Regards exotopiques sur deux portes de l’Europe : la crise migratoire à Lampedusa et à Mayotte dans Eldorado et Tropique de la violence

• Main Author: Silvia U. Baage
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2017-11-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: doorways to Europe; globalization; Indian Ocean; Mediterranean Sea; migration crisis; polyphonic structure
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/2369

This paper will focus on the polyphonic structure of two transnational texts, Eldorado by Laurent Gaudé (Actes Sud, 2006) and Tropique de la violence by Nathacha Appanah (Gallimard, 2016). It will examine the image of two islands that are doorways to Europe, Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea as well as Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, through the accounts of multiple characters who question the presence of civilizational progress on the Old Continent as it faces a migration crisis in two geographically remote areas. The convergences and divergences between these two spaces point to the existence of problems that are socio-political, moral and ethical in nature, thus far from the dreamed image of the Eldorado. The last section will be a reflection about the act of writing Europe in a globalized world, in which the texts under investigation propose both a way of countering the fear of the other, but at the same time contemplate paradoxical solutions.