THE NEWFLÂNEUR

Abstract

Situated within subaltern cultural studies, and building on the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin, this essay tells the story of the ‘new flâneur’, a recent immigrant and refugee group of continental francophone African youth, who are attending an urban French-language high school in south-western Ontario, Canada. In it, I offer an alternative cultural framework of ‘translation’ and ‘negotiation’ as a way of seeing that which is supposedly competing and conflicting is indeed re-de-and-transformed and negotiated into New ways that make them radically performed. Their radicalness stems, precisely, from the notation that displaced identities, the focus of the paper, are not oppositionally articulated; on the contrary, they are negotiated, translated, and re-born in a more complex and hybrid space: a third one. This hybridity, I will show, is habitually performed in and through language – in its broad semiological sense. As part of an ethnographic research project, the essay will show the different ways in which the new flâneurs form and perform their identities. Here, the Old and the New are not ethnographically observed in competition; both are translated in the identity formation processes and in the process, they are negotiated so that both are found in the same sentence, in the same garments, at the same time to produce a third hybrid space. To walk is to vegetate To stroll is to live Balzac

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