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Francophone writing in Algeria has traditionally been read as grounded in displacement and erasure of the colonised culture. Yet even the most assimilated évolué remained critical and conscious of a dual allegiance; and even the most resistant underwent significant acculturation, which they had to integrate into their claims to rootedness in a local community (itself jarringly reshaped by colonialism). Their writing (both fiction and non-fiction) is studied here for the first time as the hesitant articulation of strategies of alternative representation and, however modest, of deviance as a form of resistance. Although clearly indebted to the objectives and constraints of the Algerianist aesthetic of the interwar years, it introduced the Muslim Algerian subject into the colonial novel, reorienting or correcting the colonists' vision thereof and providing an alternative to the latter's monologic production.
List of contents
Contents: Colonial Algeria - Francophone writing, 1900-1945 - Francophone évolué newspapers and fiction - Literature of resistance - Colonial peritexts - The colonial chronotope - Tradition and fictional identities - Historical fiction.
About the author
The Author: Peter Dunwoodie is Professor of French literature at Goldsmiths College and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. He is a comparatist who has published widely on French authors Albert Camus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and on Algerian and Caribbean writing. His most recent book, Writing French Algeria, was a study of European Algerian writing between 1830 and 1954.
Report
«'Francophone Writing in Transition', which includes a set of valuable appendices offering historical, biographical and textual glosses, will be eagerly welcomed by historians and literary and cultural analysts as a complex case study of the effects of colonial mimicry, identification and rivalry.» (Edward Hughes, French Studies)
«Dunwoodie has produced an invaluable aid for all those with an interest in Algerian history, identity, and (post)colonialism.» (Sophie Smith, Modern Language Review)
