The Politics and Poetics of Space in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express

Les Passagers du Roissy-Express is habitually situated in relation to writing on the city and/or postcolonial writing. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to explore the extent to which, in its rewriting of the spaces of the banlieue as historical and contemporary authentic spaces of the French nation, it can be aligned to some post-war sociological writing on rural France. Second, through a close reading of the language of the text, to show the landscape of the banlieue is also an emotional landscape, a landscape of filth and of freshness, of departure and disappearance. The public discourse of rediscovery and difference is inflected by a much more private one rooted in the oppression and suffering of the Occupation, and the text problematises the notions of otherness and elsewhere at both levels.