Reinventing Community

During recent years critics have increasingly expressed their loss of faith in existing cultural and political collective frameworks. Hiddleston challenges this trend towards singularity, bringing together theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy to bear on literature by writers of North African immigrant origin. She presents a critique of those writers who underline the absence of communal identification, proposes a new emphasis on relational networks interconnecting diverse cultural groups, and argues for a more subtle understanding of the complex interplay of the singular and the collective in contemporary French writing.