THE NEWFLÂNEUR

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 d...