ABSTRACT
The concept of Beur culture encapsulates the paradox and dynamism of an open-ended community between singular beings. The term 'Beur' names a composite and multicultural group of people, forming at once an affirmative alternative to French and North African identities, and an open signifier incorporating diverse experiences. 'Beur' itself normalizes and classifies diverse individuals from different regions or with different relationships with their parents' native land. One of Azouz Begag's texts from the late 1990s, Zcnzela, demonstrates the mobility of the Beur community, less by satirizing a series of one dimensional, naive discourses than by promoting cultural mixing and interaction. Here, the very structure and focus of the text revolve around the interpenetration of Algeria and France and the subversion of national stereotypes through unforeseen combinations. Young people of immigrant origin in France are shown to hover between a reaffirmation of repressed memories and a sense of confusion caused by the resistance of the past to straightforward explanation.
