For practically the entirety of her career as a writer, Marguerite Duras displayed a determination to uphold the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression in racial terms. Examples of Duras's early journalism testify to a determination to focus attention on the problems faced by immigrant workers in Paris confronted by a racism that is both banal and institutional (see in particular ‘Les Fleurs de l'Algérien’, ‘Racisme à Paris’, and ‘Les deux ghettos’ in the collection Outside: Papiers d'un jour); one of the exhortations to be found in Duras's 1969 publicity text for her film Détruire dit-elle is that in favour of a general alignment with ‘the last coolie’; and Duras's alignments with racially marginalized groups are constant. In 1970, she took part in a protest against the death of five immigrant workers in a Foyer de solidarité franco-africaine in Aubervilliers, during which a group of 200–300 protesters seized the premises of the Conseil National du Patronat Français, and 116 (including Duras and Jean Genet) were arrested. Her denunciations of the Front National during the 1980s are frequent and vociferous; at this time, she also begins to insist polemically on a vision of France as exemplarily open to a welcome flux of immigration. In Duras's literary work of the 1980s and 1990s, the figure of the immigrant accordingly becomes an important one; this figure is accompanied by a generalized interest in questions of racial difference, insistent not least in her avowedly autobiographical revisitings of her adolescence in French Indochina, which inscribe Duras's authorial persona intimately within a complicated economy of identity and difference in terms not only of race, but also of gender and class. An emphasis on questions of racial identity is, moreover, also rehearsed formally by Duras at this time, as the texts in which these questions come to the fore (for example, L'amant, Emily L., and La pluie d’été) begin to include noticeable elements of languages other than French, while also engaging internally with the business of translation.