The Expression of Ambivalences in Postmigrant Literature of Muslim Descent: The Case of Kenan Görgün

This contribution is part of ongoing doctoral research on the autobiographical productions of postmigrant Francophone writers (Petersen, 2024) of Muslim descent. The corpus includes writers from different backgrounds of origin and socialisation, such as the Franco-Algerian writer (Magyd Cherfi), the Belgian-Turkish writer (Kenan Görgün) and the Belgian-Moroccan writer (Ismaël Saidi). The research methodology consists of combining the analysis of autobiographical literary texts with semi-directive interviews with their authors, while maintaining a diachronic posture, in order to grasp the dissonances, tensions and trials (Martuccelli, 2015) experienced. We propose here to focus on the writer Kenan Görgün.

Within the framework of dispositionalist-contextualist sociology proposed by Bernard Lahire (Lahire 2002), we consider that a set of past and present internal (dispositional) and external (contextual) constraints act on the individual. Everyone has aptitudes, mental and behavioural resources and limits (‘competences and dispositions’), but also a variety of constraints depending on the context in which they act. These ‘competences and dispositions’ are all the more complex when people, like the authors we study, are part of various cultural, family and community heritages.

We are going to analyse how not only are these competences and dispositions transmitted but they are also incorporated, reappropriated and even reconstructed by individuals as they become embedded in multiple and heterogeneous contexts (Lahire, 2009, p. 301-305). We imagine that the religious education passed on by parents translates into competences and dispositions that are implemented (or on standby) in other areas of life, and contributes to the ability to cope with everyday ambivalences (Tabboni, 2007) and intra-individual and contextual contradictions. We will therefore explore the ‘lived religion’ between autobiography and fiction, between narrative and socialisation, and between the multiple (non)belongings in postmigrant societies (Foroutan, 2019).