For many of the world's refugees, the mobility of forced displacement is followed by involuntary immobility. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, UNHCR estimated that around four in ten registered refugees lived in camp-like facilities, often for years (Gatrell 2013). In the camp’s parallel society, the lives of refugees are put on hold. This paper takes artistic representations as the starting point for some methodological reflections on what a postmigrant perspective can contribute to life in refugee camps which, it is argued, generates, a kind of postmigrant subjectivity rarely singled out in postmigration studies.

Vladimir Tomić’s video work (2015) and novel (2022), Flotel Europa concern life in the eponymous hotelship docked in Copenhagen Harbour and serving as a refugee centre for Bosnians fleeing the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s. They are about this collective experience of refugeehood, as well as an autobiographical coming-of-age story about the boy Vladimir. 1990s Denmark was only on the verge of becoming a ‘postmigrant society’, as opposed to the Danish society of 2015-2022 in and for which Tomić created these works. This prompts the questions: What is gained by adopting an analytical lens that repositions ‘refugees’ as ‘postmigrants’? How might artistic representations of ‘postmigrant refugeedom’ influence the discourse on migration in postmigrant societies? And can the analyst avoid the migrationist trap of ‘migrantising’ the artist?

Postmigrant societies mark a paradigm shift where migration influences not just individuals with a migration background but entire societies (Espahangizi 2015). Foroutan (2019) observes that identities in such societies are increasingly shaped by attitudes towards migration, plurality, and diversity, rather than ethnicity, indicating a significant change in the perception of migration. This paper explores how this paradigm shift is reflected in literature, focusing on French fiction by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Sabri Louatah, Farid Boudjellal, and Dominique Manotti. Employing a methodology that treats literary texts as expressions of language acts, I present a case study on the gradual emergence of economically mobile Maghrebi French characters in French literature. It examines a range of Maghrebi French character prototypes, including businessmen, detectives, and politicians, analyzing their connection to social realism and specific former literary tropes, such as colonial narratives, while also highlighting narratives that challenge and subvert these conventions. This approach, grounded in character studies, sheds light on the evolving representation of Maghrebi French identities in contemporary French fiction, offering insights into the changing portrayal of the Other and broader cultural narratives of France. This research aims to deepen our understanding of how contemporary French literature not only reflects but also influences the dynamics of postmigrant societies, providing a nuanced perspective on the interplay between literature, identity, and societal transformation. The study underscores the importance of literary analysis in understanding cultural and social shifts in the postmigrant era.

Our proposal draws on the TransArea Studies approach advocated by Ottmar Ette and applies it to novels by French- and German-speaking authors who are representative of a postmigrant perspective. They base the idea of TransArea on a more concrete delimitation within a global but specific space. The Trans-Mediterranean model first makes it possible to grasp the superimposition of worlds that defines French post-migration of North African descent (Alice Zeniter, Faïza Guène). Indeed, through the back-and-forth movements that cross it in several novels, the Mediterranean Sea opens up to a fluid and relational conception of spaces, which leads to going beyond basic belonging to the nation-state as a citizen of French inspiration. Our comparative approach then observes that certain ‘classics’ of German-Turkish literature by authors who establish the transition between migrant and post-migrant generations (Alev Tekinay, Feridun Zaimoglu, Emine Sevgi Özdamar) logically extend this Mediterranean model to the Aegean Sea and stage a similar chiasmus-like movement between “both sides”. In this context they make abundant use of geopoetic metaphors whose distinct functions will be examined, particularly from the point of view of the mobility of characters embodying those different generations.