UCLA

This dissertation explores exilic human rights literature as the literary genre encompassing under its aegis thematic and textual concerns and characteristics contiguous with dissident literature, resistance literature, postcolonial literature, and feminist literature. Departing from the ethics of recognition advanced by literary critics Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, my study explores how human rights and narrated lives generate larger discursive practices and how, in their fight for justice, diasporic intellectual networks in France debate ideas, oppressive institutions, cultural practices, Arab and European Enlightenment legacies, different traditions of philosophical and religious principles, and global transformations. I conceptualize the term francité d'urgence , definitory to the literary work and intellectual trajectories of those writers who, forced by the difficult political situation in their home countries, make a paradoxical aesthetic use of France, its territory, or its language to promote local, regional, and global social justice via broader audiences.

The first chapter theorizes a comparative analysis of human rights literature produced at a global diasporic site by transnational authors circulating between several locations - Middle East, North Africa, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France and the United States - that inform their cultural identities and goals. The second chapter reframes the works of the Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laâbi and Iraqi-Saudi `Abd ar-Rahman Munif by exploring the ways in which two renowned Arab writers uniquely give voice to the suffering of the outside while writing from the inside of a Moroccan and Iraqi prison, respectively, under the regimes of Hassan II in Morocco and the Baath Party in Iraq. The analysis of the Cold War literary output of Eastern European and Cuban cultural diasporas in France (based on the works by Paul Goma, Lena Constante, Eduardo Manet, and Reinaldo Arenas) completes this critical excursus.

Through the writing of dissident, feminist, resistance, dictatorship and prison literature, world exiles, expatriats, refugees, and former prisoners of conscience in France reconfigure cosmopolitan networks and cultural centralities far away from the native centers that matter to them. These exilic writers propose alternate histories, identities, and modes of interaction and map a critical model of understanding global cultural nodal points that can be applied to other world cultural centers or metropoli as well (London, New York, or Madrid are only several examples). Similarly to postcolonialism, authoritarian political systems and coerced migrations unwittingly create new world systems such as the literary and political Francophonie (or Anglophonie ), through which narratives of abuses and rights are filtrated; by and large, these are systems in motion, regionally and globally inflected, and actively involved in the movements of contemporary history. In this process of Francophone cultural remodeling, the disputed universalism of the French language and space gets surprisingly validated by the universal language of rights that diasporic writers in France advance in their efforts to counteract the language du bois of the world republics of fear with the human rights lingo of the republic of letters.