Realites et fictions du travail de l'immigre subsaharien dans la France postcoloniale

This dissertation investigates the representation of labor in postcolonial immigration in French and Francophone Literature and films. The issue of labor is a major theme in the history of the world's migrations and a key factor in the mobility of African migrants who have settled in France over the past sixteen years after the decolonization and independence of Sub-Saharan African countries (late 1950s). This study strives to account for recurrent patterns in the experience and discourse of immigrant workers, which are very similar to the colonial worker's attitudes and mind frame.;I analyze constructions of identities among migrant workers through labor in two novels L'Aventure ambigue (1961) by Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Le Docker noir (1956) by Ousmane Sembene. Immigrant women's labor situations are explored in the domestic sphere with La noire de ..., a short story and a film by Ousmane Sembene (1962/1965), and the autobiography Une esclave moderne by Akofa (2000). I argue that these women laborers are "doubly colonized" through both gender and class. One of my main arguments is that the systemic exploitation of young African maids comes often from within the African community living in France and follows the same pattern as slavery during the independence period (1960s) and the recent postcolonial period as well (1990s).;In Bessora's "53 cm" (1999), the young character goes from a legal to an illegal status of "sans-papier" which leads her to prostitution. We can find the same processes of the loss of identity combined with a status of illegal worker in Mweze Ngangura's film, Pieces d'identites (1998) which takes place in Belgium. My thesis ends with an analysis of young Africans attracted overseas by sport. Even if soccer was a prestigious sport during the colonial period, we can observe in 2010 that this sport promotes the same colonial discourse instead of bringing hope to young postcolonial African subjects.