Contemporary Literary Criticism | Jelloun, Tahar Ben - Michael Brett (review date 4 August 2000)

Michael Brett (review date 4 August 2000)

SOURCE: Brett, Michael. Review of French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5079 (4 August 2000): 30.

[In the following review, Brett discusses Ben Jelloun's indictment of French prejudice against North African immigrants in French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants.]

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeans settled in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. But over the past hundred years, the flow has reversed: North African immigrants have settled in France, to the point at which, by 1990, they numbered over one and a half million, roughly the size of the European population of French North Africa before its massive exodus in the wake of the struggle for Independence in 1955-62. As their children, born in the country, become French on attaining their majority, North Africans would appear to have...

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