The Algerian Novel And Colonial Discourse

This book investigates for precisely what purpose, on what philosophical grounds, and using what techniques, Algerian novelists engage with the history of Algeria and how significantly are they different from that of traditional historical novelists.

Algerian Literature: A Reader's Guide and Anthology is a comprehensive text and reader of Algerian literature available in English.

During the last fifty years, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, and Kateb Yacine achieved significant international recognition yet remain little known in the United States. Filling a pressing need, The Algerian Novel and Colonial Discourse provides a critical introduction and a new approach to the works of these Algerian novelists. Beginning with an overview of their novels, this book goes on to discuss critical approaches to them, challenging the widely held notion that they are merely ethnographic, upholding the status quo. The Algerian Novel and Colonial Discourse provides a new reading, and, most significantly, argues that they are best read as witnesses to the kind of conflict Jean-François Lyotard calls a différend - a conflict in which one suffers an injustice and is at the same time deprived of the means to argue. The Algerian Novel and Colonial Discourse then examines the issue of humanism that the novels allegedly both appeal to and reject and demonstrates that the Algerian authors' condemnation of colonialism is both a coherent political position and consistent with their critique of liberal humanism. It concludes with a discussion on the ongoing relevance of the Algerian novels. The Algerian Novel and Colonial Discourse includes a glossary and a short history of modern Algeria to provide readers with the political and cultural contexts they need to understand its literature. This combination of innovative theoretical approach and political context makes this book of utmost importance for students of Francophone literature and for literary critics interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, and Lyotard's philosophy.

Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses underscores the relationship between literature, history and politics. The comparative historical-cultural analysis of the works of Albert Camus, Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib provide not only interesting perspective from which to re-evaluate Camus' fiction, but also an extremely valuable insight into the colonial history and politics of Algeria. The author examines the ideological parameters - colonial history, French assimilationist practices, politics of citizenship, etc. - that provide a generative context for the birth of Algerian Literature in French. The work's strength and contribution to scholarship, particularly, to the growing field of post-colonial cultural critique, lie in its attempt to read the fictions of Camus from the perspective of North African literary tradition as opposed to a French literary tradition. It brings his writings into a mutual dialogic interrogation with those of Indigenous North African writers, whose fictions articulate a state of cultural heterogeneity at the very moment when they confront the problem of Western - particularly French - hegemony. This book is of interest to scholars and graduate students of French literature, Francophone African literature, and Cultural Studies.

Disputing the claim that Algerian writing during the struggle against French colonial rule dealt almost exclusively with revolutionary themes, The Algerian New Novel shows how Algerian authors writing in French actively contributed to the experimental forms of the period, expressing a new age literarily as well as politically and culturally. Looking at canonical Algerian literature as part of the larger literary production in French during decolonization, Valérie K. Orlando considers how novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Farès, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine both influenced and were reflectors of the sociopolitical and cultural transformation that took place during this period in Algeria. Although their themes were rooted in Algeria, the avant-garde writing styles of these authors were influenced by early twentieth-century American modernists, the New Novelists of 1940s–50s France, and African American authors of the 1950s–60s. This complex mix of influences led Algerian writers to develop a unique modern literary aesthetic to express their world, a tradition of experimentation and fragmentation that still characterizes the work of contemporary Algerian francophone writers.

In this volume, Francophone Algerian writing is studied as the hesitant articulation of strategies of alternative representation and, however modest, of deviance as a form of resistance.

This study is based on research in the former Bône municipal archives, generally barred to researchers since 1962. Prochaska concentrates on the formative decades of settler society and culture between 1870 and 1920. He describes in turn the economic, social, political, and cultural history of Bône through the First World War.