This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book discusses the issues related to the mimetic and transformative powers of literature and film. It examines literary works and films that help deflate stereotypes regarding France's post-immigration population, and promote a new respect for cultural and ethnic minorities. The book highlights the overall renewal of literary and cultural production initiated by post-beur and post-colonial authors with roots in North Africa. It explores a postmemorial methodology intended to correct the foreclosures of French memory through the reading of multiple fictional representations of a significant event of Algerian decolonization. The book demonstrates cinema's potential to rewrite, complement, and fill in the epistemological gaps of the official historical discourse. It describes a new, international type of immigration from the global South caused by a broader form of neo-imperialism.

This chapter examines how Faïza Guène, Saphia Azzeddine and Nadia Bouzid exceed the literary confines of appellations such as minority literature, decentered literature, literature of the margins, exile literature, and banlieue literature. It demonstrates how the novels seek 'to be grounded and not simply "deterritorialized" or "deterritorializing" for that matter' in a literary landscape that does not pertain to a minority literature, but to literature at large. In France, areas containing relatively large concentrations of residents of foreign origin are almost always multi-ethnic. The stereotype of the Maghrebi-French family order is revisited to offer readers a totally different view of who Maghrebi-French people are nowadays. Azzeddine replaces exclusionary and confrontational identity politics with fluid cultural and identity positions which are adopted or relinquished according to the circumstances but in any case are not pitted against one another.