de l’aventure. Paris: Karthala, 2012. ISBN 978-2-8111-0656-0. Pp. 384. 29 a. This valuable book treats a body of travel and adventure literature that, it argues, has recently come into being with the creation of strict new laws intended to reduce the number of African and other migrants entering the European Union.As Mazauric states, these restrictive laws have contributed to an entity sometimes called “Fortress Europe”under“assault”from North African and sub-Saharan African migrants unable to procure “legal” entry papers and who therefore have taken matters into their own hands. These new immigration laws not only impede the liberty of migrants and their right to mobility, they also attempt to prevent potential migrants from leaving their home countries (12). Given these circumstances, this new body of writing, which Mazauric calls the “récit de migration irrégulière” differs from the “Literature of Immigration,” in which the narration often concerns questions of arrival, inclusion, exclusion, or marginalization, but where the “immigrant” is in France “legally.” The works under analysis in Mazauric’s book instead deal with the harrowing and often deadly voyages undertaken over sea and by land by migrants who have decided to travel to Europe despite the restrictions that have been put into place. One example of this type of travel and (mis)adventure uses open-air fishing boats known as“pirogues,” which depart from the coasts of Senegal toward the Canary Islands, constituting a voyage which thousands have undertaken and which has equally led to the deaths of thousands of people. Among the works Mazauric analyses concerning this phenomenon , for example, is Abasse Ndioune’s 2008 novel Mbëke mi: à l’assaut des vagues de l’Atlantique, which offers a fictionalized account of the voyage but which also constitutes an accurate image of who decides to undertake the voyage and why. As Mazauric points out, the exact number of dead resulting from such dangerous migrations is difficult to count (15). However, it is the survivors themselves or other writers and filmmakers who transform the travelers’ tales into works of art. Mazauric examines a remarkable number of works (she lists about eighty in her primary bibliography) and divides her analysis into three main sections. The first treats narratives concerning the circumstances preceding the departure, the second examines works of “transit,”and the third looks at works dealing with arrival and sojourn at the destination. Her conclusion reiterates Edward Said’s call for a critical approach to literature that would privilege the“lived, the contested, and the immediate”(352) and points out that if the history of Africa is not comprehensible outside a paradigm of itinerancy, mobility, and displacement, it is also true that it was this culture of mobility that colonization attempted to impede through the modern institution of the border. This new body of literature proposes transnationalism as a traditionally African phenomenon being currently offered in a way that radically revises nineteenth-century European views of the world as a collection of isolated nation-states, thereby inviting readers to reinterpret the institution of the border from a variety of African perspectives. University of South Carolina Jeanne M. Garane Oktapoda, Efstratia, éd. Mythes et érotismes dans les littératures et les cultures francophones de l’extrême contemporain.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. ISBN 978-90420 -3762-5. Pp. 316. $92. Composé de treize chapitres consacrés à la littérature ou au cinéma, cet ouvrage offre des contributions portant majoritairement sur des œuvres...