Elsewhere in Paris: Creolised Geographies in Leila Sebbar's La Seine etait rouge

As a 'traveling theory', Creolisation offers a compelling framework for reading the alternative historiographies of Francophone literature of migration, but the metropolitan geography of this migrant literature seems to suggest a tension with the theory's reversed spatial hierarchies. This essay will read Leila Sebbar's La Seine etait rouge (1999) as a novel of metropolitan Creolisation that juxtaposes immigrant narratives with the Algerian war for independence in a way that resolves the paradox of a decentralising centre. By illuminating the imperialist spatial models at work both vertically and horizontally in the French colonial imagination, I will argue, Sebbar's palimpsestic Parisian landscape demonstrates that to undo cultural uniformity is also to displace the boundary between centre and periphery.