Algeria’s Mortified Memory

Anger and incivility are integral parts of the post-colonial ethos that oriented France’s response to the violent dismantling of its colonial empire in the wake of World War II. The chapter examines the recent convergence between autobiographical and documentary writings by Harkis and Pieds-noirs which present two distinct yet interconnected types of memorial writing that recollect or re-enact the colonial past by setting it in contrast with the post-colonial present, thus marking a turn from “memory wars” (Stora) to what I call the “anger consensus.”

An Unpayable Debt: For a Paracolonial Aesthetics

In their writings, artists such as Lyonel Trouillot, Régis Jauffret and Léonora Miano ponder, probe and reimagine the contradictory connotations of colonial debt. Literature and theory can shed light on the burdensome, incommensurable and indivisible colonial heritage that continues to shape our era’s violent struggles, ideological incomprehensions and myopic or even catastrophic public policies. They can show that reckoning with irreconcilable visions of the past may lead to imagining a common future and they can call to a particular kind of action in which powerful emotions foster careful reflection.

Maps of Frenchness

Stemming from different engagements with the colonial past and its postcolonial avatars, and presenting contrasting views of the colonial fortune, the works of Marie NDiaye and Stéphane Audeguy lay bare the imperfections, frictions and jagged edges of contemporary identity construction.

Landscape as Vocation

The second chapter continues the examination of the intimate and multifaceted relation between the colonial destination and the modern Western belief in the interconnectedness of individual and historical destiny through an eco-critical analysis of works by J. M. G. Le Clézio and Edouard Glissant.

A Place of Dialogue

Contemporary writers create narratives that delve into the residual effects of Western colonization while integrating them into a larger ethical discussion about the complicity and responsibility of the colonizers as well as the formerly colonized. In so doing, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors such as the French–Algerian Leïla Sebbar and the Algerian-born Jewish–French Hélène Cixous, whose works are situated in the larger framework of memorial writing about colonial Algeria, engage with the melancholic behaviors rooted in the traumas of the past, as both individual and collective phenomena.

Departures

The first chapter focuses on the works of four writers, Paule Constant, Pierre Michon, Claude Simon and Tierno Monénembo, whose scenes of departure (from the characters’ native village in the Creuse or Limousin or the cities of Lyon or Paris) and arrival (in Africa or the Americas) are saturated with tropes of yearning and despair that simultaneously conjure up exotic fantasies and deep-seated anxieties of displacement and alienation.

Distant Empathy

The chapters looks at how encounters born from crossing boundaries between territories, cultures, languages and memories can either amplify or mitigate relations of antagonism, domination or rivalry in the works of J. M. G. Le Clézio, Laurent Gaudé, Marie Darrieussecq, focusing in particular on a phenomenon termed “writing (as) Africans.”

A Primal Scene: The Colonial Fortune

The introduction presents an overview of the primary and secondary sources examined in the book. The premise of the study is that contemporary texts written by authors from and outside the Hexagon, though distinct in style, thematic concerns and ideological stances, share a number of discursive and narrative features crystallized around the proprioceptive and remanent dimensions of the colonial. Through dissemination, empathy, indirection, obliqueness and mediation, the colonial situates contemporary narratives in a larger historical framework while also reminding readers of the many layers and force fields that constitute their textual fabric.