ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 explores the encoding of globalised blackness into French space through Lauren Ekué's autofictional novel, Icône Urbaine [Urban Icon] (2005), published in the same year as the 2005 banlieue protests, which she presents as a French hip hop novel. I base my analysis on Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga's framing of self-identifying as “Black” (in English) in contemporary France, and its recoding into French slang terms “renois” or “reun” (inversions of the word “noir” in Verlan). Combining the critical framework of hip hop feminism with hermeneutic analysis and Tina Campt's notion of “intercultural address”, I connect Ekué's use of a hip hop aesthetic that consists of sampling musical and literary references, well as the remixing of linguistic codes, the novel's schema of archipelagos black spaces in central Paris (intra muros) to gendered black spatiality in the Parisian context. I argue that Ekué autofictional representation as magazine columnist and self-proclaimed “Queen of the Pavement”, remaps the city through her pursuit of black popular culture, fashion, and beauty; thus reframing Bennetta Jules-Rosette's “outsider” gaze of migrant Parisianism as the AfroFrench “insider” gaze of AfroParisianism.
