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33 - The North African Novel in French

from Part V - Fictions of the Fifth Republic: From de Gaulle to the Internet Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

The ‘North African novel in French’ is a difficult category to circumscribe and define. It immediately announces a tension, juxtaposing writing in the French language on the one hand with a ‘North African’ culture or identity on the other. This tension bears the trace, moreover, of the colonial past, of regimes established in the Maghrebian region which not only expropriated the land from local peoples and seized local resources but also attempted to impose the use of French language, culture, and ideology. Those novelists who wrote or continue to write in French necessarily record the heritage of France’s aggressive empire-building, even while, as ‘North Africans’, they also associate themselves with local, Arab or Berber cultures. The ‘North African novel in French’ is as a result a divided, alienated creature, disconsolately vilifying the culture in which it nonetheless on some level must participate. This chapter explores three key issues raised by these novels, those of ‘insurrection and revolt’, ‘history and fiction’, and ‘crossing borders’. These issues all reveal the multiple influences negotiated by the North African novel in French as well as signalling its unique contribution to the reinvention of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

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Célestin, Roger, Crowley, Patrick, DalMolin, Eliane and MacDonald, Megan (eds.), The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 20.1 (2016))Google Scholar
Chikhi, Beida, ‘Une visite dans l’atelier itinérant d’Assia Djebar’, Esprit Créateur, 48.4 (2008), 117–28Google Scholar
Esposito, Claudia, Tamalet Talbayev, Edwige, Abderrezak, Hakim (eds.), Le Maghreb méditerranéen: littératures et plurilinguisme (Expressions maghrébines, 11.2 (2012))Google Scholar
Gafaïti, Hafid, ‘Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa’, Diacritics, 27.2 (1997), 5984Google Scholar
Gafaïti, Hafid, La Diasporisation de la littérature postcoloniale: Assia Djebar, Rachid Mimouni (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005)Google Scholar
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Harrison, Nicholas, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003)Google Scholar
Hiddleston, Jane, Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition (London: Bloomsbury, 2017)Google Scholar
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983)Google Scholar
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Mvogo, Faustin (ed.), Le Printemps arabe: prémisses et autopsie littéraires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012)Google Scholar
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Ouyang, Wen-chin, Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity, and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)Google Scholar
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