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Apr 25, 2024
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FREN 292 - Tahar Ben Jelloun: French Hospitality 1.5 Credit Hours
In Sand Child, Ben Jelloun recounts a Muslim father’s efforts to raise his eighth daughter as a male in order to evade Islam’s patriarchal inheritance laws. In the voice of a professional storyteller in a Marrakesh market in the 1950s, Ben Jelloun plumbs the rich Arabic oral tradition to recount the coming of age of Mohammed Ahmed. The young female man’s letters tell another story, that of Zahra, who enjoys men’s privileges, but yearns for a child. The polemical French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants is no less provocative. Today, it speaks to the estimated 272 million international migrants abandoning their homes in search of work opportunities or simply to escape conflict, violence, and climate change. Ben Jelloun confronts his own Otherness in France and analyzes the relationship between the formerly colonized to their onetime colonizers, the cohabitation of Muslims amidst the Judeo-Christian majority, and the status of non-European minorities in Europe today. Both novel and essay illuminate, at intimate as well as societal levels, Ben Jelloun’s wager on the benefic power of opening of oneself to another.
This course will satisfy the core area requirement in literature and multicultural studies, if taken with FREN 291.
This course will satisfy the core requirement in multi cultural studies, if taken with FREN 291.
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