UC Berkeley

This dissertation is study of literary accounts depicting the lives of North African workers and their families in France during the nation’s thirty-year period of economic boom following World War II, known as the “Trente Glorieuses.” Through readings of works by authors including Driss Chraïbi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Claire Etcherelli, and others, I argue for literature’s unique potential to contest the hegemonic prosperity myth of the Trente Glorieuses by foregrounding the experiences of North African workers in France, situating their stories across marginalized topography of the street, immigrant worker foyers, shantytowns, and factories. The texts studied in this dissertation demonstrate how literary approaches to representing to lives of North African immigrant workers and their families can greatly inform our understanding the racialized logics of dispossession, exploitation, and policing which played a key role in driving economic growth and–albeit, unevenly distributed–social prosperity during France’s golden age of capitalism. This dissertation inquires more broadly into the ways that literary form can be marshalled to identify structural contradictions embedded within the different levels of state, market, and social management of these same essential, racialized workers, while drawing out the alternative modes of life, struggle, and collectivity that this same literature invites us to imagine, over and against the repressive and disciplinary pressures of the French state.