2 - Decolonizing the Classroom

Summary

Postcolonial education was tasked with more than simply drawing the contours of Algerian history and identity: it also presented to students a vision of the broader world, and Algeria's place within it. Textbook writers, politicians, and educational administrators opted to frame Algeria as a fundamentally Arab nation, and thus as an integral part of the Arab world. To borrow Boualem Sansal's phrasing, “Nos ancetres les Gaulois” [our ancestors the Gauls], the classic symbol of the French civilizing mission, was replaced in the classroom with “Nos ancetres les Arabes” [our ancestors the Arabs] (Poste restante 60). Sansal's provocative formulation highlighted the feeling of discontinuity as education's foundation shifted its primary point of reference from France to the Arab world. Yet it also drew out a potential similarity: according to Sansal, both schools were based on affirming an identity that did not match students’ linguistic and ethnic diversity. The ability to finally teach and learn the Arabic language was a cornerstone of decolonization. But for Amazigh students, or for French speakers, was it any more accurate to call one's ancestors Arabs, or one's language Arabic?

Despite the deceptive simplicity of Algerian president Ben Bella’s pronouncement “We are Arabs! We are Arabs! We are Arabs!,” the questions of where definitions of “Arabness” are produced and whether Algerian students would see themselves reflected in those definitions, were difficult to resolve. Literary texts offered one space in which not only national but also transnational identities could be articulated. Individual protagonists’ self-conceptions gave readers a chance to reimagine what it meant to be Arab and/or Algerian. Yet, at the same time, the selection and teaching of literature was a tool with which the state exerted its influence, in the form of national curricula. The choice of which texts to teach was a way of not only imagining the contours of an Arab identity, but also of projecting who did and did not qualify. In the case of teaching in Algeria, this question was complicated by the colonial past. Were novels in the former colonizer's language, but written by Arabs, still “Arab” texts? Did Algerian novels contribute an equally constitutive part of “Arab literature,” or (as is often alleged) were they a later-developing minor phenomenon?