Testimony, Co-Authorship, and Dispossession among Women of Maghrebi Origin in France

This article focuses on a number of recent narratives published in France by women of Maghrebi immigrant descent with the assistance of majority ethnic co-authors. It reveals a dynamic of dispossession at work in these texts that appears cruelly ironic in view of the importance that the minority ethnic authors attach to an ethic of personal emancipation. The authors lose control of their texts through their dependence on intermediaries, who include majority ethnic co-authors as well as editors and publicists who shape not only the reception of such texts, notably through the paratexts that they place around them, but also the construction of the corpus itself, through the filtering process by which texts are selected or rejected for publication and the role played by co-authors in tailoring the primary authors' narratives to meet the perceived needs or interests of their readers.