Though central to the history of Paris, the inestimable contribution of immigrant workers to the city’s ongoing construction has been subject to persistent historical erasure. Despite protracted efforts to attain visibility, workers still struggle for recognition from the French government for their central place in national history. Within the context of this struggle, this talk will argue for literature’s capacity to counteract this tendency of erasure, recentering the experience and efforts of immigrant workers, but also changing the way we, as readers, see and engage with the social and material history of the world around us, in this case the city of Paris and its monuments. To do so, this talk considers a little-known novel from 1978 titled L’homme qui enjamba la mer [The Man Who Stepped Over the Sea] written by a pair of North African authors under the pseudonyms Mengouchi and Ramdane. By examining Mengouchi and Ramdane’s critical attention to two major modern Parisian monuments–The Montparnasse Tower and the Centre Pompidou–this talk will demonstrate how novels like L’homme qui enjamba la mer possess the power to provoke an important epistemological shift in their readers, inviting them to see beyond the fetishized exterior of urban monuments to recover the obscured human labor–and in this case immigrant worker labor–at their origins.
