Theorizing the Role of the Intermediary in Postcolonial (Con)text: Driss Chraïbi's Une enquête au pays (original) (raw)
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Rocky Mountain Review, 2013
I n 2007, the signatories of the littérature-monde manifesto declared an end to Francophonie and the demise of the "Franco-French" literary center. Thus, the study of Francophone literatures, as separate from French literature, has extensively benefitted from new approaches. 1 The vast and protean cultural theories of postcolonial studies, as well as gender and queer studies, first emerged in Anglo-American universities. In "Littérature française et littératures francophones: une union inconvenante?," Nadège Veldwachter suggests that these studies have enabled researchers to apply an interdisciplinary, eclectic approach to Francophone literatures while attracting the best Francophone thinkers and writers to their institutions. In spite of their imperfections, postcolonial studies advance the interdisciplinary collaboration that tries to provide answers to such questions as: "Quelle histoire la littérature considère et configure-t-elle? Et quelle littérature l'histoire fait-elle advenir ou apparaître?" 'What history does literature consider and configure? And what literature does history produce or render visible?' (Emmanuel Bouju, Littérature et histoire, qtd. in Veldwachter 30). For the purpose of this essay, I would suggest adding the question: "To what extent does literature 'consider and configure' history accurately?" More specifically, I will examine the power structures in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë (1961), translated as Ambiguous Adventure by Katherine Woods in 1963, by rereading this classic Francophone African novel through the lens of Mahmood Mamdani's cultural study Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996). Critics of Kane's novel have studied this philosophical text as a Bildungsroman or inversed tale of initiation, as well as a young man's search for cultural identity; others have focused on the antagonism between tradition and modernity, including the contrast between Islamic mysticism and Western materialist individualism; few have analyzed its ideological configurations. After a brief introduction of both texts (Mamdani's and Kane's), I will examine to what extent some aspects of the analysis of power structures in colonial Africa and its legacy as described
In 1977, a group of North African intellectuals produced a special volume for the prestigious French journal Les temps modernes. Led by Abdelkebir Khatibi, they sought to ‘rethink the Maghreb’ as a way to counter the poisoned, divided and belligerent climate of the region, and to offer an alternative to the authoritarian models of the nation-state that took hold after political independence. When read through the lens of Rancière’s concept of the ‘dissensus’ concerning the interplay between culture and politics, this collective volume of Les Temps Modernes reveals the plight of a generation of post-independence Maghrebi intellectuals who questioned their own purpose in light of their countries’ national projects. This article claims that this group intervened in the public sphere as a way to reconfigure the intellectual’s purpose in their respective societies and political systems. Their case highlights an important chapter in the region’s social and intellectual history and demonstrates how intellectual actors seek re-integration in the national community after a painful period of exclusion.
Dossier spécial Léon-Gontran Damas, 2020
The emergence and rise to preeminence of the bourgeoisie on the African political, social, and economic scenes have been the stuff of many novels. One could even argue that the rise of the sub-Saharan novel (because it is inherently connected to the colonial project) is more or less concurrent with the birth and rise of this class. In this essay, I seek to analyze the discourse of bourgeois transgression and illegitimacy as exemplified in two novels: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances (1968) and Francis Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot (1992). The two works focus on the ruling elite in the immediate postcolonial period. In both novels, albeit in varying degrees, the colonial school is presented as the main catalyst of the change that occasioned the transgression decried by the members of the erstwhile aristocratic nobility.
Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora, 2018
Amir Aziz examines L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals), a 1970 play by the Franco-Algerian writer Kateb Yacine. L’Homme narrates the dramatic journeys of characters of disparate geopolitical and historical contexts, such as Mohamed, a North African peasant conscripted into the French colonial army, and Alabama, an African-American soldier serving in the Vietnam War. Aziz argues that L’Homme blends both history and fiction to produce an enduring historical and literary archive of subaltern voices that conveys the motifs of transcultural kinship and anti-colonial revolution characterizing North Africa and Indochina during the turbulent era of decolonization. Aziz contends that L’Homme shows how differing anti-colonial narratives may instead be conjoined as teachable lessons in national unity, where Vietnam functions metonymically as political exemplar to emulate and cautionary metaphor to bear in mind for a post-independence Algeria.
Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2021
Nation in Moroccan historiography writings has traditionally been described as culturally, ethnically and racially homogeneous; an all-encompassing discourse that silences episodes about the historical legacy of slavery and racism in the country, and undermines multicultural Morocco. In fact, the history of Morocco’s blacks of sub-Saharan descent remains fragmented, scattered and undocumented – partly because of the scarcity of archival sources. Recent years, however, have witnessed the revival of an ‘African consciousness’ in Moroccan history and in literature. This is also the case of Maghrebi (North African) and Arabic literature from the Mashreq (the Middle East) and the Gulf. In this paper, we consider how two recent Moroccan novels, Le Lutteur [The Wrestler, in French] by My Seddick Rabbaj (2017) and Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil's Memory, in Arabic] by Rachid al-Hachimi (2018), deal with salient moments of trans-Saharan cultural connections. We argue that the historical and the geographical imaginaries connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa compel a discussion of the ‘decolonial’ as outlined by the Moroccan critic Abdelkebir Khatibi, and enforce a rebound on the concept of ‘significant geographies’. In engaging with the narratives’ concern about the construction of racial and cultural identities in Morocco, we consider how these works resonate with the recovery of the subaltern history of black Morocco, and how gender, rural and ethnic identity inform and imbue the texts with a knot of ambivalent discourses.
The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, poststructuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory
Review of International Studies, 2012
This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.
2018
This study aims to highlight and explore the impact of the French colonisation on the Algerian intellectuals in Yasmina Khadra's What the Day Owes the Night (2008). The selected novel provides a socio-historical account of a critical period in the Algerian history. Besides, it sheds light on the identity issues experienced by Algerian intellectuals which were a direct result to the assimilation policy adopted by the French administration in colonial Algeria. This research focuses on the traumatic consequences of being in margins and on borders of two clashing cultures: the native one and that of the coloniser, namely as an inevitable outcome of identity hybridisation. This endeavor, thus, investigates how those Algerian intellectuals developed a sense of alienation and confronted a chaotic psychological state of inbetweenness, particularly after the outbreak of the War for Independence. This study brings to the surface the troubled relationship between Algeria and France and see...