(University of Toronto Romance Series) Farid Laroussi - Postcolonial Counterpoint - Orientalism, France, and The Maghreb (2016, University of Toronto Press)

POSTCOLONIAL COUNTERPOINT
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Postcolonial Counterpoint
Orientalism, France, and the Maghreb
FARID LAROUSSI
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2016
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4891-3 (cloth)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-

based inks.
University of Toronto Romance Series
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Laroussi, Farid, author

Postcolonial counterpoint : orientalism, France, and the Maghreb/
Farid Laroussi.
(University of Toronto romance series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4891-3 (cloth)
1. French literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. French

literature – North African authors – History and criticism. 3. Orientalism
in literature. 4. Postcolonialism in literature. 5. Gide, André, 1869–1951.
6. Orientalism – France. 7. France – Relations – Africa, North. 8. Africa,
North – Relations – France. 9. Muslims – France. 10. Islam – France.
I. Title. II. Series: University of Toronto romance series
PQ307.O75L37 2016 840.9'3585 C2015-908025-8
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Funded by the Financé par le

Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
For Tahar and Meriem
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 States of Postcolonial Reading 3
2 The Orient in Question 20
3 Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies 54
4 Unfinished (Literary) Business: Orientalism and the Maghreb 71
5 André Gide and Imperial Dystopia 89
6 Fables of Maghreb Nationhood 106
7 A View from Diversité: Writing and Nation 125
8 The Challenge of Identities and the French Republic 150
Epilogue: Elusive Convergence? 170
Notes 173
Bibliography 209
Index 221
Acknowledgments
During the years this book was taking shape, in a very eerie sense,
events provided me with powerful illustrations of my ideas and argu-
ments. In particular, the killings in Paris on January 2015 exemplified
the historical, cultural, and political undercurrents this study exam-
ines. France and the Maghreb had never been brought together this
tightly within the postcolonial condition – or in such a dramatic way,
one must add.
However, instead of focusing on close readings such events, which
would merely generate more interpretations, I have taken the cultural
and materialist approach of postcolonial studies, especially as it bears
on Orientalism and its mutation(s). In contemporary France and the
Maghreb, culture is a site of both interpretation and conflict and is satu-
rated with profound misunderstandings as well as what I refer to as
“lingering states of mind.”
This book has grown out of a wider conversation with colleagues
and students over several years and in diverse venues. For their ad-
vice, conversation, consultation, corrections, suggestions, support,
and scholarly pointers, I am indebted to Emily Apter, Sandra Berman,
Abdelkader Cheref, Tom Conley, Hamid Dabashi, Charles Forsdick,
Hafid Gafaiti, Alexandra Gueydan, Fredric Jameson, Michel Laronde,
Françoise Lionnet, Achille Mbembe, and Christopher L. Miller. Beyond
the academic world, Assia Djebar, whom I met for the last time on
Avenue de la République on a beautiful, sad day in May, will always
command a special place in my reflections on the riddle of what
Algerianness might be and entail in the twenty-first century. Also, this
book was greatly improved by a superb editor, Richard Ratzlaff of
x Acknowledgments
the University of Toronto Press. Institutional support came from the

University of British Columbia, and I am deeply grateful to André
Lamontagne and Gaby Pailer for their faith and expectations that my
work would be completed and published within the time frame I set
myself. Most important, I am grateful to Nisa Saadah for her indispens-
able words and affection.
POSTCOLONIAL COUNTERPOINT
1 States of Postcolonial Reading
N’oublions jamais que nous nous sommes emparés de l’Algérie moins encore
par le droit du plus fort que par le droit du plus civilisé.1
Another book on Orientalism cannot reasonably expect a warm recep-

tion. Since the appearance of Edward Said’s groundbreaking essays
on Orientalism and Jacques Derrida’s pioneering work on deconstruc-
tion nearly forty years ago, criticism of Orientalism and deconstruction
has been frequent, often harsh, and, it bears stressing, ill-informed.2 It
seems that our contemporary cross-cultural and transnational visions
and experiences, operating under the guise of postcoloniality, have
had little effect on how we assess Orientalism – either its epistemology
or its historicity. One cannot but be reminded of the words of Allamah
Qazvini, one the greatest twentieth-century scholars in Islamic studies,
who spent more than twenty years in Europe, most of them in Paris:
“In Europe and among the Orientalists the number of fake and would
be scholars, and indeed charlatans, is infinitely more than the number
of genuine Orientalists and real scholars. […] These Orientalists then
proceed, without the slightest sense of shame or being scandalized, for
there is no one to tell, to claim knowledge and authority.”3 My remarks
and argument are not intended to single out some Western scholars and
native informants, for doing so would only repeat their tendency to
glorify global forces (cultural, ideological, economic) while denying the
forces that condition the postcolonial local, Muslim, and Other. Yet the
latent Orientalist claims are hardly surprising in the context of intellec-
tual and academic traditions that have resisted challenging the founda-
tions of fields of knowledge, especially in the present political climate,
4 Postcolonial Counterpoint
which has been catastrophic for emerging minorities, especially those

from the Muslim world.4 One consequence of this is that the truth value
of established historical and cultural accounts is unstable, as we will
see when we review the challenges faced by francophone literature and
when discussing the question of Islam and citizenship in contempo-
rary France. Ideology is like a party crasher in these domains, and this
is especially true of ideologies that seek to straddle different levels of
civilization. Said’s thesis was that the body of theory and practice that
Orientalism had become helped forge the intellectual tools that enabled
the West to exercise economic and cultural control over the Orient. The
key concept for him was representation, as opposed to a dualist ideologi-
cal pattern (West–East). Orientalism, for him, was a universal problem
with a discursive flexibility that remains to this day unequalled in its
scope and potency: “Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose
material happens to be the Orient.”5 Said never claimed that the Orient
existed as an objectified or essentialized reality. For him – and this is
where there is room to criticize him – Orientalism had drifted away
from its humanistic roots. He remained committed to the concept of the
sovereign subject, in opposition to the premises of post-structuralism
and its questioning of origins and single causes. He was wedded to the
old Enlightenment transcendental signifier, and he tried to expand the
idea to encompass a broader range of humanistic patterns. Critics were
quick to jump on Said’s “literary” take on Orientalism’s epistemology,
and on his superficial understanding of the sociology of what had come
to be known as the Orient. In his famous response to Said’s Orientalism,
Bernard Lewis wrote: “Apart from embodying a hitherto unknown
theory of knowledge, Mr. Said expresses a contempt for modern Arab
scholarly achievement worse than anything that he attributes to his
demonic Orientalists.”6 Here Lewis may have a point, but he and his
followers should recognize that their critical stance and its archaeology
are enshrined in the West and fail to historicize the modes of knowl-
edge of the postcolonial itself. And this is what I intend to do in the
particular case of France and the Maghreb.
Said’s postcolonial hermeneutic can easily be viewed as a hasty, func-
tionalist reading of Foucault. This is perhaps one dimension that the
critical reception of Said has missed and that I want to explore. My argu-
ment is not against Said’s work, nor is it an apology for his Orientalism,
which is considered the fountainhead of today’s postcolonial studies.
Is the situation any different today, as we convince ourselves that the
postcolonial era has secured some historical distance from colonial
States of Postcolonial Reading 5
evils? Truth and knowledge, which usually smooth the passage of his-
tory into culture, seem ill-suited to size up the relationship between the
West and the Islamic world, for reality is always further deconstructed
and then reconstructed into representation. Said was correct in this re-
spect; however, we will also underscore the limitations of his method-
ology when it comes to examining Arab/Muslim cultures. By placing
Orientalism at the centre of the legacy of humanism, was he attempt-
ing to reframe his aesthetic idea of counterpoint, which is both flexible
and inclusive, even while fostering cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural
understanding? The Orientalism that Said deals with is not just some
scientific and ideological model; rather, it is a way of describing and
exploring the world through personal experience, eventually making
that experience universal. Said goes so far as to state: “Orientalism is a
partisan book, not a theoretical machine.”7 Our challenge is to asses to
what extent such a commitment still holds currency in the specific post-
colonial context between France and the Maghreb. Of course, the fact
is that in the twenty-first century the Islamic world is becoming part
of the West, even while issues of immigration and intégration are be-
ing sorted out – in contemporary France, for example. How is it, then,
that the postcolonial condition – and we will define what that encapsu-
lates – can be used, especially in the academic world, in these different
senses in such a variety of disciplines and backgrounds?
This book is about the inner life of a never-dying ideology, at times
called “Orientalism” and at other times “neo-imperialism.” It is also
an attempt to make sense of cultural practices and historical events by
looking beyond their representation and the so-called objective truth
of language to reveal how mere speculation is too often turned into
settled certainty. Said’s main opponent, Bernard Lewis, who focused
exclusively on a philological approach to the Islamic East, advocated a
single essentialized meaning and ignored calls for interpretation and
discussion of the sociohistorical context in which culture and politics
foster resistance. We will see that the fraught relations between France
and the Maghreb are important not just on historical grounds but also
because they will be shaping the new Euro-Mediterranean world of the
twenty-first century. The so-called Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in
January 2011 demonstrates the extent to which freedom based on uni-
versalist agreement is associated with the agency of native cultures and
helps articulate new models.8
Such a challenging state of relations touches on a question of theory
as well as on politics. Even within the emerging nations south of the
Mediterranean Sea, it is often assumed that both universal and relative

truths exist that delineate the privileged position of culture in matters
of religion, literature, and gender. No wonder the cost of “doing” post-
colonial studies has been high. Cultural histories have been ignored
or neglected, and as we will see, the discourse itself remains impris-
oned in the old imperialistic mode of writing intellectual history, by
historicism and post-independence nationalist hagiography. This book
– indeed, this amounts to its expanded argument – rejects the confines
imposed by standard academic monographs as it seeks a discourse bet-
ter suited to criticizing latent Orientalism and postcolonial studies from
a point of departure between knowledge and hegemonic relationships
(as these relate to former colonial states and to today’s institutional
powers). I am writing from within a postcolonial context, one in which
discourse, identity, and memory (for example) tend to be shaped by
external forces. For instance, is it possible that key postcolonial terms
manufactured by the theoretical machine, such as “hybridity,” have
created a location that is the same everywhere even while power re
mains located in the West? I contend that the ideology underpinning
the science of Orientalism has had a catalytic effect, so much so that the
figure of the Oriental is no longer aesthetically and humanistically com-
prehensible, while he/she is forced into a secular and historical condi-
tion. Examples are many, from the 2003 US military campaign in Iraq in
the name of democracy, to the French obsession with Islamic religious
symbols, to the entire postcolonial obsession with “locating” the na-
tive. The warning came loud and clear more than half a century ago, in
The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which Frantz Fanon delineates the
differences between cultural (identity, traditions, etc.) and intellectual
(revolution, emancipation, etc.) history in terms of specific conventions
and particular aims. Present-day attempts to view the postcolonial con-
dition through new eyes have not been very convincing.9 Yet Foucault
explained in The Order of Things (1966) how the agency of power – po-
litical, economic, and cultural – grounds its own discourse. Seen from
this perspective, the performance of postcolonial theory (or theories)
invites re-evaluation in order to avoid what Heidegger called “the poli-
tics of culture,” politics that arise when the essence of culture feeds on
itself and thereby risks losing any axiomatic sense.10 The purpose of this
study is to show to what extent the current postcolonial discourse is
defined less by a line of demonstration than by the act of communica-
tion itself – indeed, by an act of communication about the Western self.
There must be room to navigate between the monochromatic views
of an academic world that is too busy coining “theory,” on the one

hand, and creative literary endeavours by Maghrebi writers that trawl
and recast ideas about “resistance” and “minority voice,” too often for
Western audiences only, on the other.11 I will argue in chapter 6 that this
strategy of cultural co-optation, which is complicit with neocolonial-
ism, replicates an ideology of identity politics that shares many of the
essentialist notions that are implicit in Western views of culture and
history. The native informant syndrome has scarcely been addressed;
it is as if respectability and admittance to the centres of power have
fostered less subversive stances. Or as Anne McClintock put it when
postcolonial studies began to gain prominence in North American ac-
ademe, “colonialism returns at the moment of its disappearance.”12 I
will be examining this challenging axiom of postcolonial studies as a
means to explore the provocative idea that cultural interests and modes
of knowledge have transformed postcolonial studies into a tool that
has repoliticized the epistemology of colonialism. By exploring fran-
cophone literature and how feminist discourse is mimicked in the
Islamic sphere, I will highlight that particular condition as it currently
exists between France and the Maghreb. This book also examines la-
tent Orientalism as it relates to the Maghreb – its permanent features,
its variants, and its relative absence from mainstream postcolonial dis-
course. I will consider these questions, among others: What is the post-
colonial agency within the contours of the French Orientalist episteme?
How does one account for a space that distinguishes between a sov-
ereign postcolonial subject, on the one hand, and France or the West
as the principal interlocutor of that subject, on the other? The discus-
sion will also highlight the Western and French “othering” of Islam.
What interests me is the tension between the pitfalls of historicism13
and the production of knowledge about the postcolonial condition; this
is part of my effort to bring to the surface the dynamics of othering
both Maghrebi and French subjects. If the argument encourages oth-
ers to grasp the higher cultural stakes in play between France and the
Maghreb and to shake off the self-referential universalism at the core
of postcolonial discourse, it will have served one of its main purposes.
My goal is not to settle accounts with postcolonial studies, for doing
so would ultimately reinforce historical determinism; rather, I want to
examine the essentializing process that has occurred in the realm of
theory, a process that risks turning theory into yet another disposable
fiction. The very contemporaneity of Orientalism interests me; so does
a sustained argument for repudiating postcolonial metanarratives.
There seem to be at least three ways of conceiving the term “Ori

entalism.” First, it refers to an academic discipline dating back to
fifteenth-century Europe, when brilliant scholarly work was carried
out that marked the beginning of the fields of philology and religious
studies. Second, Orientalism can be viewed as a discourse that seeks to
define and understand what the Orient and the Occident truly are in
both political and narrative terms. A third approach to Orientalism, and
the most polemical one, identifies the Orient as an object of study in
order to represent and control it. These three conceptions are linked in-
sofar as they draw distinctions between “us” and “them” and blur the
boundary between scientific speculation and systemic discourse. And
while they compete on discursive grounds, these conceptions reveal a
Western centrism that would have been innocuous or short-lived were
it not for its global implications. But I intend to keep my reading clear
of the tempting – and misguided – pan-Arabic, pan-Islamic knee-jerk
reaction against a West – a reaction that becomes a construct in itself
and merely ends up masking the limitations of contemporary Arab/
Muslim ideology. Let us be clear: a critique of Orientalism must engage
with the discipline and the subject of its scholarship, despite rather than
because of any ideological agenda.
In my argument, I pose these questions: What is this conceptual in-
tertextuality that governs the postcolonial relationship between France
and the Maghreb? And what are the sources of the loose and some-
times defiant modes of apprehension of the postcolonial condition
on the part of the French? French social scientists such as Eric Fassin,
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Dounia Bouazar, Françoise Gaillard, and
Jean Baubérot have in recent years confronted key issues pertaining
to French ideas about postcolonial identity, religion, public education,
and citizenship. Yet postcolonial theories and critical approaches have
not been reformulated (after having been formulated in North America
by French theory!) in French academia, especially in the field of literary
studies. Is this simply a matter of academic posturing that preserves the
boundaries of scholarly knowledge and politics? (Academe is famous-
ly insular in both style and content.) Or as Achille Mbembe has put it,
is France perhaps still in the grip of its “imperial winter”?14 Our focus
will be on the third way of understanding Orientalism and the mecha-
nisms of power/culture perpetuation. Postcolonial studies will feature
significantly in this work, albeit not as a catalogue of the transnation-
al, the diasporic, the exilic, the globalized, the decentred, the hybrid,
the politics of difference, and other current theoretical configurations.
The latent Orientalist argument is certainly wedded to an evaluation
of postcolonial studies, although it will neither secure nor consolidate

its supposed academic authority. This book attests to the cultural and
ideological perspective of latent Orientalism from an viewpoint predi-
cated on misconceptions of the knowing subject.15 As I examine the
relationship between Orientalism and postcolonialism, I will reflect on
what constitutes the (re)production of knowledge about the postco-
lonial Maghreb and about France. At the same time, no one seriously
engaged in this discipline dismisses Orientalism as pseudoscientific
or politically driven; it is precisely its cohesiveness and rationalism
with respect to other cultures such as Islam that add to Orientalism’s
amplitude. Let us be clear, this work has no intention of falling into
the “Orientalism-bashing” that scholars like Robert Irwin have tried
to pin on Said; however, my argument does demonstrate that within
the Franco-Maghrebi sphere, one cannot avoid a particular discursive
mode of thinking that can be called “Orientalism.” And Orientalism is
what exemplifies the postcolonial paradigm both in the Maghreb and
in France. To dismiss the ideological dimension of postcolonial stud-
ies is to attempt to sanitize the academic discourse of the humanities
while providing an alibi for complicity with neocolonialism.16 It is evi-
dent that the recent Arab revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen,
Bahrain, and Syria have overthrown long-standing failed forms of na-
tionalism – forms based either on the legacy of the Enlightenment and
its fanciful notions of nationhood, or on a socialist model of govern-
ment with no genuine working class in which to ground its Marxist
principles.17 In the twenty-first century the much-vaunted Western
institutional models seem to have generated a global dilemma, one
that rears up when this question is posed: Are the “Arabs” ready for
democracy?18 Think for a moment what the term “Arab democracy”
signifies when applied to countries with diverse histories, contrasting
demographic profiles, distinctive social structures (with regard to pub-
lic education, models of government, the political visibility of women,
the role of the media in society, etc.), and varying degrees of economic
development (in terms of unemployment rates, the ambiguous bene-
fits of oil revenues, and the strength or weakness of tourism, and of ag-
riculture), and when we summarily lump those countries together and
judge them according to some democracy “index” (see, for example,
the annual Arab Human Development Reports of the UN Development
Program), the lofty standards of which strangely do not apply to other
nations, such as Russia, which two decades after the fall of the Berlin
Wall finds itself again in the grip of an authoritarian and corrupt re-
gime bordering on the grotesque.19
Colonial occupation differed in its forms across continents and over

the centuries, but in broad terms, it started for the same hegemonic rea-
sons, which revolved around war or trade, and ended up drowning in
an idealism tenuously associated with democracy. In the case of France,
we now understand that a republic that blends democratic and egali-
tarian virtues with economic pragmatism and the energetic pursuit of
geopolitical interests is capable of countenancing the morally dubious
enterprise of colonialism, along with all the suffering and exploitation
that are its foreseeable consequences within the frame of global capital-
ism. The former colonial overlords, after granting independence to the
colonies, felt the need to develop an economic and cultural apparatus
that was capable of orchestrating globalization, a phenomenon em-
blematic of the dissolution of ideologies and of nation-states. In post-
colonial discourse, with its connecting threads of “hybridity,” “third
space,” and “cultural fetishism,” we hear echoes of past attempts to
rewrite the Other’s world. Taking Said’s definition of Orientalism and
his theoretical premises as my starting point, this book will analyse
how the postcolonial theory “industry” (for lack of a better word) has
been ridden to its logical conclusion by the Western academy and its
fantasy of universalism and sovereign subject, as well as by the cohorts
of native informants and intellectual fellow-travellers who have proven
themselves incapable of disavowing the centre of globality. Lastly, one
critical question stands out in the representation exercise that postcolo-
nial discourse constitutes: Is theory ever independent of the historical
forces that produce it?
An examination of Orientalism and postcolonial studies allows me
to approach my subject from a number of different entry points, in-
cluding those of history, religion, and literature. The goal is not histori-
cal reconstruction; rather, my argument will question the foundational
form of knowledge that has arisen in tandem with with the postco-
lonial condition. In the case of the francophone writers, we will see,
for example, how the concept of nationalism has been embraced by
the first generation and rejected by contemporary authors, as if the
redrawn picture of nationhood – especially Algeria’s – could bypass
the epistemic texture and leave the postcolonial subject unaffected. In
other words, the concept of postcolonial does not always apply (e.g.,
within the dichotomy of nativism and Enlightenment) simply because
of a given colonial legacy or the logic behind the homogenization
of the world. Perhaps this reflects the fundamental dialectical ques-
tion that revolves around identity and power. It is evident that the
current postcolonial condition does not provide a coherent amalgam

of practices that depend on class and location. We will examine the
problematic instance of upper-class Maghrebi female intellectuals in
France, who dabble in Western as opposed to Islamic feminism, who
declare themselves “emancipated,” and who brand as socially inferior
and culturally illiterate their fellow female natives, be they at home
or in the underprivileged French suburbs. A striking consequence of
this destructive ideological position is that it turns the “native” into an
outsider in his/her own home, demonstrating again how knowledge
is historically produced.
Whose views am I indicting, then? Perhaps those of people who posit
that postcolonial studies has become a new discourse with a limited
note of dissonance in polite academic society.20 In France the postcolo-
nial critique has essentially operated within chronological markers set
around the Algerian War of Independence, branching out to include its
sociocultural ramifications such as the practice of torture, the fate of the
pieds-noirs, the founding of the Fifth Republic, new waves of immigra-
tion, and the heightened profile of Islam. Expressions such as “colonial
impasse,” “integration sequel,” “war of memories,” and “la repentance
nationale” have taken over the debate. Yet despite the seminal works of
French intellectuals such as Balibar, Césaire, Fanon, Deleuze, Glissant,
and Memmi, the postcolonial critique remains barely alluded to in
the field of inquiry. One worn-out justification for this lack of concern
among French academics (George Balandier and Jean-François Bayard,
for example) – a justification that suggests insecurity – is that postcolo-
nial studies is merely an Anglo-Saxon import, that it is cultural studies
under another paradigm (i.e., multiculturalism). This is also how I will
situate my argument within the critical landscape: that the postcolo-
nial remains overlooked perhaps because the colonial repressed has
returned to nest on its native ground. In overcoming this French aver-
sion to postcolonial studies, the challenge is to understand how France
imagines itself. The final chapter of this book will examine this particu-
lar “historical unconscious,” to use Bourdieu’s terminology. I find this
evaluative distinction against French academia problematic: there have
been plenty of studies, books, and colloquia dealing with immigra-
tion or questioning France’s colonial metanarrative. That is why it will
prove worthwhile to examine the overlapping syncretisms that frame
today’s sense of Frenchness, as well as how latent Orientalism plays
into a false idea of Eurocentrism.21 I am interested in this buried episte-
mology that permeates intellectual and social representations.
Exceptions abound among scholars outside France, whose works have

contributed to the fracturing of historiographical constructs and epis-
temological models. It comes as no surprise that the leading academ-
ic figures of postcolonial critique – Appiah, Bhabha, Dabashi, Dirlik,
Khatibi, Said, and Spivak, to name the most visible – hail from the so-
called emerging nations. Their discourse, whatever approaches and
theories they employ, continues to feed intellectual conversation on
the world scene, and this has conferred a corresponding legitimacy on
the native Other. It suddenly appears that in a Foucauldian sense, the
Western humanities hold a meaning beyond their power centres and
beyond the sites of their internal operations. This potent combination of
postcolonial origins and the linear projection of Western humanities in-
forms the particular and fascinating intellectual model of postcolonial
studies. And postcolonial studies has certainly morphed into different
species, according to the languages, locations, cultural areas, historical
praxes, and narrative performances of the natives, and sometimes also
according to the ideological bent of scholars in the field. We understand
that postcolonial studies is predicated on a manifold hermeneutics. And
while it may seem unfair to paint postcolonial studies with the broad
brush of anti-Western posturing, the metaphorical condition remains
the one discourse reconstructing Oriental subjects, be they intellectual
exiles (e.g., most writers) or a commodified culture (as represented by
Muslim women, for example), with that same sense of dissonance typi-
cal of the colonial era. And the silence that hangs over this critical state
becomes even more uncomfortable when Islam is historicized in terms
of its resistance to traumatic events of the colonial and postcolonial peri-
ods. Of course, there is more to faith, both as culture and as praxis, than
any critical discourse can capture. That said, Islam always seems to go
somehow unheard in the West. To illustrate: after the 9/11 attacks, a no-
tion of the “moderate Muslim” arose in Western discourse that tended
to elide and ignore the conditions in which political extremism arose
in Muslim lands. Not surprisingly, Islam has become, on etymological
grounds, an object of theory – that is, of observation. The signs, struc-
tures, and claims about the native culture(s) – all of which resembled
the old colonial project of splitting the subject between discourse and
history, between materialization and symbolization – helped smooth
out the Western fantasy of the Orient and turn it into an experienced
reality. My point is that when faced with historical movements, dis-
courses of power – Orientalism one among many – tend to transmute
rather than break down. Orientalism in Voltaire’s plays cannot compare
with Orientalism in Hollywood movies, yet it continues to operate as

a mode of selling an ideology of representation. By the same token, the
French convinced themselves for more than a century that Algeria was
part of France, just as much as Lorraine or Gascony; the shift of loca-
tions was held not to affect the mode of knowledge production, called
the French Republic. In colonial times, Islam was rarely viewed with
any sense of urgency and was apprehended through fractured empiri-
cal sources. Yet nowadays, with the proliferation of inevitable if some-
what artificial contact zones between French citizens of different ethnic
backgrounds, Islam appears to be displacing new anxieties at a time
when Europeans of all backgrounds supposedly share identical values.
But of course the new European nationalists would be hard-pressed
to explain away their own record of centuries of land grabs, religious
conflicts, and shredded treaties, not to mention two world wars. Today,
the presence of the Islamic headscarf in the French public space is feed-
ing an exclusivist ideological discourse based more on the stereotype
of Islam’s resistance to modernity than on the sacrosanct principle of
French laïcité, as we will see in the last chapter.
France, as a result of its historical denial and shrinking sense of citi-
zenship, is making it more and more difficult to assess its legacy of
human rights and representative governance. A lack of coherent self-
hood looms between French institutions and the postcolonial subject,
who mourns the growing gap between identity and citizenship. The
difficulty in choosing between forms of being French can prove over-
whelming, and this difficulty relates not to the choice itself, but rather
to what one must find out. For example, French political discourse
has demonstrated since colonial times how this particular culture has
thought of itself in relation to the the Islamic Other. The ideological
root of this matter, from the infidèle to the immigré, poses one question
– “How many?” – and creates its own reality by postulating how cul-
tures can be “mutually incompatible.” Basically, I want to demonstrate
that the French postcolonial condition is inherently incapable of sta-
bilizing itself, not just because of current conflicts, but also because it
shapes its own forms of resistance. I will elaborate on this in chapter 7.
It is in light of the conception of a still dominant Orientalist logic that
French assimilation, or elements of postcolonial resistance, can be iden-
tified, measured, and questioned. The chapters of this book are linked
by a series of motifs attributed to the Islamic Other as cultural and po-
litical references between France and the Maghreb have been gradually
reinforced. Most significantly, it is the place of the Islamic Orient that, in
my argument, sustains a critique of French and Western postmodernity.

A hotly debated question in academia is how the postcolonial condition
has inherited, in subtle ways, many Orientalist tropes. The recent re-
volts in the Arab world have demonstrated that Islam has taken a new
road, one that is different from the radical concepts proposed by Sayid
Qutb in the 1960s, for example. Islam is now more diffused, less cen-
tralized, and less ideological; it is also more attuned to political affairs,
especially to the issue of representative governance, which newly elect-
ed governments are slowly learning.22 This historic moment in the de-
velopment of a post-ideological Islam has somehow escaped the West,
which seems stuck in the old Orientalist representations of authoritari-
anism, fanaticism, corruption, and so on. In July 2014, the founding by
a transnational jihadist movement of an Islamic State straddling Syria
and Iraq elicited guarded reactions in the Arab world, when this entity
was not viewed as out-and-out heresy. Discourses that fail to transcend
a single culture must be questioned carefully. To what extent do the ide-
ologies of the Atlantic world continue to shape the encounter between
the West and the Islamic world? This book revisits critical engagement
with the legacy of Orientalism, notably through the French colonial ex-
perience in the Maghreb. I will also be asking what the postcolonial
condition provokes in both national and academic contexts. How does
the epistemological valence travel and perhaps end up out of place?
As we attempt to reconceptualize notions such as Orientalism and
postcolonial studies, which themselves are theoretically unstable, we
must define anew the discourse itself. We need to examine the dis-
placement and relocation of colonial patterns and how their intellec-
tual moorings have become in some ways weaker but in other ways
stronger. For example, the narratives of French-speaking writers of
the Maghreb enshrine themselves in a discursive experience of loss lo-
cated in language performance and a remapping of the nation, mostly
from the perspective of the exile. The unstable relationship between
France and the Maghreb is a consequence of how each has imagined
the other. While Edward Said made sense of Orientalism from with-
in the confines of Western discourse, especially Foucault’s critique of
humanism, I would like to think that Orientalism, just like the colour
purple, does not exist in real life and is processed or elaborated in our
brains only. The notion is that Orientalism has cleared a space between
the humanities and politics, a space that allows us to explore new dis-
courses, yet with a continual return to the topos of representation of the
Other. This Orientalist ideology is not simply an exhibition of power
– to represent the Other; it has been an attempt at full disclosure of the

Western self, where faith, politics, economics, and culture are forced to
coexist and to pre-empt a world of alterity. For example, both spheres,
Judeo-Christian and Islamic, become comprehensible in a distinctive
and singular yet elusive unification. A theoretical unum emerges with
a single, simple tenet: monotheism. So long as they remain apart, both
spheres are doomed to cultural entropy. It seems that people know that
only collective intelligence needs to be updated.23 Even leaving aside
the consistency of difference within perception, it is clear that disputes
over the postcolonial condition, be they over citizenship, national iden-
tity, or the place of Islam in the West, have in recent years become more
common, and more deep-seated, rather than less so. Social unrest in
the suburbs of French cities over the past twenty years, the civil war in
Algeria in the 1990s, and the recent and ongoing Arab uprisings have
prompted politicians and academics to examine arguments for an ethos
of pluralization based on common bonds of citizenship, nationhood,
and promises of social equality. Too often, the colonial legacy has been
left out of the equation, as if the history of the colonial period seemed
already to have been swept up into a larger narrative. The uncertain
status of the colonial legacy has had unfortunate consequences, such
as forgetting Maghrebi immigration and its contribution to France’s
economic boom from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. My work, echo-
ing Said’s view of the lasting impact of Orientalism on the West’s po-
litical culture, strives to locate the reasons for the enduring problem of
latent Orientalism. An unflinching scrutiny of discourses concerning
the Arab/Muslim sphere easily convinces the observer that the emer-
gence of postcolonial theories has too often gone hand in hand with
revisionist intellectual history. It is true that postcolonial studies has
reached global significance as it has branched out to create multiple
critical positions and debates. Yet the tradition of Manichean binaries
that conceives of cultures in terms of their differences rather than in
terms of their differences and similarities is never far from the surface.
For example, the inchoate state of francophone studies in French aca-
demia draws attention to the weaknesses of a critique of representation
that has France at its centre as well as to the weaknesses in the disciplin-
ary project itself, in which facts are not allowed to speak for themselves
but require a politically acceptable narrative, as we will see in the case
of literature in French by Maghrebi writers. By focusing on France and
the Maghreb, I will be seeking those parts of the postcolonial discourse
that are determined by political and cultural circumstances alone, and
where communication actually occurs and develops. My personal re-

flections and the diverse resources presented in my work support my
endeavour to shed light on the cultures of the Maghreb and France –
which are linked by their common colonial experience – and how they
might grow in the new century. I also want to showcase the ideologi-
cal nuances of the newfound power of postcolonial studies and their
reverberations. My aim is to illuminate important aspects of this piv-
otal region, connected by the Mediterranean, and to underscore what
could be either the agony of identity conflict, both in the Maghreb and
in France,24 or a successful cultural movement in which transnational
authority develops the capacity to hold itself accountable.
Communication – as opposed to mere interaction – between commu-
nities with different histories and world views is more than a challenge
of everyday life. It is also a world-historical necessity, for otherwise we
will never answer questions such as these: How do we grapple with the
complex relationship between culture and domestic imperialism? To
what extent is the ban on Islamic headscarves in French public schools
part of a new nationalism that claims to uphold “freedom and digni-
ty” but fails to promote inclusive citizenship? Does France really need
a universalist vocabulary in order to perceive its unique relationship
with the nations and cultures of the Maghreb?
One possible explanation for the limited responsibility the French
have felt for their colonial history has to do with the ambivalence
and permanent deferral of tension arising from the recognition of ra-
cial oppression in a culture steeped in the tenets of humanism and the
Enlightenment. There is a logic in this recognition that disrupts the
Occidental ontology. This feature has not yet been related to the signi-
fying, cultural Other that the immigrant, just like the colonized native,
has become. With the arrival of the postcolonial condition in France, a
split of another order now looms, one in which “identity” and “secu-
larism” have drawn a metaphorical border within the Republic. These
two worn-out concepts in current French political and media discourse,
with their putatively universal application, serve as an ideal gateway
into the cultural domain of French exceptionalism and the intellectual
domain of hexagonal entropy.
In this respect, the “counterpoint” of my title takes on a certain
meaning, understood both as investigative in nature and as exposing
cultural misreadings. I believe that Orientalism is very much an active,
natural, and thereby nameless construct, but I realize, too, that it also
sets up a progressive dialectic of repetition with emerging identities.
It is not just that millions of postcolonial citizens live in contempo-

rary France, but that the country is slowly divorcing itself from its old
national, republican self, hence the unrest and manifold challenges it
faces. Of course, the fact that France is struggling with its postcolonial
(as well as European) identity is not of primary significance. The valid-
ity of the French position flows out of its politics. For example, turning
the far-right Front National into a foil for discourse on national affairs
only demonstrates that when a theory is wrong, putting it at the centre
of discussion won’t make it come out right. Extremism, even from the
safe, reassuring distance of a voting booth, remains false, fraudulent,
and sometimes frightening. Contrary to the claims of the old colonial
ideology, the ideology of current right-wing extremism avoids any ex-
ploration of Western hegemony.25 This type of ideological parochial-
ism accounts for the emergence of a national history that is incapable
of looking forward, either within a European frame or within its his-
torical postcolonial narrative. This political reality underscores the im-
portance of Orientalism today. And it is not limited to the history of
aesthetics, because in order to maintain discursive superiority, latent
Orientalism needs to travel outside traditional ideological domains,
such as the humanities.
A core aim of my argument is to forge a relational method for charting
the intellectual movement known as Orientalism and what was actual-
ly anticipated from the time of the original encounter with Oriental cul-
ture up to contemporary theoretical constructs developed in the fields
of postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, transnational studies, dias-
pora studies, trauma studies, and so on. Thus my analysis will avoid
using a single logos that might confuse critical positions rather than be
transformed by them. I have also taken care to avoid developing any se-
quencing or variegated account, from humanism to postcolonial stud-
ies, for doing so would amount to creating an exact copy of Western
ideologies and their narrativized historicism. Instead, I trace the af-
fective, imaginative tropes that underwrite latent Orientalism, hoping
to emphasize the evolution of the concepts of citizenship and nation-
hood, in a sort of double-strategy of storytelling from each side of the
Mediterranean. What modes of representation were generated before
they became reified? Why does a rights-conferring nation-state such as
France codify its citizenship in words that both recognize and defy the
truth of Otherness? Beyond a study of latent Orientalism proper, I ex-
amine how exclusion from critical discourse operates by, for example,
dismantling the discursive constitution of the postcolonial subject.
As it turns out, the narrative discourse on citizenship is sustained by a

racialized view of the subject. So, how does our much vaunted transna-
tional space collapse citizenship into essentializing categories?
This study has eight chapters. It starts with a focus on the Orient and
the Oriental. My intention here is to demonstrate the nature of radical
mimesis, a process by which those possessing colonial power end up
believing the representations of the colonial subject they created in the
first place in order to validate and make sense of the colonial undertak-
ing. From this fallacy onwards, meaning is bare and worthless, with
almost no connection to any coherent set of interpretations related to
scholarly independence and political objectivity.26 This partly explains
why colonialism was more than an act of appropriation; it also pro-
duced markedly twisted discourses, from the most racist to the most
paternalistic. I follow up with a case study: the relationship between
André Gide and Algeria. Beyond Gide’s well-known homoerotic fetish-
ism, the important point is that I present his works as a transhistorical,
universal language, one that is loaded with all the trappings of cultural
castration within French bourgeois constructs. In this regard, Algeria
is elevated to the status of a mirror reflecting French self-desire back
to itself. Whatever Gide’s own premises, he never calls into question
French cultural universalism. The Arab body helps enact the condition
of domination that is inscribed in the traveller’s subjectivity and on-
tological quest. Chapter 6 continues with a discussion of nationhood
from the perspective of the colonized Maghrebi. I am interested in how
political thinking developed by establishing its own brand of national-
ism against the backdrop of colonial nationalism. I argue that the colo-
nized peoples of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia had to fight not just to
claim their independence; the nexus of the struggles was about national
myths more than about recapturing one’s own history. It is no wonder
that to this day, democracy has been slow to flourish throughout the
Maghreb. The later chapters concern themselves with the consequences
and functions of latent Orientalism in contemporary France. This brand
of Orientalism does not vary a great deal from the foregrounding move-
ment of the nineteenth century. I begin with a study of Beur literature,
that is, literature written by French authors of Maghrebi descent. My
goal is to demonstrate how these texts, saturated with historical and
sociological provenance, have failed to occupy the conceptual space of
French postcolonial identity. Then I move on to explore Orientalism
and the subtle strategy of violence among fellow-citizens.27 One case
in point is the debate about a brand of feminism that targets French
Muslim women. I examine the tensions between universal principles

and the solidarity within racial and religious groups. Because I want
to reclaim the importance of identity as a politically necessary source
of knowledge, I turn to the place of Islam in present-day France. As it
happens, there is more than the headscarf at issue in the debate about
Muslim women in France today. Classifying French citizens on the ba-
sis of their foreignness – on the basis of their faith, for example – not
only creates an ambivalent genealogy but also, in the case of women,
creates a deterministic construct that postcolonial studies find it chal-
lenging to move beyond. And beyond the Foucauldian critique of the
ubiquitous violence of power lies a complex dynamic of resistance that
neither Said nor the French postmodern thinkers have truly addressed.
If we acknowledge the weakness of mainstream epistemologies (the
postmodern mantra!), where is the locus of feminism to be found
within the French brand of universalism? Once again, the postcolonial
critique of belonging, identity, and location becomes instrumental in
denouncing the normative violence exerted in the name of rationality
and democracy. Just as it is important to research this type of colonial
continuum imposed on Muslim women, my analysis will challenge
the discourse on victimization and other forms of romanticization of
the immigrant’s experience.
What is unique about Orientalism is that it creates hierarchies even
while sacrificing meaning; it thrives on representations even while es-
chewing referentiality and turns historical violence into experience that
overrides authentic cultural encounters.
2 The Orient in Question
More than ten years after Edward Said’s death, and without any im-
plicit celebration of a truly dissenting intellectual, his work continues
to be the basis of an extended reflection across the humanities he was
so fond of, against an ideology that manufactured Otherness. But the
truth is that Said did not single-handedly create postcolonial studies.
The Négritude movement in the 1930s in Paris, and the founding of sub-
altern studies in India in the 1960s, are two reminders that postcolo-
nial studies is a complex and multifaceted apparatus that at the very
least cannot be separated from the colonial experience itself. It is inac-
curate also to claim, for example, that Said blindly borrowed Foucault’s
paradigm of power. For Said, power was deeply personal, something
bearing on intention and whose consequences were either alienating or
liberating.1 Whereas for Foucault, power grew in a rather unremark-
able – yet all the more threatening – manner, largely through institu-
tions and their histories. In that sense, Said adhered to a humanistic,
Cartesian model, whereas a thinker like Fanon clearly established pow-
er as a set of relations within the colonial ideological machine when
he theorized racism (its various codifications) as the pillar of imperial
ideology. Lastly, if Said postulated exile as the condition of dissent, it
was Adorno who foregrounded such expectations against the tragedy
of uprootedness and the subsequent need to create new worlds, new
rules. Benhabib, a more contemporary critical theorist, has put forward
the view that “we are facing today a disaggregation of citizenship.”2
It may be that ontological considerations and cultural imagination
are both on the receiving end of the logic of globalization and have
grown obsolete. At the same time, postcolonial agency and subjectiv-
ity are contesting the boundaries of the polis through a new normative
The Orient in Question 21
grid that Said did not have to confront and elucidate. Yet if one is to
embark on a comprehensive, critical argument concerning Orientalism
and postcolonial studies today, one must hold on to Said’s tenacious
uncovering of world-historical forms of culture that hail from the old
combination of science, arts, and empire. It must be clear that my use of
Said’s work harks back to the critical tools he has provided us to negoti-
ate the subtle disenfranchisement of both native informants and post-
colonial subjects. Drawing on Said’s work, my argument will cast into
relief the place where the relationship between France and the Maghreb
clashes with circumstantial historical and cultural conditions, as well
as the consequences today for intellectuals and postcolonial citizens.
This chapter examines Said’s theoretical framework; later chapters will
explore the influence that Orientalism has exerted in academe, as well as
a postcolonial sense of culture.
Why is Edward Said a literary critic who cannot be ignored in a
world where globalization demands that theories and ideas be dis-
posable? How did he put the longevity of humanism to the test while
steering clear of the Eurocentric trap? And how is this relevant to a
critique of the contemporary postcolonial condition? As Emily Apter
suggests: “Saidian humanism, defined with the Orientalist critique at
its crux, pointed to urgent issues in the field of language politics.”3 This
is one example of why Said continues to matter, and the core of my
argument is that his critical approach can be employed to develop new
perspectives on the larger question of representation and its origins and
politics, as in the case of the Maghreb. But again, this is neither a blank
cheque for Said nor a vindication of Saidian discourse. Because we
must look rather carefully at such a thetic figure in postcolonial stud-
ies, this chapter will elaborate on the archaeology of Orientalism and
its advent between the Christian and Muslim spheres; the next chapter
will then focus on Said’s groundbreaking book itself. It is important to
bear in mind that the two chapters inform and consolidate each other.
The key criticisms directed at Said’s Orientalism have been that in it,
he fails to historicize colonial representations; at the same time, its his-
torical scope is too wide, so that he often falls into sweeping generaliza-
tions, thereby trivializing his subject matter. Among many thoughtful
and relevant readers of Said, Daniel M. Varisco underscores the extent
to which Said remained unmoved by scholarly views that impugned
his anti-Orientalist dogma and that failed to engage with the rapidly
changing perspectives in postwar Islamic studies, which Varisco tells
us amounted to “a hermeneutic shift from what Islam ‘is’ to what Islam
‘means.’”3 But whether or not the limits of a longue durée genealogy of

Orientalism tend to set aside the finer points of a robust, manifold dis-
course across several academic disciplines, it is clear that Orientalism’s
temporal trajectory travels from the Crusades to the postcolonial era.
Naturally, the timeline pauses with individual nations, as the density
of detail increases. Another criticism of Said is that to contextualize
Orientalism in terms of the end of European colonialism, as he did, may
appear to entail no more than a modern scholarly frame of reference,
but it could also amount to an attempt at a circular return to the golden
age of Western cultural hegemony, with its ethnocentric bias. Most of
the Islam bashing that fed into Orientalism over the centuries is barely
recognizable as scientific discourse today, yet this abundant body of
scholarly work can still tell us much about past perceptions of Islamic
culture and the epistemological shackles that continue to impede the
formulation of objective, nuanced approaches to the Islamic world. The
simplistic and hackneyed generalizations about the Middle East found
in the Western media, for example, are probably the clearest example
of the legacy of the Orientalist body of beliefs. What is most striking
about the latent Orientalism in discussions of the Arab/Muslim world
is the guise of neutrality assumed by Western commentators, their self-
righteous claims to be conducting objective intellectual inquiry. At the
height of the “Arab Spring,” for example, the most prestigious news-
paper in the United States, the New York Times, provided this striking
illustration of its position: “Our instinct is to search for the clarity we
saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians,
and Americans, need is something murkier – not a victory, but an ac-
commodation.”4 Democracy in Egypt can wait – is this what we are to
surmise? – unless the Americans require it to happen sooner. But of
course the military coup of July 2013 showed the world that democ-
racy was not coming to Egypt any time soon and that the United States
could live with yet another authoritarian Arab regime. The positions
taken in international relations and diplomacy are by no means mere
inconsequential wordplay: there is a legacy of “othering” the archetyp-
al Oriental, who, as usual, cannot claim any agency in the narrative.
How did we come to this?
The word “Orient” carries so many meanings in both classical and
contemporary Western culture that disciplines as divergent as anthro-
pology and political science have created their own definitions. The
projections, interpretations, and tendencies resulting from this panoply
of definitions have often turned both the concept and the reality of the
Orient into a perception that largely fails to question Western sources,

as we will see in the case of the Maghreb.
In representations of the Orient, truth and falsehood matter less than
the responses they elicit, with the result that perceptions create their
own reality. Most of these representations, which Said tells us can be
traced back to Euripides or Dante, have been by-products of the process
of European self-affirmation.5 The consolidation of Europe as a single
cultural and geohistorical entity stemmed from the expansion of trade
in the transatlantic triangle that reached its apogee in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries with the full flower of colonialism. The es-
sentialist view of the Orient also grew from ontological distinctions. As
early as the twelfth century, the various European perceptions of the
Orient coalesced into labels that contributed to polarizing the Christian
and Islamic worlds, although other factors came into play as well, such
as the rise in the fifteenth century of the Ottoman Empire, which came
to control most of the trade routes in the Mediterranean. Clearly, these
narratives about the Orient were teleological in structure: the politics
behind Europe–Orient interactions were goal-driven. And they led to
something probably unique in Western culture – a hybrid discourse
that blended inclusion in the Judeo-Christian world with exclusion
from the utopian world of the Islamic Other. Now the Orient, having
been contacted through trade, needed not to be not just represented, but
organized in the imagination.6 Non-European worlds came to be expe-
rienced through fantastic medieval stories and elaborately illustrated
maps that created categories of thought that served to unify a European
sphere in search of its own historical destiny. Once the belief set in that
everything could be historicized, the idea of universal applicability
was not far off. Cultural legitimacy was planted with the help of what
Paul Gilroy referred to, with respect to slavery, as “the tragic popular-
ity of ideas about the integrity and purity of cultures.”7 Illustrations on
manuscripts and maps featured allegories that fed into the evolving
constructs that comprised the Orient in the European imagination. In
France, the Orientalist construct was shaped by three forces: human-
ism and academic achievements beginning in the Renaissance,8 eth-
nographic studies and research in other social sciences, and colonial
rhetoric derived from a racial or religious typology. It seems that at this
junction of knowledge and power, Foucault misread the historical evi-
dence about control (or confinement, as he liked to put it) by complete-
ly excluding struggles and resistance from his totalizing theory.9 It is
easy to see how one can fall into such a trap, when history comes to be
formulated as text rather than textualized, as began to happen in Europe

during its modern era, that is, with little room for counter-hegemony,
particularly in the colonial context. Moreover, the nascent ideologies of
control (extending the idea of European sovereign power) articulated
promises of a profitable future. Early on, Orientalism grew out of these
characteristics of dominating systems – systems that turned out to be
circular, antagonistic, and self-fulfilling. As Albert Hourani noted in his
now classic Islam in European Thought: “Separated by conflict but held
together by ties of different kinds, Christians and Muslims presented a
religious and intellectual challenge to each other.”10 The emphasis on
relationship and conflict suggests that Orientalism, as science and as
discourse, arose out of “doing” culture from a point of view grounded
not in the needs and expectations of the Other but rather in the needs
of the dominant powers.
The legend of Prester John, which proliferated in multiple versions
throughout Europe from the sixth century to the fifteenth, epitomizes
the deep-rooted stereotype of the Orient that emerged from a European
world view that was presumed to be objective. Depending on the ver-
sion of the narrative consulted, Prester John was either a king or a priest
who ruled over a magnificent Christian kingdom somewhere in either
Ethiopia or the Far East. In this equation of religion and power, Prester
John stood out as a redeeming figure, one whose inspiring example
had political implications. Popes and kings dreamed of meeting him.11
His kingdom supposedly contained the Garden of Paradise and other
wonders from the lives of saints, tales of which stimulated religious
inspiration in Europe and a desire to explore this fabled land. Both the
Pope and the King of Portugal launched expeditions to meet and help
this Christian king living in his land of gold and honey. Some of the
apocryphal materials that fed into the myth suggested that Prester John
was surrounded by barbarians and infidels. Christian expeditions
and voyages to Abyssinia and other exotic lands found no trace of the
kingdom.12 The legend of Prester John is an early clue as to how his-
tory and literature, both oral and written, would continue to inform
each other in Western culture and stimulate interest in the sources of
Christianity. Most importantly, this legend enacted a performative ide-
ology based on the domination of one civilization over another – an
ideology that provided a justification for the Crusades, and, later on,
for European colonialism. By claiming an ancient origin for itself in the
Middle East, Europe prepared the ground for history and representa-
tion to accommodate the continent’s expansion of influence around the
world over the coming centuries.
It was no coincidence that between Prester John’s kingdom and

Europe lay the vast Muslim world – a world that would play a signifi-
cant role in the shaping of both national self-images and Otherness in
modern times. Europeans had to make sense of an Islamic civilization
that was rapidly expanding, not just as an empire but as a functioning
world-system devoid of everything that Europe cherished: church, na-
tionalism, and a pre-capitalist economy.13
Discourse on Otherness originated with the ancients. Whether in
Heracles’s battles with monsters, in the travels of Odysseus, or in their
descriptions of the barbarians, the Greeks defined the “Others” as ter-
rible races living at the edge of known lands, who possessed no rational
faculties and who were spiritually, socially, and technologically back-
ward. The ancients, though, did not base any of this on race or ethnicity;
rather, what defined the condition of the object of cultural domination
was the speech act and its meaning. As Said pointed out, one text that
strikes us in this regard is Aeschylus’s The Persians, a play told from the
point of view of the Persians after the their navy was crushed at the
Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. In this tragedy with no hero, the Greeks,
with their high rhetorical style and sense of a higher calling, symbol-
ize reason and democracy, while the Persians are depicted as savages
who shout and moan and find themselves caught up in emotional pos-
turing and despotic arrogance. Is there is a continuum between ancient
Greece’s literature and Orientalism as science and as discourse? What is
the historical reach of lumping together as the “West” ancient Greece and
modern-day Europe? Said does not address these questions; it is as if he
has been swept up in symbols that require less analytical information. By
choosing Western myths as the norm, Said reduces the scope of his ex-
amination to an epistemic perspective that does not distinguish between
ancient and modern and that remains captive to binary assessments. No
wonder he fails to underscore that figures like Darius and Cassandra,
even though they are Oriental, display the same virtues as their Greek
counterparts (if not superior ones).14 Could it be that Said was ensnared
by the inescapability of relations of power? True, this kind of archaeol-
ogy of Orientalism, set in ancient Greece, was predicated on its power to
represent the “uncivilized” as doomed to be either defeated or assimi-
lated into the logos. Tragedies like Aeschylus’s taught their audiences
how to look at the world and benefit from experiencing this paradigm
of Otherness. Said, in his cursory examination and commentary on The
Persians, emphasizes the “virtue of European imagination,”15 when in
fact that play offers a new model for generic othering: the Greeks versus
the Orient (Persians, Trojans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, etc.).16
This pattern of tethering one’s cultural perspective to one’s own

self-perception has endured in the Western psyche, not only among
cultural zealots but also (and especially) in the discourses of edu-
cated, post-Enlightenment people of letters. Little could be salvaged
when intellectual beacons of Reason dabbled in cultural essentialism.
Kant’s idea of the sovereign subject, for example, was a person who
was European, who presided over the world, and who was fully in
charge of historical agency.17 The knowing subject and the knowable
world were exclusively European concepts. This mindset helped enact
European hegemony in the non-European world, in the form of slavery
and colonialism; it also erased all notions that these latter civilizations
had a culture, any body of ideas and institutions that defined them. In
this way, it invalidated them either by force or, in a more subtle man-
ner, by freezing the Oriental in naturalized, romanticized constructs.
For example, Johann G. Herder, a student of Kant and a forefather of
European nationalism based on language and culture, wrote about “the
noble legacy of the Arabic language” without any suggestion that that
language was embedded in a civilization.18 But rather than an exercise
in plain Orientalism, the problem of the Enlightenment was that of self-
representation – its world view lacked any conception that the subject
was centred, could speak for itself, and had an authentic voice.
The framework used to complete the figure of Otherness in the Euro
pean mind contained elements from the Greek heritage, the Biblical tra-
dition, and a post-Enlightenment undertheorized Other. The Christian
tradition influenced the construction of Otherness with imagery of a
permanent struggle with the Other, from Adam’s expulsion from Eden
to Moses’s confrontation with the Pharaoh, and it included the omni-
present “temptation” facing all mortals. Christological debate contrib-
uted by celebrating the division between nature and religion, body and
soul. This dichotomy would became a crucial element in the yardstick
the Christian West wielded when measuring the possibility of civilizing
individuals. Also, the possibility of the saviour’s return underscored
for the West that it had a spiritual and historical mission to save or
convert. The messianic content of Christianity was awkwardly su-
perimposed on that mission. In post-Revolution France, for example,
where the gap between temporal and spiritual authority was always
narrow, the much vaunted mission civilisatrice coincided, at least in part,
with messianic expectations, notwithstanding the heritage of a secular
revolution. What the French monarchy made possible by virtue of its
alleged divine attributes, the Republic saw as vital to legitimizing its
place in history. Orientalism operated along this chain of substitutions

by displacing other cultural values and historical systems – something
Renan called “the genius of nations.”19
The idea of the state-sponsored redemption of Others took root in
Europe with the establishment of a normative faith back in the fifteenth
century, when expansionism and mercantile capitalism first intersect-
ed. The concept of blind, unquestioning faith became uncomfortable
to many and gave rise to scepticism – which led to the founding of
the Anglican Church, the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal, religious
wars in France, and the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire, and
even to revolutions of another sort in the figurative arts when bour-
geois characters began to replace Christian figures in Dutch paintings.
The narratives of religion and cultural heritage had provided Europe
with a triumphant self-image that was to set the mould for its concept
of national sovereignty as well as its framework for foreign policy.
Especially after the colonization of the Americas, Europe’s new image
in the world was premised on the belief that it could shape reality by
negotiating a place for itself. In a sense, Europe came together by re-
ducing the Others to their distinct forms, their tribes, their religious
denominations, their places of origin, and any number of other misap-
plied concepts of cultural encounter. The Others were kept in a state of
perennial reinvention – and of approval, too, within Western historical
teleology. The problem was not that an exclusive, hegemonic ideology
was being manufactured; rather, it was that ideology’s pretension that
it corresponded to reality. And Europe’s perception of Others became
more garbled as cultural and geographical distance increased. The poli-
tics of representation seemed to follow the patterns of Copernican geo-
centric postulations, but with Europe as the new cultural and political
sun. The famous Psalter map, an English work of the thirteenth century
that supposedly represents Africa and India, shows people depicted
with the heads of dogs or with eyes on their torsos; others are shown
feasting on human limbs. Similarly, maps from the sixteenth century of-
fered monstrous representations of the peoples of the New World. This
is not surprising, given the misstated expectations and naively booster-
ish pathology of colonialism. How else could Europeans have repre-
sented Others – given their powerful tendency to view them in sharp
contrast to their own goodness – except in terms of crude fetishism?
From this point on, conceptions of liberty and modernity would be of
no concern to the subjected peoples; it was as if Europe had dumped
on them discourses of identity while choosing narratives of power for
themselves. But of course the ideological performance of silencing the

Other never truly caught up with all of this. The subalterns continued
to speak their languages (which were also the languages of their lit-
eratures) and escaped the expectant gaze: colonialism came with criti-
cal demarcations that, over time, it proved unable to overcome. The
colonial powers failed to heed the diverse contexts and forms of sub-
ordination and resistance, whether in the Americas or in the Orient. It
is this very dichotomy of Western idealism that Said tries to undercut
in Orientalism in order to eliminate the newly (post–seventeenth cen-
tury) fabricated peripheries. He astutely points out that “to say that
Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent
to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather
than after the fact.”20 Again, all power stems from the West in inten-
tionality, shape, and application, and a pernicious consequence of this
is to deny the possibility of reciprocity by the Oriental in his/her own
historical agency: to represent is to make powerless. In the case of the
Maghreb, we will see how even “resistance” and “anticolonial strug-
gle” were structured from within the colonial centre.
The heuristic notion of “difference” – which developed in its own
logical way vis-à-vis peoples perceived as barbarians and savages – led
to the idea of possession through slavery and colonization. The ocu-
lus mundi of the Renaissance, first expressed by the Flemish cartogra-
pher Mercator in 1585, was that very eye whose glance symbolized
Western power in all geographical areas and spheres of human activi-
ties. Conquests in the sixteenth century, and colonization throughout
the nineteenth century, merely confirmed the knowledge created by
Europeans. The drive towards empire did accompany an increase in
knowledge, but rarely was the impact of non-Western cultures rec-
ognized or assessed. Over many centuries, Western expansion to all
corners of the planet metastasized as self-righteous ambition; but in
reality, European travellers, military, missionaries, traders, and intel-
lectuals remained ill-equipped to understand the faiths and cultures of
other peoples. The paradigm of Western modernity based on difference,
however, was less a matter of trans-European narcissism than of collec-
tive activism against a supposedly passive terra incognita. This principle
would survive until the twentieth century, when confrontations with
non-Western peoples brought about the questioning and transforma-
tion of historical conceptions and of cultural patterns. Naturally, the
self-understanding of Western nations was impacted from the outset by
the encounter with the Other. By the eighteenth century, international
trade was acquiring global reach, putting Western culture into broad
circulation. In this regard, Christopher Miller notes that “slave mer-
chants were ‘cultivated’ people … In Nantes, the négriers established
six chambres de lecture and helped to establish the music academy.”21
Perhaps this implausible cultural injunction to become “cultured” al-
lowed for a canny borrowing of structural power that could eventually
posit the Other as a transcultural subject. Christian ethics as well as
prejudices were co-opted by Enlightenment cultural superiority;22 they
then seeped in, which set the stage for a genuine appeal for moral guid-
ance with universalist overtones. The traumatic caesura of slavery and
colonialism fractured the linear history of the colonized cultures, but it
also helped problematize the Other’s narrative(s) of progress. But this
“progress” would not take place overnight.
Ironically, the requisites for Reason – the lack of which was perceived
as the Others’ major flaw – were ultimately identified as non-European
attributes. After centuries of philosophical discourse on the subject,
Western academics had come to realize that rationality (that which
gives knowledge in the first place) is an unstable notion, especially in
the realm of morality. As in the case of physics, Western cultures lacked
appropriate paradigms to represent Others per causas – that is, as they
really were. Instead they relied on Western constructs with limited abili-
ty to comprehend identities outside the European sphere. Orientalism’s
purpose was to distinguish the significant (languages, faiths, literature,
histories, etc.) from the commonplace (essential foreignness), in the
guise of scholarly study. Yet this often amounted to banding together
in epistemic assaults on the foundations of the “Oriental” subject by,
for example, obfuscating cultural singularities and the merits of their
truth claims. In the field of philology, for example, it was widely accept-
ed, from Sir William Jones to Ernest Renan,23 that Hebrew and Arabic
were the languages of monotheism, spoken by cultures that had failed
to produce myths, higher literature, and science.24 At the same time,
Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were tied together as a group, which ush-
ered in the endemic metaphysics of Western superiority, with its Aryan
myth.25 Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars eagerly sensationalized
history by linking it to contemporary events, the colonial undertaking
being one of them. The project of Orientalist ideologies can be summa-
rized as an effort to merge the past with cultural inquiry and thereby
accord Western discourse legitimacy for its own ethnocentric sake. By
operating outside the principle of dialogue, Orientalism produced its
own repressed material; it abandoned contextualization and cultural
reciprocity and eventually turned history and science into mere opin-
ions masquerading as knowledge. And knowledge operated as part of
a network of power whose key purpose was to cancel out the power
of Others to be read and understood. Said perfectly deconstructs this
critical agency, which not only produced knowledge but also created
a crisis for the subject, be he the Oriental Other or the colonial subject.
And it was mainly through language that the illusion of the Western
sovereign and knowing subject sustained itself, as Said demonstrates
in his parsing of famous Orientalists’ works (Sucy, Renan, all the way
to Massignon). The more it grasped textuality (philology, theology, his-
tory, anthropology, etc.) for itself, the more Orientalism helped govern
the production of culture by, for example, ensuring both the subjuga-
tion of its colonial subjects and a welcoming place for historical deter-
minism in cultural discourse about them. That said, Orientalists were
not colonialists. Among European Orientalist academics, there were re-
peated attempts to move beyond uniform and reductive interpretations
of “native” cultures.
But Said targeted the wrong people with his wholesale attack on
Orientalist scholars. The greatest authority on India in the nineteenth
century, Friedrich Maximillian Müller, who taught philology and com-
parative religion at Oxford, also happened to be the most committed ad-
vocate for a comprehensive recognition of India’s languages and faiths.
Orientalists were not shy in assailing the colonialist mentality; they even
denounced the armchair linguistics or history work that was initially
aimed at propping up the political elite and advancing careers in aca-
demia or in the diplomatic corps. In twentieth-century France, Louis
Massignon claimed to be the greatest expert on Shiism and mystic Islam,
but unlike his friend Paul Claudel, he never managed to land an ambas-
sadorial appointment. One may also wonder whether a state of confu-
sion stands between Orientalism and the culture of the post–eighteenth
century capitalist world, more precisely between an ideology and a his-
torical reality. What are we to make of the subversive truth that while
Orientalist scholars were studying and classifying Oriental languages,
Europe was consolidating its knowledge of its own national languages?
And this touches on the very postcolonial issue of the ties between lan-
guage and national identity, as we will see in the chapter on franco-
phone and Beur writers. The need, therefore, to nuance Said’s attractive
yet too radical views on Orientalism, construed as both a set of sciences
and a discourse, has never been more urgent, because the Other’s voice
risks being essentialized and challenged in its very identity.
Throughout the prolonged contact between Europe and the rest of

the world, the geographical or cultural distance from Others has had
little to do with misconceptions and a priori assertions. Rather, it was
Europeans’ injection of self-identity into the process that inevitably
created comparisons with Others. Loaded as they were with rational
exculpation, these comparisons provided European cultures with nar-
cissistic self-gratification; it also socially conditioned them. Above all,
they encouraged the West to embrace the belief that domination was
historically inevitable, with the result that its relationships with Others
were based on that perception rather than on historical fact. With this
attitude towards history, superiority took the form of authority rather
than being rooted in speculation and inquiry. The asymmetries between
codified discourses and the fascination with alien, “exotic” cultures re-
sulted in a blindness towards other cultures because Orientalism relied
fundamentally on logocentric representations. This heralded a twenti-
eth-century realpolitik whereby borders and national interests conjured
up an ever-greater role for themselves over that played by cultural
paradigms. Scholars and artists played along with this, offering them-
selves up as useful platforms for illuminating the singularity of Western
culture. In France, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire found that there
was indeed a history they could talk about, and that it was not theirs
but that of Persia, Tahiti, Zadig, Zaïre, the Great Turk, and Mahomet,
although their depictions were not to be taken literally. They argued
that political power was not needed to control the population, and they
set out to debunk anything fixed and singular; but in doing so, they
only created their own variety of universalism. These philosophical eli-
sions generated a project to consolidate natural rights as a Western pre-
rogative. It is no wonder that while the forces of the French Revolution
transformed one another, the flow of political power quickly became
both cyclical and alienating, especially during the overseas expansion
of the nineteenth century. Capitalizing on its Orientalist momentum,
the colonial undertaking pioneered a negativity posturing, converging
into everything Europe was not, thereby shedding its authenticity.26
The degree to which Others could be known was limited both by
religious prejudices and by the subsequent opaqueness of those preju-
dices. As long as Others were ontologically missing, the Western self
was safe and, in academic and political spheres, deemed to dwell on a
higher plane. In a sense, the metaphorical and literal obliteration of the
Other safeguarded Europeans against self-doubt and upheld their cul-
tural continuity. Said talks about the formidable “power to narrate, or to
block other narratives from forming and emerging.”27 Closer to the issue
of France and the Maghreb, one need only recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s
argument in his Seconde lettre sur l’Algérie that Algerians were killed
for their own good.28 Indeed, the European identity bore a dual origin,
Greek and Judeo-Christian, and developed in a continuous evolution,
which in the post-Enlightenment age would be dubbed “progess” by
scholars and politicians alike.29 More often than not, Europeans proved
themselves unable to read different cultures against their own self-styled
civilization. For example, mosques in the Levant (a geographic term
equivalent to the Arabic Mashriq, meaning “land where the sun rises”)
were described as “Infidel churches”; medicine men in the New World
were simply “sorcerers”; even China, despite being called a land of wis-
dom, could never become a truly civilized nation ruled by laws because
it did not belong to the course of history, according to scholars such as
Vico and Bacon.
Even as foreign encounters inevitably increased, Europeans insisted
on living by “true” knowledge alone – that is, the knowledge they were
able to fabricate. This cultural/political creativity reached a certain lev-
el of complexity in the religious, technological, and aesthetic character
of what we, in the West, now call the modern age. And this “moder-
nity” had little to do with a conflict between the past and the pres-
ent, or the old and the new; rather, it was determined largely within
a character shaped by selfhood and otherness. It took a long time and
many missteps to grasp that relations to/with the world were medi-
ated through representation. By extension those relations were tenta-
tive, contingent, and open in their very structure: on the one hand, the
Enlightenment and its genuine knowledge (liberty, progress, Reason,
political representation, etc.), and on the other, power that became a
discipline in itself. No wonder the cultural perceptions, and then the
political solutions, came to a full stop with the twentieth-century ideo-
logical crises, especially those that revolved around nationalism and
racism. But of course a study of the scope and influence of Europe,
from the Renaissance to the first half of the twentieth century, cannot be
lumped together around problematics of historicism and universalism.
Such a passive intellectual orthodoxy can only lead to theoretical dead
ends, as we often see, for example, among those who eschew issues of
cross-fertilization.30
The West did not create foreign geography, languages, and religions
out of nothing; however, Western culture did rework them so that they
could be viewed through the lens of a knowledge that conformed to
already known patterns of European thinking. It did not take long to ap-
ply this narrowly created vision of knowledge to the tenets of what was
considered universal human experience. For example, in the thought
world of The Merchant of Venice, Les lettres persanes, Les fleurs du mal, and
Vanity Fair, a “good” European would never behave as a Jew, a Moor, or
a black. Later on, the humanistic, anthropocentric form of knowledge
would be related to the very idea of Reason, which was then extended
to administrative perfection and the civilizing process, applied first at
home and then throughout the empire. The principle of consensus (in
ethics, science, the law, and so forth) became the hallmark of Western
universalism, through language and signs dressed as natural and time-
less in order to conceal their own historicism.
There is more to this elusive or flawed understanding than simply
throwing one’s own civilization into sharp relief against other peoples’
ways. Although Western knowledge, based on the simulacra of its own
metaphysics (as Nietzsche tried to spell out in his Gay Science [1882]),
was essentially faulty, Europeans could not do without it because it was
the only system they possessed for interpreting other cultures. Colonial
enterprises throughout the Mediterranean and the Americas were, in
a very literal sense, experiments in reproducing a model of enslave-
ment that had worked in Africa, and earlier still in the Roman Empire.
In Spain, the new idea of a “motherland” was superimposed on the
world as it existed. After the fall of Granada in 1492, King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabella decided to bring to an end the multiculturalism
that had been the hallmark of Spanish civilization: Jews and Muslims
were expelled, killed, or forced to convert to Catholicism. Spain rose as
a nation-state, but one doomed to decline under the weight of its own
religious fundamentalism and by its failed economic policies, despite
the vast fortunes the Spaniards plundered from the Americas. Spain
became a self-confirming example of a predictable, disengaged cultur-
al critical system, and in the nineteenth century the country morphed
into a duplicating representation of the European subaltern, even while
slowly being painted as an appendix of the Orient.31
With the arrival of the European nation-state came the concept of
authenticity, reflected in various stages as historicism or ethnocentrism.
This concept of authenticity emphasized the “true” (i.e., unique) fea-
tures of a nation and its culture. It likewise rejected attributes that were
shared, or mixed – or worse, imitated – as in the case of the Orthodox
Christians in Greece and Syria, or the Armenians, who were slaugh-
tered by their fellow Christians during the Crusades and were later
conveniently ignored when they fell under the rule of the Ottoman
Empire. At this nexus between political reality and moral choice lay a
presumption of cultural identity that was constantly being reshaped
to account for changing expectations and legitimacies. The “us versus
them” distinction was extremely useful and valuable for Europeans. Its
value, however, remained the product of prejudice and misconception
that proved unable to accommodate dissent and negotiation until later in
the twentieth century. Yet it is true that many Orientalist scholars fought
back against any racialized view of European superiority. The concept
of race did not come into existence until the advent of anthropology in
the eighteenth century; that said, it was a famous nineteenth-century
anthropologist, Johann F. Blumenbach, who claimed that racism had
no scientific validity – that it was a historical construct that required a
historical treatment.32 Note here that both Britain and France abolished
slavery before their golden age of colonial rule, so race was a moot item
in the expansion and domination machine. Only the rhetorical tangent
remained untouched, with the imaginary and Destiny woven into its
narrative. Europeans understood too that the rest of the world could
not be reduced to an object. One may even suggest that Orientalist
scholars knew that what distinguished the modern age was its capactiy
to recognize the Other as an objective truth. By then, religion had been
swept away by the French Revolution. An excellent example of how
the European fascination for the Arab/Muslim world was framed is
that of Jean-Joseph Marcel, a printer-engineer with Bonaparte’s expedi-
tion to Egypt. In October 1798, when the French leader embarked on a
“defensive” move against the al-Azhar university in Cairo, Marcel was
able to save ninth-century copies of the Quran from fire and destruc-
tion. Later on, in France, he became an Arabic scholar (he taught at the
Collège de France from 1808 to 1811) and established an extensive library
of Islamic culture.
However, no relationship has prompted such challenging cultural
and political stances as the one between the West and the so-called
Orient. For this reason, we must follow three principles as we tackle
the concept of “Orient.” First, we need to distinguish the whole (the
abstract idea of “colonial enterprise”) from the part (one particular un-
dertaking, e.g., France in Algeria) in myths and representations that
set the Oriental as a subject already analysed and solved. Second, once
the “Orient” appears in this fashion, we must not essentialize it, for it
creates its own counterpoints and counter-discourses, as was shown
in the struggle of post–First World War India against British colonial
institutions, demonstrating that there have always been alternatives to

hegemonic power in the fabric of a colonized nation and throughout
the cultural contact zone between colonized and colonizers. Third, the
topos of “Orient” varies across different historical moments and geo-
graphic areas, and this premise runs against time-flattening approaches.
France’s policies in Algeria and Indochina varied greatly, even though
both colonial lands were viewed as the global “Orient.”
The word “Orient” calls to our attention its dual etymological root
– from the Latin oriri, to arise, and the Greek ορος, mountain. Thus its
origin is both a verb and a noun: action and description. The transition
from Greek into Latin and then into modern European languages may
best explain its meaning, which is discontinuous, as well as that of its
counterpart term, “Occident,” which long ago came to suggest stability
and progress. The various names that stood for parts of the “Orient”
(the Sublime Gate for the Ottoman Empire, the Barbary Coast for the
Maghreb, the Levant for the lands stretching from Palestine to Syria,
Golkonda for southern India, the Middle Empire for China, Cipango
for Japan) enjoyed widespread use as long as they presupposed a plu-
rality, compelling Western powers to acknowledge degrees of differ-
ence among the cultures of Others.
What the sociocultural world view of Europeans demonstrated more
than anything else was that they were unable to view their own posi-
tions as subjective; they considered their relationships with the Other
in the Orient to be objective, rational, and unilateral. As a result, rep-
resentation took on a new meaning: it became the index of reduction
of the vast majority of the world to a cultural prototype. From these
roots, the relentless narrative of “progress” – the staple of objectivity
and rationality – was born. This narrative has segregated the exterior
of the Oriental construct from the deep reality of Western defining val-
ues. Thus, a striking contradiction in the European colonial structure
of power can be found within the paradigms of nation-building and
the role assigned to native languages. These two paradigms contradict
the tenets of Western humanism and the realities of national indepen-
dence and cultural autonomy. Yet they eventually became neutral tools
of transmission for indigenous communities.
When Columbus embarked on his first voyage to India, he took with
him scholars who could speak Hebrew and Aramaic, for he and his
crew believed they were going to meet tribes and nations closer to the
peoples of the days of the Creation. They seemed not to distinguish be-
tween an elusive object and one that was imaginary, albeit expected to
generate real economic benefits.33 On his third journey, Columbus even

mistook the mouth of the Orinoco River for the entrance to Paradise.
Again, India as a bounded territory with its own history and peoples
remained completely ideational. While some may consider this näiveté
on a grand scale, the fact remains that these misapplied characteris-
tics and inaccurate attributes served to define Columbus’s Orient and
render it intelligible to him. The quandary of the para-geographical
metaphor (India and the East as the Americas and the West) served to
dismantle the location of the Oriental as well as the epistemic and
theoretical binary positions that defined it. The Other morphed into
a structuring character in the West’s narrative quest, in contradistinc-
tion to Europe at a specific time and place, until that Occidental figure
collapsed because its own ideologies, cultures, and institutions created
an antihegemonic hegemony, demonstrated throughout the twentieth
century in two world wars and many successful colonial struggles for
independence. In an irreversible development over several centuries,
Europe combined a subjective view of the individual as self-moulder
with a conception of history as a perpetual intentional activity culmi-
nating in the exclusion and domination of anything non-Western. This,
and the fact that European power was based on the authority of the
state and sometimes the church, meant that the Orient had to reinvent
itself – both before and after achieving independence, as we will see in
the case of the Maghreb.
Distinctions between “Orient” and “Occident,” however, may mis-
lead us by failing to support the notion of a multidimensional Orient.
Western distinctions tend to overlook an important fact: both the idea
and the reality of the Orient are mobile, changeable, and deceptive. The
Muslim Orient, for example, is rooted in shifting soil: new cultural par-
adigms arise that become sources of rival ethical, political, economic,
and cultural traditions. Persia, the Arab world, and the Ottoman Empire
are all Muslim, yet they are highly distinct in their traditions and in
their political relations with the Christian West. Islam did not generate
a cultural totality. The term “Orient” developed within an open field of
ideologies and modes of intellectual inquiry, without resistance from
the “subaltern,”34 as it was later called. The subaltern evolved as both a
figurative entity and a representation. Through the former, the Orient
became a spatial concept, created to preserve the absolute centrality of
the Occident. The Orient became a form of discourse so distant from
any definitive meaning that its essence lost all direction. And because
the very existence of Oriental discourse remained unacknowledged,
it was generally accepted that the Orient under Western rule was silent.
To set aside this preposterous claim, we need only remind ourselves
that the Orient is the birthplace of the scriptures on which all mono-
theistic faiths are based, as well as many poetic, philosophical, and sci-
entific works now viewed as landmarks in world culture. The value
of these works, however, was long negated by the Western notion that
economic and cultural products were valid only to the extent that they
had a utilitarian function. The dialectical dimension of Orientalism and
colonialism confronted a broader crisis in European consciousness: for
it to rule, Europe could no longer take the Orient out of itself. It is not
surprising that to this day, for most scholars trained in the West, the
post-independence literature of the Third World amounts to no more
than national allegories of failed Western models; so we shall see in
the chapter devoted to postcolonial studies. Very early on, however,
culture became the logical and rhetorical paradigm for the political. The
subaltern, through traditions of language, faith, literature, and music,
drew critical demarcations with the white interlocutor. One proof of it is
that, while the subaltern may be using the (former) imperial language,
English or French, he/she is not talking to the white interlocutor. Thus
it can be argued that both the old hegemonic and the new globalized
approach desperately lack historical awareness, including deep insight
into the various spheres of the Muslim world.
Wherever this collective construction holds sway, at least two con-
spicuous and conflicting conceptions of the word “Orient” appear. The
first entails “marking out,” or designating as familiar and identifiable.
The other entails “showing or exhibiting,” or withholding real mean-
ing by offering an image in lieu of the actual object. The first conception
applies to the Western construct of the Other, formed in the absence
of any direct contact. For example, it is perplexing that within the co-
lonial endeavours throughout North Africa, a comprehensive sense
of superiority was legitimized as a civilizing tool; yet Islamic studies
gathered momentum only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, with the work of towering Orientalism scholars such as
Jacques Berque, Henri Corbin, the Marçais brothers, Louis Massignon,
and Maxime Rodinson. What was morally contestable was also empiri-
cally false: no culture, Arab or otherwise, needed Western civilization.
The second conception falls within the province of experience, cued by
the presence of the Other. To scholars of the postcolonial condition, the
Orient remains at the core of the unfulfilled promise of Western uni-
versalism. This is echoed in political debate in contemporary France,
where politicians and the media conflate issues suchas immigration,

crime, feminism, Islam, and transnationalism (also connected to nation-
al misgivings about the European Union, which is perceived as under
siege). Put more simply, the claim is made that postcolonial France may
be seeing the erosion of its Republican tenets, and therefore its history,
because Oriental elements in its midst have failed to become assimi-
lated. Immigrants – the claim continues – are fundamentally incapable
of bridging the gap that separates them from the colonial state of mind,
and in this way, they and the mythology of the Oriental have fallen into
a perverse dialectic: the West created the Oriental, yet it is the Oriental
who is responsible for the perceived cultural discontinuity, exemplified
by the overinflated issue of intégration in France. One can easily see that
discussion of how couscous came to be served in Parisian restaurants
is a substitute for confronting the challenge of riots in the suburbs: the
postcolonial subject is essentialized by something he no longer is or
never was – a couscous eater – while suffering alienation as a conse-
quence of socio-economic problems such as failed public schools and
high unemployment.35 After each suburban uprising, debates and na-
tional discussions have been many, yet these have been essentially mis-
directed because they have merely given rise to a renewed awareness of
France’s untouchable identity, with both the left and the right – through
their own agendas – appealing to intégration. This state of affairs could
be dubbed “the political reality of the museum effect” – an effect be-
comes visible when the nation itself looks back on a past that it does
not know or own but that it deems unique and authentic. It may be
that such a complacent national position stems not so much from na-
tionhood but from the discourse on nationhood, a bit like painting that
could not exist without contemplation of painting.
During colonial times, murky references to a Christian Algeria pre-
dating Islam were often considered by French policy-makers sufficient
to render the “Orient” recognizable to the Western eye. The ability to
interpret as one chooses becomes key to this sort of recognition. The
word and the object appear to lack a fundamental unity, perhaps be-
cause both are stripped of their concreteness in Europe’s co-option of
Islamic cultures. To that extent, the “Orient” becomes a metaphor that
lacks a proper referent – perhaps it does not even require one. This is
true, for example, of Europe’s anti-Islam discourse, which is not based
on documented knowledge; rather, it permeates the Western psyche,
by absorption, through the biographies of individuals (travellers, sci-
entists, soldiers, writers, missionaries, diplomats) as well as through
the collective experience of groups (Western colonial enterprises, sci-

entific expeditions, the European postcolonial encounter with Muslim
minorities). Words such as “Arab,” “Moor,” “Saracen,” “Infidel,” and
Mahométan36 helped shift the Judeo-Christian logic of identity and strat-
egies of identification towards essentialism, which became one foun-
dation for Orientalism. This, in turn, motivated the attacks against the
Other’s faith, land, and heterogeneity of culture. A striking feature of
Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) was that the country’s con-
temporary Arab and Muslim culture was bypassed, dismissed in favour
of a single (scientific) focus on a long-dead Pharaonic empire.37 Egypt’s
political invisibility actually helped increase the prestige of a country
like France, which by then was deep in its own historical revolutionary
present. The trick to dismissing Egypt’s Islamic legacy was to transfer
the cultural capital of the pyramids to the domain of Europe’s political
modernity, an exercise in civilizational translation. Despite this sleight
of hand, which has fed back into Western cultural and political self-
esteem, very little has changed. Nowadays, literature, ideologies, and
the mainstream media in Europe and North America are perpetuating
the same old misconceptions and untruths: (1) that Islam is a perver-
sion of Judeo-Christian truth, (2) that Islam advocates violence, (3) that
Islam is fixated on vice and characterized by intolerance, and (4) that
the Prophet Muhammad was a charlatan. Communication between the
West and the Orient – and, above all, within the West – has rarely oc-
curred outside the litany of these unchallenged fallacies, and the end
result has been cultural obscurantism. It was Said’s achievement to
partly dismantle the ideological agency of Orientalism, specifically its
organic link between knowledge and power whereby one essentialized
the other in a stubborn post-Enlightenment age. Unfortunately, the
moral (and capitalistic) vagaries of Europe’s colonial and neocolonial
undertakings came at a high price for the Muslim Other. This kind of
substitution of violence for reason had actually been theorized early in
the twentieth century, during the peak years of capitalism and colonial-
ism, by French philosopher Georges Sorel in his Réflexions sur la violence
(1908), an essay that greatly impressed Frantz Fanon, who proceeded to
theorize violence as a liberating force offering escape from the colonial
paradigm: “From birth it is clear to him [the native] that this narrow
world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by ab-
solute violence.”38
Representations of the Muslim Orient have also led to an astonish-
ing annihilation of linguistic, historical, and psychological distinctions
between the borrowers and the borrowed-from. A striking example

was the use of French by politicians and writers from the Maghreb – be-
cause they were never educated in classical Arabic – as they were strug-
gling against France to bring about independence for their native lands.
For Europeans, cultures are objects to be possessed, and are consumed
with little or no acknowledgment of their origins and developmental
histories. What has emerged clearly in the challenging and conflicting
relationship between the Judeo-Christian West and the Muslim world
over the centuries is that the latter ended up being domesticated within
the contours of cultures (British, French, Spanish, Dutch, American)
that remained both foreign and restrictive. Even concepts such as the
“nation-state” were normative and operative only so long as they bore
the West’s imprimatur. As a result, there was no pre-existing national
community in the post-independence age for the individual to be rec-
onciled to. The colonial habitat, so to speak, had been contaminated by
an emphatic alienation.39
The point was – and remains – that history, as an ideological category,
keeps the conditions of national identity in the West undisturbed. This
explains, for example, why conservative and far-right political parties
in Europe are organized around fetishized constructions of citizenship.
The epistemic violence of Orientalism, slavery, and colonialism no lon-
ger deals with the postcolonial subject as an economic instrument of
production, but rather as a political actor. The postcolonial condition
thereby illuminates the fundamentally dysfunctional relationships be-
tween identity, citizenship, ethnicity, and faith – especially in France,
which has dismissed its own Christian roots while simultaneously de-
nying its colonial accountability. Perhaps France is unable to acknowl-
edge its postcolonial condition because to do so would highlight the
centrality of the colonial narrative. It is safe to say that French nation-
alism, centred on an obsession with laïcité and the tenets of republi-
canism, grows in the shadow of Orientalism with the aim of asserting
identity rather than of standing witness to the trauma.
Western representations of “I” as subject – from the Cartesian era
to the death of the contemporary subject – presuppose that his or her
moral law and technological advance are meaningful and smoothly
accommodate a succession of political platforms and cultural institu-
tions. The Oriental Other, by contrast, is cast as a figure of opposition
and reversal, and as largely disposable as formerly colonized people
and later on as immigrants. The difference nowadays with the Oriental
postcolonial subject is that instead of functioning in an allegorical sense
– in paintings, or during the colonial exhibitions, for instance – he is

defined as pure immediacy, at levels both political (citizen) and ethi-
cal (non–Judeo-Christian values). There is nothing new here. Thus it
was believed for a long time that northern Europe developed rapidly
during the early fifteenth century even while southern Europe was be-
ing ruined by Arab/Muslim threats and influences.40 Similarly, it was
acknowledged that Arabs introduced Europeans to neo-Aristotelian
philosophy, architecture, and new sciences such as algebra, optics, and
chemistry, even while it was supposed that Arab culture and progress
had been corrupted by the inherent contradictions in their faith and
their ethnicity.41 This gave flesh to the contrast between the supposedly
unstable Arab/Muslim world and a West whose essence was, by com-
parison, permanent and incorruptible. This image has scarcely changed
since the Enlightenment.
As colonialism set the standard for a moral consciousness whereby
two incompatible humanisms cancelled each other out, the contrast be-
tween the Arab/Muslim world and the West was reinforced or modi-
fied. One brand of humanism, specific to the French and imbued with
post-Revolutionary values as well as a discourse of origins and inter-
ests, was unable to accommodate cultural tensions, even though a revo-
lution of ideology had replaced that of the soul, greatly undermining
the validity of Christian theology. This type of humanism, emblematic
of a typically French paradigm, posits an inclusive approach to under-
standing cultural values that, because it is absolute, serves to validate
the figure of the Orient. This figure even becomes the foil to history
and literature (as will be discussed in later chapters). The second brand
of humanism can be defined by its capacity for both replication and
isolation. This is the Anglo-American model, the only one to survive
nineteenth-century colonialism. Its current iteration allows the figure
of the Orient to align itself with Western culture, even though capital-
ism, democracy, and social equality are not taken fully to heart; put
more simply, modern democracy is reduced to manufacturing econom-
ic advancement and second-hand human rights. In this specific case,
the Orientalist logic of a binary opposition between East and West,
Christian and Muslim, the industrial and the traditional, the democratic
and the despotic, is deemed irrelevant. At the same time, the fluidity of
this logic folds the foreignness of the Orient back inside the West itself.
Returning to the theme of the Orient as a figure of oneself, the con-
cept evolves in time and space, operating on two levels of rationality.
The first level assesses a sense of being against a historically changing
perception. This was true in the case of the Arabs, who were perceived
as a threat to Europe from the eighth century to the fifteenth. Yet after
the Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the thirteenth century and the
beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s spread around the Mediterranean
by the late fourteenth, Arab civilization became a prime target for colo-
nization. Colonialism, in fact, allowed Orientalism to resume its course,
and to rethink its ideology along the way as a token of modernity. It is
no coincidence that France’s military campaigns in Algeria in the 1830s
coincided with the painting of the Hall of the Crusades at Versailles,
a project begun in 1834 and completed in 1843. King Louis-Philippe,
deemed at that time to be too close to the bourgeoisie and its revolu-
tionary aspirations, needed to make peace with the Catholic Church
as well as with the old nobility. The Crusades offered a highly use-
ful theme for promoting reconciliation at a time of renewed war with
Muslims in Algeria. It is no surprise that in the Hall of the Crusades,
one painting stands out, that of Algerian leader Emir Abdelkader’s sur-
render to French troops on 16 May 1843. This was a time of deeply felt
nostalgia that saw the French indulging in their fetishistic fascination
for the Middle Ages while attempting to absorb the reality of an impe-
rial expansion that still lacked political content. In a perverse manner,
the military conquest helped foreground the episteme of Orientalism.
The French king was personally involved in this campaign, sending
three of his sons (the Duke of Orleans, Duke of Aumale, and Duke of
Nemours) to ensure the legitimacy of imperial conquest on the battle-
fields of Algeria. Delacroix contributed to the painting of the Crusades
scenes, which played an important role (alongside the violence of the
colonial wars) in the political formation of a nation that was still reeling
from Napoleonic rule and that more than half a century after 1789 had
failed to live up to its own revolutionary democratic ideals. Conflating
the Crusades with the conquest of Algeria probably helped crystallize a
memory construed as glorious, besides conveying historical continuity.
Said’s argument conflates that agency with, for example, the dogma
of realism in nineteenth-century literature: “In practical meaning and
operating ideology […] Europe led the way and was the main subject of
interest. […] At a still deeper level, it is from the Christian Incarnation
that Western realistic literature as we know it emerges.”42 Even litera-
ture could not distance itself from presumed representation, whether in
the case of the “savage natives” in Conrad’s novels or, as we will see, in
Gide’s North Africa.
The second level implicit in the concept of the Orient as a figure sym-
bolically debunks Westerners’ constructions, which tend to span all
cultural and civil contexts, including those of their own origin. On this
level, the rationality of the Orient along with the excess of representa-
tions of it verging on stereotyping – those focused on faith, language,
and gender issues, for example – set a limit on Western reason because
they require stability and self-awareness. Western universalism thus
falls victim to cultural and political relativism by casting aside the need
for limits. For example, more than a century after the French occupation
of Algeria, Algerian writers such as Jean Amrouche and Kateb Yacine
demonstrated clearly that French literature signified different things on
different sides of the Mediterranean. Even such a figure as Camus could
not find his own “limit,” being the Other among both the European
French (as a half-Spaniard pied-noir) and the Algerians (as a symbol of
the patronizing European, especially during the War of Independence).
In the specific case of Camus, there was a fleshing out of the distinction
between homeland and nation because of the ideological mystification
brought about by colonialism. In the final and decisive test of his alle-
giance, the War of Independence, his identity failed to find roots in its
historical conditions, due to a lack of immanent political critique: the
Other’s freedom entailed Camus’s own alienation.43 In a sense, Camus
was hardwired to respond to humanistic values that worked wonders
in metropolitan France but that failed to grasp the colonial ideological
reality of Algeria. Authenticity (historical, ethnic, faith-based, and so
forth) had turned freedom into a categorical imperative. The irony that
escaped Camus and like-minded French intellectuals was that colonial-
ism forces the colonized to become free.44
As I will discuss in a later chapter, there have been many theories that
attempt to single out historical problems as well as contemporary criti-
cal discourses regarding the Other and Orientalism.45 Scholarly atten-
tion has focused largely on the issues of multivalence and relativism,
rather than dwelling on the subject’s surface. It is also fascinating to note
that, while the experience of colonial rule heightened European self-
awareness and influence, most academic voices in the West today are
still keen to produce a discourse about the Other against a background
of growing global cultural misunderstandings. The Arab world’s in-
dignant reactions to the American “war on terror” demonstrate how
much remains to be done in terms of developing political programs
and dovetailing cultural mechanisms. Relations in the academic and
political spheres, viewed from afar, point less to a legacy of anti-Islam

prejudices than to Europeans’ deep-seated sense of superiority in all
aspects of culture and identity. Yet for any explanation to be valid – as
Said offered in the archaeology of Orientalism – it must address its own
origins, in terms of either mission or contingency.
Organic links unite the various approaches to identity-seeking, be
they religious, historical, linguistic, or literary. Consider the birth and
stage-by-stage development in Europe of the Orient concept. Its pur-
pose was not to lay the groundwork for cultural imperialism; rather,
it grew out of Europe’s irrationality, selfishness, ignorance, religious
rivalries, and unbalanced sociological mechanisms. Europe had long
cultivated its own perspective on deviancy, its targets being Jews, lep-
ers, heretics, homosexuals, New World cannibals, and even syphilitics.
Yet Muslims were exempted from this dialectic of identification and
repression. At the onset of the Crusades, Europe condemned Muslims
as infidels; then Europe’s own history, ambitions, and cultural certain-
ties began to overstate its own singularity. Later on, the values of liberty
and self-determination, so crucial in European societies, received only
local, limited awakening within the anticolonial discourse. Thus in the
1950s, Fanon advocated violent revolutions of the colonized because
the colonized were unable to assimilate their past in its totality. They
needed to work from a blank slate, bypassing their own colonial his-
tory. But one need not be a Marxist to grasp the importance of how
both Algeria and France were transformed by the colonial experience
and how economic conditions that were both significant and interre-
lated – immigration on one hand, fossil fuels on the other – kept Algeria
and France interconnected. Furthermore, violence was connected to a
transnational movement on the African continent itself and, to some
extent, to what would later be dubbed the Non-Aligned Movement.
So the goal for Algerian revolutionaries was to contextualize their own
national history in terms of new dynamics that were simultaneously
un-Western and un-Oriental, just as it was for their Vietnamese coun-
terparts of the 1950s. Yet the Marxist option failed to bow to the logic of
postcolonial modernization.
Although the figure of the Orient developed differently in different
European countries, its various concepts and representations competed
with a single Western notion, arrived at as the fulfilment of prophecy.
Note here that the French grasped the Islamic sphere as a subject of en-
cyclopedic and artistic inquiry, while for the British the Islamic sphere
amounted to a diplomatic and economic challenge. As it evolved from
metaphor to direct designation, the Arab/Muslim figure became for-

mative for European nationalism.46 It literally prefigured the vitality
and depth of identities and identifications. Under the auspices of the
rising nation-state, the European self-image became corrupted by spec-
ulations about political agency: ideologies became cross-essentializing
tools. One example is the relevance of French universalism in the colo-
nies.47 At the time, universalism was a strategic term, one, however, that
continues to derive its compelling force from the sole accepted view of
history and its discourse in the face of the postcolonial situation.48 The
oriental Other became “a figure of ourself,” as it were, but stripped of
his or her normative character and reduced to a shadow status, albeit
a useful one. This condition reinforced every form of colonial utilitari-
anism, largely dependent on a paradigm of pleasure by way of death
and sex: eliminating the threat and possessing the subject. The point
is that the Oriental Other was made mute not so much by the abso-
lute effectiveness of imperial discourse – which is far from true49 – but
rather by the power of representation that seeped deep into intellectual
constructs until the mid-twentieth century. Even Simone de Beauvoir,
in her much vaunted The Second Sex (1949), seems to have fallen prey
to a facile pattern of gender distribution across civilizational lines: “The
Oriental, careless of his own fate, is content with a female who is his;
but the dream of the Occidental, once he rises to the consciousness of
his uniqueness, is to be taken cognizance of by another free being, at
once strange and docile.”50 Beauvoir fought hard against any sort of
cultural determinism, yet she seemed unwilling to apply her budding
feminist concepts to the Oriental Other, whom she depicted as wearing
the shackles of a long-standing essentialism: as doomed never to play
a prominent role along the path of progress or in the course of human
history – a prevalent statement in the golden age of colonial France that
elided the narrative of capital on which colonialism had been built.
The construction of the Oriental Other allowed Europeans to pass
from the pathological to the status of super-being: white, Christian,
knowledgeable, wealthy, and so on.51 At the same time, the status of
the colonized was essentially that of a symbolic fiction: the more he or
she was dominated, the stronger the justification for colonial power.
The perpetual and provisional condition of Oriental Otherness in the
West cuts across traditional Cartesian subjectivity, especially its pre-
scriptive content. It is no surprise to uncover, in contemporary anti-
Arab racism and Islamophobia in France, the same discourse found
in nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. For example, writers such as
Proust (whose mother was Jewish) and Ben Jelloun (who proclaims
his Moroccan identity in French) articulate, in their respective works,
selective judgments of Frenchness.52 Jews and Arabs and Muslims in
France are blamed for presumably having two different homelands,
for mismanaging the national credo and faith, and, above all, for re-
sisting assimilation into the melting pot of the French Republic. The
identity of the Oriental Other thereby collapses into this: the West
exists as long as its cultural and political utopias flourish anywhere,
including at home. To that extent, colonialism – or historical pre-
emption – was an experiment that both fulfilled and cancelled out the
systemic perception of the Orient. In other words, Orientalism contin-
ued to thrive on a psychosis of the Common Good that was excluded
from the realm of ethics. But what was it that gave rise in the first
place to the chasm between politics and ethics?
This idea of separation and psychosis was advanced by Freud in
Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud highlighted the importance of
awareness that comes when civilization leaves the subject no choice
but to become alienated in the face of a have-it-all ideology. By liv-
ing in a world of biddable values and principles, citizen-subjects find
themselves domesticated within the community and caught in the up-
side-down world of ethical acts. Domination, exploitation, and other
pathological symptoms of hegemonic ideologies are not just gratuitous
additions to intercultural exchanges – they have become their very
foundation. Freud puts the claim in quite striking terms: “When people
came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses, which threaten to
undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by civilized men […]
It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot
tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the
service of its cultural ideals.”53 By vindicating such an intuition within
the postcolonial condition, one risk is to set into a clash of authenticity.
Simply put, what was lost in sensationalist representations of the Orient
was not gained in national histories and individual activity. Even after
the wars of national liberation, for example, Europeans continued to
regard African nations as former colonies, as deprived of the impetus
of their own histories. These new countries, especially their econo-
mies, were branded uncompetitive and poorly managed; at the core
of this denunciation was the suggestion that the formerly colonized
had missed out on modernity despite now living in independent states.
Their political and military elites had been trained in France, within a
safe distance of the source of cultural continuity. It is no wonder that
peoples who had been narrated out of their own histories during the
colonial era were unable to find a site of contestation and resistance on
becoming independent. By eradicating true nationhood, Orientalism
had produced its own brand of futile idealism.54 In most cases, French
remained the official language of these countries;55 the currency for
some West African nations is still the CFA franc even though the French
franc has ceased to exist. Although Europe and Africa were separated
in political time, they remained part of the same historical stream, ex-
cept that now Orientalism expressed itself not as representation but
rather as self-perception. In short, even as their lands gained national
independence, the African and Maghrebi elites participated in their
own Orientalizing; meanwhile, it was unclear whether the masses had
been converted.56
All of this points to why the paradigm of “us versus them” seems so
off-target and must be re-examined in the postcolonial political order.
Wasn’t decolonization, after all, an assertion of the independence seek-
ers’ identity? In fact, decolonization and the migration of the formerly
colonized to Europe gave way to an entirely new configuration, one in
which the paradigm of the local and the global has come to the rescue
of the subject. Yet the fashionable (postmodern) notion of “subject”
remains as valid as the concept of national authenticity.57 In any cul-
ture, authenticity places self-recognition at centre stage. That was true,
for example, of the old Chinese Empire, which based its authenticity
on the notion that it was the centre of the world.58 But for this process
to be fully grasped with respect to Europe, one must presuppose that
universalism, as it has flowed out of the Enlightenment, rests on the
idea that the Other must take on the attributes of the West in order to
belong to the universal community. This has inverted the relationship
between East and West: as the Oriental Other became more concrete,
the West became more allegorical in the broadest sense, in both its
sign and in what it signified. It was Rousseau, after all, who suggested
that Europeans had the capacity to struggle out of themselves in or-
der to become free, while the “savage” (the people of the New World
and of Africa) was essentially enslaved from within.59 In the modern
era, postcolonial Europe seems to have been outmatched by its own
“Europeanness.” Indeed, the paradox is such that, if the West were to
disappear completely, this Western “Europeanness” would survive in
the rest of the world. In a sense, Shanghai, Singapore, and Dubai are
as Western as Paris, London, and Vancouver are Eastern. So it seems
that Western virtues, institutions, and so forth are defined less in their
full historicity than in a figurative extension. This acknowledgment

of shifting powers, if only in economic terms, complicates national
myths. As borders have become an issue for both the European Union
and the United States, insecure nations have spawned a new kind of
racism, one that is not focused on hatred of the Other but rather that
is eager to foster or preserve an ideal community. This is a kind of re-
verse segregation that works like a fiction within the grand narrative
of Western nations.60
The extrapolitical interpretation of the relationship between Occident
and Orient is rooted in what imperial history has either denied or es-
chewed. This is true in part because arts and ideologies have stripped
Europe of its concrete reality. By means as various as the ontological
projection of the Renaissance onto the Enlightenment (drawing on the
past to build a new future) and the fleshing out of the global figure of
the Occident, Europe has not so much shaped its own Orient once and
for all as it has continued to re-create it. From the seventeenth century
to the twentieth, France reflected itself in its own Oriental fantasies:
turqueries in music and literature, arabesques in dance, chinoiseries and
japonaiseries in art, the psychological attributes of espagnolisme in litera-
ture,61 and art nègre in painting and sculpture. The key to understand-
ing this cultural process lies in the idea of re-creation, not by starting
afresh, but after fully grasping the preceding fundamental truths. What
is most striking about the lineage of Western thinking about the Orient
is that, while it is omnipresent, it is never officially acknowledged or
even identified as such. An example is the racialization of issues of sex
and gender along with the conception of social history that was derived
from this. In attempting to explain “polygamy and homosexuality” in
Eastern cultures, Montesquieu pointed the finger at the warm climates,
which helped weave debauchery and perversion into the fabric of
Oriental despotism.62 Of course, Louis XIV, with his fifty-two children
born out of wedlock in the mild climate of France, remained unaffected
by this climatic disorder.
The re-creative process grew more obscure as Europe spread its pres-
ence in the real Orient through colonial occupation. Within the forced
conversation of colonialism, the Oriental subjects converted a culture
to its plurality. That may be why universalism stood no real chance of
being adopted as the dominant principle in Eastern culture. In a sense,
the colonial experience outed the universalist imaginary, as if ideo-
logues of all stripes – academics, writers, missionaries, and diplomats
among them – had realized that their “world-hypotheses”63 were long
on speculation and short on fact. This reality eventually cohered into

self-revelation for the colonized and their anticolonial political and cul-
tural movements – which tends to disprove Said’s argument concern-
ing the absolute hegemony of colonialism. Even the modern separation
of discourses – between the hard sciences and the arts, for example –
was rescinded in Orientalism through narration of its culture, knowl-
edge, and methodologies. So one could speak of a dual presence of the
Orient – one inside the Western paradigms, and one outside, but al-
ways lacking a point of origin, or rather expelled from its origin. Thus
it is not surprising that behind the colonial ideology was the demand
for both permanence and change. In the case of Algeria, the land itself
was dubbed French, because it had supposedly been Christian since
the time of Augustine; yet at the same time, this Algerian colonial pos-
session needed to be brought into the fold of societies embracing tech-
nological modernity. This type of thinking amounted to a misguided
strategy that consisted of putting down roots in lands where the French
would always remain outsiders. The issue of origin only resulted in
cultural incompatibility.64 Frenchness could never become the precon-
dition for constructing Algerian identity and subsequent nationhood.
The violent culmination of colonial occupation meant that Europe
needed to produce some sort of political and cultural tradition in order
to be present in and contained by its own discourse. And it is, in fact,
in relation to Islam, and not to the fall of the Roman Empire or to that
of Chinese civilization, that Europe came to exist as a purposive and
creative whole. Even the decolonization of the Americas (the United
States, Haiti, Spanish America) remained marginal within the European
construct of history because of the radical opposition between nation-
building in the Americas and colonial expansion in Europe, while the
Muslim world evinced a general complacency and lack of methodol-
ogy in responding to Orientalism. Underlying the discourse’s articulat-
ed purposes, however, were unspoken attitudes of superiority.65 What
matters most here is that the rationale for maintaining coherence and
meaning is often derived from what is kept silent within what is being
said. A famous early literary example is found in Rabelais’s Gargantua
(1534), where, in chapter 33, Pichrocole travels to the Maghreb and
meets with pilgrims bound for Mecca. There is something provisional
and incomplete about the protagonist-hero that suddenly makes sense
in the heart of the feared Orient. He points to the Muslim world as a
perverted incarnation against which his own self can be revealed and
saved from the barbarism of the Others. Once identified, the Muslim
Oriental source needs to be cancelled out. This literary illustration re-

calls the erasure from memory of how the Arab/Muslim world passed
the Greek legacy to Western Europe, as well as attempts to forget that
the Muslim civilization achieved vital breakthroughs in astronomy,
chemistry, medicine, and mathematics. The nostalgia for, or invention
of, non-Muslim origins has always plagued the West. The West’s Arab/
Muslim paradigm is not a matter of interpretation or correction; rather,
the paradigm is all about locating oneself in a world of absolute al-
terability and hegemony. It is easy to grasp how such a construction
moved from fantasy to imperial epic.
There is no need to view the Middle Ages as an era that fore-
shadowed the Muslim–Christian misunderstanding of later centuries,
although twentieth-century authors did delve into the ancient propa-
gandistic effort.66 Just as there had been “a Jewish question” in Europe,
the “problem of Islam” needed to be circumscribed and dealt with. It
took a foundational discourse, largely based on polemics and misrepre-
sentations, to shape Europeans’ sense of a prevailing identity. It turned
out that Islam, like Christianity, had formalized a spiritual mono-
theistic principle with little vested interest in other faiths. At the peak
of their civilization, Arabs and Muslims were preoccupied with self-
critique. Rhetoric and theology slowly took over the hard sciences, es-
pecially after the split between Sunnis and Shias.67 The Other remained
for Muslims a non-proposition until after the Crusades and, later on,
during the various Western colonial enterprises in Muslim lands. The
religious and epistemic principles elaborated in the Islamic world be-
tween the eighth and fourteenth centuries validated a true and exem-
plary universalism. This was universalism at its apex: Islam was global,
while cultures remained local. The expansion of the Muslim world,
and the triumphalist attitude that surely accompanied it, have always
posed a challenge to Christian civilization. No one can forget the image
of the Caliph Umar, dressed in a simple camel-hair garment, entering
Jerusalem (still called by its Roman name, Aelia) without bloodshed,
in 638 (year 16 in the Muslim calendar) and going straight to the
Temple mount to clean it with his own hands because local Christians
had turned the sacred place into a garbage dump.68 By contrast, when
Jerusalem fell to marauding Frankish armies in July 1099, signs of the
massacre remained visible throughout the city at Christmas. At the
al-Aqsa Mosque, also known as Solomon’s Temple, more than 70,000
Muslim scholars and other civilians were slaughtered in a matter of
days.69 When the Christians refused to touch the Muslim dead, deemed
“unbelievers,” the Jews were left to do the cleaning up. Afterwards, the
Jews were sold into slavery or held, together with their sacred books,
for ransom.70 Thus the Orient – the Muslim one at least – represented a
threat that needed to be rendered powerless, but not before its useful-
ness was exploited.
From this perspective, it makes sense that the figure of the Oriental
was conceived as an ideal literary subject. The narrative of Western
will-to-power, couched in the ideologies of humanism and the Enlight
enment, is now understood as intellectual and theological defensive-
ness. From the outset, the projection of Orientalism has presupposed
a special bond between the validity of European culture – which rests
more on contingency than on absolutes – and the ongoing process of
historical integration. While the French Revolution replaced the Ancien
Régime, for example, it did not put an end to French civilization per se.
A relationship existed, but it needed a new narrative.
Underlying the Western ideological/political work is a concept of
law based on a subversive reading of Islam. From the “Infidels” of
the Middle Ages to the “jihadists” of the twenty-first century, Muslims
have found themselves cut off from the spectrum that encompasses
reason, ethics, law, politics, and science. Yet within this vision, lines
are blurred. Indeed, as Christianity has continued to lose its bearings
in Europe, it needs more and more to find a different set of absolutes
with which to define itself. That is why, for example, the industrial
and technological revolutions corroborate the Christian notion of be-
ing reborn, yet reborn in a centreless world. It is no wonder that these
revolutions first took place in Anglo-Saxon nations, where the original
model of Christianity had been reshaped into a personal connection
with God – just as has always been the case in Islam. Interestingly, it
is also in England that the word “Orientalism” was first coined and
acknowledged as such by academic institutions, in mid-sixteenth cen-
tury. The word appeared in France much later, in a journal, Magasin
Encyclopédique XXV (November 1810), 122, in reference to Father Pau
linus, a scholar in Oriental languages.
In the hands of ideologues, enlightened thinkers, and colonialists,
Europe’s perception of itself turned out to be parochial, if not sim-
plistic. The dichotomies produced by efforts to fathom the Orient are
reminiscent of exclusivist categorizations perpetuated in old empires
or modern totalitarian regimes. For example, a Maghrebi immigrant in
contemporary France remains very much the Other, while a Korean or

Canadian worker does not. According to Johan Galtung, this attitude
is determined by specific factors: (1) space: the West is the centre of
the world; (2) time: any process, including a crisis, is unidirectional;
(3) knowledge: the world is better understood by the lowest common
denominators; (4) man–nature: man necessarily rules over nature;
(5) man–God: there is a fundamental principle that rules over man; and
(6) man–man: equality cannot be achieved and has no bearing on the
historical process.71 It comes as no surprise that Western nations have
been vying with one another over the blurred vision they still have of
themselves and the Orient, especially the Muslim one. What is most
fascinating is that, early on, travels and expeditions to the Orient were
deemed to be essentially homecomings, mainly on Biblical grounds.
In the field of literature, this false universalism might be attributed
to an untamed imagination. In all types of literature (literary, histori-
cal, religious, diplomatic, etc.), Arab characters have always appeared
untrustworthy, sectarian, cowardly, and oversexed. Sometimes they are
simply invisible, as in Albert Camus’s works of fiction where the name
“Algerian” never appears in stories taking place in Algeria.72 Western
writing is reactive and tends to focus on reinforcing a sense of both
historical and material identity, especially in a post–French Revolution
culture that slowly became profane and secularized. That sense is
usually stronger still when the writer has extensive contact with the
Orient. Even those who held favourable views of the Muslim world,
such as André Gide and Jean Genet, underlined incompatibilities be-
tween Islam and the humanistic, enlightened intellectual legacies of
their own culture.73 Rana Kabbani, in her monograph Europe’s Myths
of Orient, writes about what could be dubbed a metafiction: “In the
European narration of the Orient, there was a deliberate stress on those
qualities that made the East different from the West, exiled into an ir-
retrievable ‘otherness.’”74 It is as if collective identity, be it Christian,
nationalistic, or capitalist-driven, could only be fulfilled in an arena of
conflict or domination. Yet what is fascinating here is that the conflict
itself becomes a form of socialization. It brings cohesion to a culture
best described by its technological achievements as well as by its gift
for destroying itself and its surroundings. Part of the fascination with
the Orient was a rejection of how Europe was transforming itself. In
such a crisis of antagonistic cultures, it is in the field of literature that
one may best trace the misperceptions related to the “Other” as well
as world views that explain the objectivity of Orientalism. One result
was that the perceptions around power and sex, in French literature
at least, integrated their own legacies to form a distinct genre. From
the first translation of The Arabian Nights75 to the recent academic dis-
putes concerning who is an “arabologue” (Arabologist) and who is an
“arabisant” (Arabist),76 French culture never got over the measure of
its Orientalist identity. The great movement of Western culture was re-
drawn – not necessarily questioned – by Edward Said when he tackled
humanism and it bourgeois selfhood and tried to link aesthetics with
politics. Said dropped the category of the Oriental, and its deconstruc-
tive questions, so that he could dramatize rather than resolve what
Orientalism continues to be.
3 Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies
My aim in this chapter is to pursue my conversation with Orientalism

by demonstrating more specifically how Edward Said made manifest
the political and cultural practices of Arab and Muslim representa-
tion, as well as by examining the impact of his ideas on postcolonial
studies. The formation of knowledge in the West about the Muslim
East came to the forefront with Said’s Orientalism (1978). Of course,
Arab accounts and criticisms of Orientalism1 had long been present in
Near Eastern intellectual debate – in the work of the Egyptian reformer
Muhammad Haykal in the early twentieth century, for example, and
more recently in that of Syrian philosopher Sadik al Azm. In my view,
Said’s book belongs to a genre of Arab authorship that is time-specific
– rooted in the 1970s, when Arab identity and representation were
still seeking stability on the world scene as well as at home. The hu-
miliating Syrian–Egyptian defeat of October 1973, the headlong rush
towards terrorism among Palestinian leaders, the reality of Arab pup-
pet regimes caught up in the proxy politics of the Cold War, and an
Islamic revolution in a non-Arab nation all became structuring motifs
in cultural criticism. Much has been written about the extent to which
Orientalism was somehow tendentious. Said was accused of romanti-
cizing Oriental victims of Western ideologies and colonial enterprises,
of being “selective” with his sources, of ignoring issues of social class
and glossing over ethnicity and faith, of simplifying the intellectual
relationship between discourse and domination, of overlooking the
disjunctive configuration of the “Oriental” intellectual who lives in
the West, and of omitting Eastern intellectuals from his analysis and
thereby perpetuating the stereotype that Orientals cannot speak for
themselves. All of these comments are valid and help open up new
Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies 55
readings of the West–East dialectic beyond the arguments proposed by

Said. Yet this perhaps ignores the fact that Said, as a critic of imperial-
ism, was a minority voice (a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem) who
struggled to transform the Western academic world from within. His
scholarship was indeed an intrusion, one that rejected the postmod-
ern premise that all knowledge is tainted and complicit. Whether his
achievement remains undiminished is irrelevant: he succeeded in ini-
tiating an “irritative process of critique.”2 Orientalism generated a great
deal of blowback. A different side of the story was being told, and the
book’s thesis upset people in all walks of academic life. Initially, the
harshest reactions came from a Western scholar, Bernard Lewis, and
an Eastern scholar, Aijaz Ahmad: the full spectrum of academic and
ethnic commentary was reacting to Said’s writing. Regardless of the
book’s many shortcomings, what the critics failed to grasp was that
Said was writing from within the Western academic tradition and was
bringing together humanistic values in an effort to replay the decon-
structionist battle on the native terrain of Orientalism.
Guilt and various destabilizing factors factored heavily in the criti-
cal reception of Orientalism. Setting aside any anti-Western posturing,
Said’s premise was clear enough: knowledge cannot be dissociated
from the exercise of power. He actually took Foucault’s critique a step
further by questioning the centrality of the sovereign subject. But Said
left this question unanswered: What was the epistemic root that led
to the manufacturing of the Orient? What worked with respect to the
Industrial Revolution in Europe, and the rise of the bourgeois class at
the expense of the working class, disappeared in the blind spot of self-
representation of the Oriental. Western powers manufactured history
into historicism. For example, for the French throughout the Maghreb,
understanding Islamic codes of law helped them administer their sub-
jects in ways that seemed fair to the colonial power. Critics who excori-
ated Said for his vertical analysis of the historical complicity of political
establishments and academics were probably struggling with current
issues relating to their own complicity with global oppression, espe-
cially in the Middle East. It is hardly surprising that Bernard Lewis,
whose Zionist position informs his work,3 underscored the contrast
between Said’s pronounced pro-Palestinian discourse and his own.4
According to Lewis, Said’s anti-Western dogmas reflected a very weak
grasp of Orientalist science. Likewise Aijaz Ahmad, taking a Marxist
perspective, tended to relate Said’s argument to a discourse descriptive
of cultural hegemony (much along the lines of Gramsci’s “dominant
culture” paradigm) emanating from the elite institutions of American

academe. According to Aijaz, Said was an intellectual comprador op-
erating within an unabashed Western cultural ideology. One lesson to
be learned from the fallout from Said’s work is that conflict is a valu-
able asset in a world too prone to recycling its own truths. Since Said’s
work, a conventional reading of Western epistemology has been im-
possible, although he acknowledged that his thesis was derived from
Foucault’s analyses developed in L’archéologie du savoir.5 Said avoided
categories, reasoning that they would amount to dogmas, and in doing
so he laid the groundwork for his own indictment. For example, the
Australian philosopher Arran Gare underscores that Said “has virtu-
ally presupposed that there is no such thing as the understanding of
cultures, that statements or representations can be nothing but exercis-
es of power as parts of discursive formations.”6 The charge that Said’s
argument applies to his own book is weak at best, given that most
Orientalist literature had been written earlier, while the colonial enter-
prise was ongoing. Orientalist misrepresentations thus echoed into the
present day, becoming mechanisms of self-referentiality. By definition
the Orientalist ideology could not understand other cultures as such,
because that approach was grounded in the praxis of occupation itself.
Knowledge was a product of local interactions and – to some extent – of
determined measures of understanding. For example, Montesquieu’s
and Voltaire’s old theme of Oriental despotism re-emerged during the
nineteenth century within the framework of alleged Islamic fanaticism.
After all, in Algeria, India, and Sudan, jihad had been fought against
the French and British Christian “infidels.”7 This provided sufficient
material for politicians and the media in Europe to elaborate on the
“essential” violence of Islam. Yet by tracing the supposed weaknesses
of North African cultures with regard to religion, the French revealed
their own brand of cultural imperialism. Said emphasized this par-
ticular point: “To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate
it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny
autonomy to ‘it’ – the Oriental country – since we know it and it exists
in a sense as we know it.”8 In this respect the Western powers were able
to confirm that they were rational, developed, humane, and democrat-
ic, while the Orient was the exact opposite. The Orient was described
as unchanging, uniform, and impervious to political evolution. Most
importantly, the Orient was able to assess itself only through Western
input. It is interesting, and rather ironic, that all of these passive and
belittling representations paralleled a weak socio-political situation
at home. Even while the French were engaging in a full-out military

campaign to “pacify” all of Algeria, they were defeated in the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870, losing the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in
the process; the following year, the Paris Commune nearly overthrew
the entire regime and its institutions, and was only suppressed after
widespread carnage. So it seemed that colonialism was providing cor-
rectives to a debilitated French democracy.
Of course, examined from Said’s perspective on epistemic violence,
colonialism and Orientalism together overturned the assumptions of
humanist discourse. His critique emphasizes the contingency of a total-
izing and capitalistic paradigm, as in this famous passage: “It is there-
fore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient,
was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocen-
tric.”9 Orientals were left to restore some kind of historical agency by
jeopardizing their own history and traditions, as well as by appropriat-
ing the colonizers’ models – a phenomenon analysed by Albert Memmi
half a century ago.10 Yet the colonial condition left the colonized with
one asset – they were able to identify and challenge Western world val-
ues from within, thus exemplifying the Marxist view that economic ex-
ploitation fuels historical conflict. The Orientals shaped their resistance
– dramatically so – with Western tools. This historical evidence, this
workable truth, escaped Said, as if he preferred to dwell on the idea
that the Orient blindly followed everything Western, whether under
duress or not. It was not just a matter of mimicry.11 Resistance seeks to
counterbalance the dynamics of oppression; it also operates like a cat-
egorical imperative that shapes Otherness. What merits attention here
is the fact of collective awareness, or the Maghrebi community’s capac-
ity to reinvent itself when confronted with the fiction of Orientalism.
This was no easy feat, if only because the French language buttressed
colonial nationalism. The Arabic language, meanwhile, collapsed into
a problematic topos riven by the fault lines of religion – Arabic was the
language of the Islamic faith – and ethnicity – it was seen as valid to
ask to what extent Maghrebi peoples were Arabs. North African in-
tellectuals were left to struggle for symbolic order, and this included
disseminating Western truths (they were educated in French schools
and published by Parisian publishing houses) as well as challenging
Western self-entitlement by bearing witness to historical discrimination
and exploitation. Their no longer “Oriental” identity relied on the very
object they were trying to expel. No wonder a leading Algerian writer,
Jean Amrouche, developed the myth of the éternel Jugurtha (eternal
Jugurtha),12 in direct opposition to Albert Camus’s éternelle Méditerranée

(eternal Mediterranean).13 Both positions encapsulate the idea of puri-
ty that stemmed from Orientalism. These labels consolidated principles
as if they were ideological straitjackets. That is why Maghrebi intellec-
tuals and political leaders – most of whom were Marxists – argued for
a rethinking of selfhood and national identity. But was it truly a course
they had chosen, or had they been hurled down that path by Orientalist
knowledge production? Said sought to demonstrate that the national
histories of formerly colonized cultures and countries could not be
grasped outside the Orientalist context in which they had been pro-
duced: “The boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of
projected inferiority and strength, the range of work done, the kinds of
characteristic features ascribed to the Orient: all these testify to a willed
imaginative and geographic division made between East and West, and
lived through during many centuries.”14
In a sense, the postcolonial condition brings to light the repercus-
sions of unities that are separate but not distinct, mostly in relation to
Maghrebi immigration to the former métropole and the economic neo-
colonial bonds that have joined France to its former colonies. The role
of the Orientalist legacy in the construction of knowledge stands at the
core of the power dynamic. Orientalism was essentially directed at the
conquest and occupation of the Muslim East; today’s postcolonial dis-
course maintains the record of knowledge, but in a state of crisis both
for the Maghrebi intellectual and for France. Borrowing from Marxist
rhetoric, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak talks of “surrender to the control-
ling power of neo-capitalism.”15 Postcolonial writers are not soulless,
nor are they commodified subjects, and above all they do not need to
uphold liberal humanism as it exists in contemporary Europe. Indeed
it is France that is preoccupied with mapping its own cultural contours
and pinning down its political principles.16 Orientalism is effective in-
sofar as its intended result is to resolve contradictions between lived
realities and representation. Now that both France and the Maghreb are
trying to come to terms with their cultural differences, the past is prov-
ing to be an unreliable resource when it is not complicating their narra-
tives outright. Self-absorbed cultural practices find themselves drawn
into question by the language itself. Indeed, representation exposes the
limitations of the subject matter. If French literature sought to define
itself as canonical – that is, as a key source of ideas and values – then
Maghrebi writers in French would perpetuate this. But what is called
francophone literature is still largely fuelled by a resistance that calls
for new interpretations. Postcolonial identity itself is beset with issues

of displacement and alternative understanding. It comes as no surprise
that in the twenty-first century, French universalism has yet to extend
itself to all groups in the French-speaking world, including French citi-
zens who belong to ethnic minorities.
If it is true that recapturing the language of the former colonial
power reflects cultural dislocation, one can add that there is something
utopian in the very idea of writing and thinking in a non-native cul-
ture. Maghrebi intellectuals, because they are critical of homogenizing
practices derived from a colonial excursus, ask their readers to pay
attention to national identity, not so much as a token of their antico-
lonial credentials, but rather as a reorientation and as a transforma-
tive force. To understand this particular utopian paradigm, one must
first understand the role that Orientalism played in the nineteenth-
century Western landscape. John MacKenzie argues that Orientalism
developed as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and to the many
counter-discourses (mainly in the arts) that stemmed from it.17 Europe’s
cultural uniformity had been shattered, and the Orient proved an out-
let for emerging dreams of unity and meaning.18 Meanwhile, the twin
scourges of racism and economic exploitation in the colonies helped
mask the twin failures of French republicanism in the métropole and
universalism across the empire. It seems that Orientalism had been de-
signed in terms of limits as well as fiction. Normative French history,
which relied for its authority on the (eminently exportable) ideals of
the Révolution and the fervour of French culture’s mission civilisatrice,
found itself outmatched by the new possibilities brought about by the
ideological shift. In a quite paradoxical fashion, the Orient became the
centre of what was missing in the West. This may be how colonialism
eventually shaped French national identity. Almost no one belonging
to France’s political and intellectual establishments questioned that
Algeria was an unconditional part of the fatherland. In this regard,
Algeria was both the real and the allegorical locus where nation and
empire intersected. Like drama, which has the power to make present
rather than just narrate, Orientalism throughout the Maghreb took the
place of the missing object, the repressed representation of stability and
unified identity. Like a mirror, postcolonial literature enacts its trauma
in a semiotic relationship between history and text, life and story. But
does putting the past into words do justice to the colonial reality and
its cultural and social impact? It is safe to say that Orientalism required
of non-Westerners (called the “minority” in the empire) that they forget
who they were and aspire to the norms contained in someone else’s
history. In 1925, during the golden age of French colonialism, Paul
Valéry pointed out that “the Greeks and the Romans showed us how
to deal with the monsters of Asia, how to treat them by analysis, how
to extract from them their quintessence.”19 The idea of reclaiming the
Other’s cultures illuminates a fundamentally disjunctive perception of
race, language, religion, and nationality. The modern manner in which
Orientalism operates assumes that one myth supports another in an in-
finite chain. Thus, the violent postcolonial inscription that the Oriental
lacks a mother tongue derives from the fact that, as Said put it, “[he’s]
written about.”20 It seems, then, that Orientalism can be symbolized by
a fable, one that replaces remembrance of language with a social or-
der based on symbolic power. All that Maghrebi writers can then do
is speak the historical outrage that touches both memory and identity.
Postcolonial literature has become the tool that allows the metonym-
ic perception of continuity by and through language, and by agency
rather than passive victimization. The racist premises of Orientalism,
combined with the crude logic of capitalism, have been turned into
a meaningless commodity as a result of the essentialist position that
postcolonial writers must take. They must free themselves from the
mesmerizing stare of Western subjectivity, if only to rethink the limita-
tions of European aesthetic norms. In a quite phenomenological way,
language engages human consciousness, not just human identity. In
that sense the colonial language becomes the experience of home; the
whole postcolonial self is that which synthesizes the past and the pres-
ent. The francophone author writes against the imperialist’s belittle-
ment (based on an axiomatics of inferiority) and does so in precisely
the field of interpolation that shapes French culture: literature. It must
be understood that in France, one of the many purposes of literature
is to continue the imperialist project; in this regard, the contemporary
political concept of francophonie (the French-speaking world) has sup-
plied Jacobinic France with the narcissistic illusion of transnational cul-
tural exchanges. Most of all, the genealogy of Orientalism that posits
that Orientals have achieved little culturally pursues its own narrative
course, which informs the myth of origin, or rather revises it by turning
language and fiction into emancipatory concepts. Unlike postmodern
literature, postcolonial literature does not simply problematize itself
here and now; it also seeks to tear down Western cultural benevolence.
For example, there are hardly any breakaway or avant-garde writers
from the Maghreb in the postcolonial movement. They must always
consider their own location and dig through the strata of ideology de-
posited by the colonial period before they can find their own literary
voice. In a sense, the creative and aesthetic endeavour must make a spe-
cific contribution to an emerging literature as a distillation of pure ex-
perience, opposed to what I dub the second nature of revisiting history.
As a parallel, this reminds us that Wittgenstein was able to do philoso-
phy without ever quoting philosophers. In a perfect world, the postco-
lonial writer would be able to rid himself/herself of the garments of the
postcolonial condition. And it is this challenge that feeds the conflict
between what the postcolonial is and what culture is. Essentially, cul-
ture draws its legitimacy from historicism rather than from history.21
This reminds us that Orientalism was truly modern because it was
mainly about self-discovery, even while it recast old terminology into
a translation of différence. Orientalism’s challenge was to enclose hu-
manistic values within its configuration of discourse formation, if only
because philologists viewed the Orient as the cradle of all languages.
As for the Orientals themselves, they were simply obliterated as a neg-
ative deconstruction (the difference of différence) and were often per-
ceived as either subservient or uncontrollable. After independence, they
found themselves in transition, or what falls under the term “hybridity,”
and French became the language in which the knowledge of Maghreb
cultures was produced.22 Francophonie, hybridity, and métissage are not
happy coinages, because even though the transcoding is useful, it still
points to unequal encounters. Even so, these terms gained academic
currency, mainly because they entailed a realignment of literary epis-
temic grids. The centrality of France in North American and British
universities has lost some of its conceptual grip; French postcolonial
studies themselves bear on the alien and remain a phantom category.
Why do the boundaries of the national paradigm not apply to so-called
francophone literature? The intent here is not so much to contextualize
literature in terms of ethnic dynamics as it is to question the identity
taxonomy itself. In short, if literature is an expression of national iden-
tity, why are Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, Congolese,
Ivoiriens, Haitians, and Québécois all lumped together under the fran-
cophone banner? Is it because a true literary reinscription cannot flour-
ish within the colonial fracture? Probably not, because of the historical
disjunction between France and the Anglo-Saxon world, as well as the
misleading implied assertion that what is analysed is and will remain
the same always and everywhere. Comparative approaches provide a
relevant gloss on the problematics, which in theory do not exhaust the
postcolonial world of representations. The challenge is to reopen the

wounds without succumbing to a nostalgia that dwells on origins, ar-
chives, languages, différence, technological advances, and so on. Still,
this moment of transcultural crisis folds into a narrative of identity
and authority. For example, the contemporary global paradigm fails
to disrupt colonial patterns, not just in terms of economic policies but
in terms of cultural productions as well. It is not surprising that post-
colonial analytical strategies work better in the West than in the “rest.”
It is also accepted that the transition from the colonial to the postcolo-
nial has never indicated, directly or by allusion, greater autonomy, sus-
tainable academe, or any normalization of the curricular space. What
is called “postcolonial” at universities in Birmingham (England) and
Los Angeles is astonishingly “national” in Algiers, Delhi, Nairobi, and
Port-au-Prince. By failing to distinguish between the various shades of
native cultures, does postcolonial theory function as a retroactive tool
of ideological correctness? Does postcolonial studies perform the trick
of scrubbing prejudice and propaganda from history while leaving the
stain of cultural domination untouched? Any doubt left in one’s mind
serves as further evidence that the asymmetrical and limited range
of postcolonial theory simply does not address the configuration of
power. Once postcolonial literature is read as “resisting,” “subversive,”
“transgressive,” “polyphonic,” “eccentric,” “transnational,” and so on,
the political and intellectual threads of inquiry snap.23 Said suggested
that Orientalism taught us more about the Orientalists’ own cultures
(i.e., British, French, German) than about the “Orientals”; it is nearly as
puzzling to note that postcolonial studies has, to some extent, become
a discourse centred on the crisis in humanities in Western academe.
The blanks of oppression are never filled in completely, as if literary in-
terpretation were fuelling the too familiar cultural cycles. The native’s
“discursive resistance” endorses the theory’s central tenets and man-
ages them in a fashion reminiscent of the historical outrage that made
the articulation of identity and memory impossible. More than thirty
years after the founding of postcolonial studies, it can be safely argued
that critical discourse has failed to take to task the ahistorical posturing
and the idealization of texuality, as if the postcolonial condition did
not include the political here and now, as if narratives overrode facts.
In short, postcolonial studies has sent us back to a world of representa-
tion.24 A minority academic in North America does not enjoy something
“extra” thanks to the position he or she is speaking from; his or her po-
sition implies, rather, that whiteness is the default. Simply put, are not
minority academics othering themselves because their race and history

are marked out for special notice? Africans, Arabs, Asians, Caribbean
people, and so on strive to make their historical narrative more impor-
tant relative to what remains dominant and evident and requires no
explanation. Spivak is more straightforward when she writes that “we
cannot ‘learn about’ the subaltern only by reading literary texts, or mu-
tatis mutandis, sociohistorical documents.”25
With latent Orientalism spanning politics and culture, it was neces-
sary to remain vigilant against strategies of disenfranchisement. The
Orientalist discourse had a strong tendency to reduce meaning and
intentions. Also, Orientalism could accommodate the illusion that the
colonial undertaking involved more than political domination and cul-
tural erasure. Metaphors of “reason,” “principle,” and “responsibility”
only highlighted the West’s compromised value system, which in the
twentieth century spawned two world wars and a Cold War that held
mankind’s fate in the balance. Interpretation was bound by the reach
of Western self-absorption, especially after post-structuralists read our
post-Marxist world in terms of categories of culture and desire. The old
non-capitalist lands, which stretched from Africa to Asia, found them-
selves split into subverted representations of themselves; then through
independence they exported wave after wave of emigrants along the
political and cultural fault lines leading to the métropole. Conversely,
in Western academe, postcolonial theory functions as a vehicle that af-
fects the text as much as it is affected by it. The vehicle of meaning
that is a book works to maintain dominant interests (in terms of the
market) and to express cultural sedimentations (in terms of nation for-
mation). Aspiring to be more than a set of representations, the theory
ends up being subverted by the ontological gap between hierarchies
and divisions. The “subaltern” does not need to be “saved,” and the
rational, enlightened principles of Western academe can be shown to be
counter-intuitive, especially when Maghrebi literature in French finds
itself awaiting completion – translation on the French cultural scene,
and legitimacy in the Maghreb.
The end of empire, just like that of hegemonic theoretical discourse,
is never merely a national affair, or at least not one set in a particular
cultural frame.26 Orientalism used to be concerned with narrow, un-
warranted assumptions. Uncannily, the postcolonial discourse tends
to focus on a small assemblage of literary texts that rarely represent
the people of the land. The most powerful cultural statements are of-
ten made by diasporic authors. The issue of truth and its complicity
or randomness vis-à-vis the question of origins or nativeness is best

illustrated by the case of Salman Rushdie. Can his fiction “truly” por-
tray what India is today? Or Islam? The prestige and authority granted
to exiled writers at the expense of native writers amounts to a restric-
tion of the critique. Because of this, postcolonial theory leads to the re-
alization that there cannot be any truth-claim in the figuration of the
Oriental Other. Just as Orientalism used to proclaim that the Orient
was “an entirely coherent phenomenon,”27 contemporary academic
discourse in the West finds itself shored up by strategies of unwitting
exclusions. The postcolonial discourse, in its many guises (Marxist,
feminist, deconstructionist, transnational, etc.), is called upon to ho-
mogenize itself into a single signifier of dissenting voices penned as
modern chronicles of displacement. Yet the theory expands on hack-
neyed political positions based on a model of assimilation that is un-
ruffled by its own deficient knowledge of the Other’s cultures. And
meanwhile, the postcolonial condition projects itself in worlds of inter-
actions, mainly against the foreclosure of political and economic hege-
monies. If, as Rushdie puts it, “to see things plainly, you have to cross
a frontier,”28 why is it that the ruling ideas come from a West at peace
with itself? Are we not faced with a collective Third World bildungsro-
man that perpetuates the West’s literary machine? One could argue that
the Oriental or native culture was transformed by transnationalism and
by cosmopolitan schools of thought but that the “inferior,” “margin-
al,” or “eccentric” positions of natives have remained untouched. This
is the core of the critical discourse of a scholar like Spivak regarding
the condition of women in contemporary India, for example. Reason
in postcolonial public life is deployed in a different manner, and this
needs to be addressed as a legitimate issue rather than simply in terms
of what Kant, in discussing non-European peoples, called human “im-
maturity.” Intellectuals like Bourdieu, Cixous, Derrida, and Lyotard, all
of whom enjoyed a strong bond with Algeria, did break away from
the conservative French continental theoretical machine, but did they
advocate a critique of narratives of identity? Derrida and Cixous were
too busy “locating” their autonomous subjectivity, mainly from an ex-
ilic perspective. Cixous believes that women have their own story to
tell, and she rightly assumes that there are many ways of being in the
world (as a woman, as Jewish, as Algerian, as French, as a lesbian, for
example.) with one’s own voice. Yet she, too, falls for the universalist
brand of feminism that bypasses the natives and thereby historicizes
them as a permanent minority in their own condition. Strangely, it
seems that for Cixous, Algeria is the name for a non-home, even while
it is also the core of her creativity. See, for example, how she has associ-
ated Algeria with a dead past: “When I walked with my brother on the
hot trails of Oran, I felt the sole of my body caressed by the welcom-
ing palms of the country’s ancient dead, and the torment of my soul
was assuaged.”29 This is probably how the pendulum swings back to
historical determinations that draw out systems of values and mean-
ings: colonial guilt on the one hand, cultural capital on the other. Those
closer to the postcolonial condition – Derrida, for example, or Cixous –
remain firmly bound to overarching narratives: they continue to assert
their authority over Algeria. Basically, they never left Algeria because
they never arrived there: place and people are at best empirical in their
writings. Cixous toys with the question of nationality, mourning “her”
Algeria even while calling it not-home. But she also steers clear of the
hard political questions – the impact of colonialism on the colonized’s
identity – and all the while her poetical writing embellishes a strictly
individual experience of a woman and her career. Cixous even dwells
on some providential Arab–Jewish enmity, resorting to an archaic type
of Orientalism that reinforces both dualism (time and language) and
the temporality of repetition (at best, the two peoples are supposedly
doomed to ignore each other).30 This sort of Orientalism prevents any
postcolonial postulate of modernity from arising. Where is that third
culture that might mediate the dialogue between the colonial and the
postcolonial? By this account, postcolonial theory closely resembles an
ideology, a force that need not be proven true or false but simply lived
out like a constant tautology. Past or recent struggles of race, gender, and
social class in the Maghreb account for little in the dynamics of Western
theory. Writers find themselves aligned with established critical orien-
tations: Assia Djebar is anticolonial by historical design, Abdelkebir
Khatibi is a Moroccan secular deconstructionist, Boualem Sansal is an
Algerian Céline, and Malika Mokeddem is a self-appointed rational,
anti-Islam feminist. It is as though the Oriental Other has been turned
again into a cultural fetish, newly arrived at through a discursive mind-
set ordered by the unabashed practice of theory that corresponds to no
real-world doxa. Where does the postcolonial subject fit in this picture?
Likely, as a defined formal position within latent Orientalism represen-
tation. The most glaring instances do not even lay claim to questioning:
the Muslim woman is a permanent victim (a reading that proliferates
among francophone/postcolonial writers). In the views of these writ-
ers, Africans cannot escape poverty by themselves, the French language
is a democratic asset, and pre-colonial history constitutes the “romantic

era” of the formerly colonized31 (when the former métropole and the for-
mer colonies are not both deemed postcolonial). Surprisingly, the post-
colonial discourse has flattened the heterogeneity of its subject matter,
thereby diminishing the impact of theory. The critical narratives fab-
ricate cultural explanations at the expense of culture and geopolitical
history. It is astounding, for example, that present-day fundamentalists
throughout North Africa and the Middle East, both religious and ethnic,
are keen on recycling postcolonial rhetoric by raising issues of identity,
history, colonization, native language, mystical actuality, and the like;
they rethink history without any dialectics because zones of exchange
no longer exist. Could it be that the postcolonial discourse, just like
that of Orientalism itself, is caught in the double-bind of power analy-
sis? The condemnation of repression emerges from a collaboration with
repression (if only intellectual), which is why postcolonial discourse
refers to violence while failing to bring it to the point of crisis. A case in
point is the painful silence of academics throughout the United States
(apart from the usual suspects: Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Juan
Cole, Rashid Khalidi, etc.) vis-à-vis that country’s disastrous Middle
East foreign policy – not just the war in Iraq, but also the support for
authoritarian and grossly incompetent regimes throughout the Muslim
world, and continuous lobbying against a viable Palestinian state.32
In Western institutions, both political and academic, Orientalism is
still at work, fuelled by Arab chaos and collective religious failures. The
mechanism of postcolonialism is thus directed not towards recognition
but rather towards repetition. The old ethnocentrism of Western science
has superseded the critical vigilance that arose after the Second World
War and the era of independence. The “programmatic anti-humanism”
of postcolonial theory fails to stand the test of cultural relativism. It is
not surprising that the key concept of hybridity is always applied by
the formerly colonized to the West, not among peoples formerly under
Western rule. One illustration of how hybridity truly works is Frantz
Fanon, a black Martiniquan French citizen who chose to become an
Algerian nationalist. Even now, one can only wonder whether there is
such a thing as a fixed self or a fixed culture outside the Western frame.
How can human rights and macroeconomics be applied to the emer-
gent Muslim world? This would assume that we have no reason to in-
vest postcolonial theory with the privileges of radical explanation. The
battle between latent Orientalism and postcolonial theory has boiled
down to amicable encounters on the terrain of rebound conservatism

and cosmopolitan window-dressing.33
Once again, the Orient becomes a multifaceted topos that hinges on
the impossibility of representing the unrepresentable. This is what Said
was alluding to when he referred to “the Muslim as a native informant
for the Orientalist.”34 The order of history and ideas remains Western;
the former coercive structures have been replaced by symbolic power.
For example, Maghrebi intellectuals are expected to embrace Western
democratic values, but they cannot be perceived as critical of Zionism35
or as calling into question secularism and how it is played against Islam
throughout Europe. In that sense, their literary production is bound
to feed on both cultural expectations and the sensational.36 Concerted
criticism of postcolonial studies is nothing new;37 what makes it a chal-
lenge within the problematics of Orientalism is that it has failed to
escape history’s reflexivity, especially with regard to the mystique of
nation and race. The tricky problem with postcolonial scholarship in
North America is that one cannot indict a specific author or school of
thought: the whole discipline conforms to the protocol of the “good”
discourse rather than the subversive one. And by “good” I mean one
that allows for an ability to retell a story (about a minority, a subaltern,
an immigrant, etc.) in such a way that it becomes a political act. It is
not surprising that postcolonial scholars dabble in history, religion, law,
and perhaps literature at the same time, and in the name of the post-
colonial subject. The scholarship taps into a never-ending narrative of
trauma, loss, infantilization, and so on, and all the while this hydra-like
discipline feeds on a methodological and epistemological challenge.
The postcolonial paradigm has indeed been inspiring, but only up to
a point. One crucial question remains: Can one truly grasp how global
culture works? No one is calling for reformed theorists, although this
would be an original way to begin. Nor are graduate students expected
to produce classroom ethnography on the lived lives of the postcolonial
Other. The irony of most postcolonial scholarship is that it is not just
politically correct – and thereby fails to address the entanglements and
compromises of postcolonial reality – but culturally inert as well. In its
mature and ideal forms, the postcolonial discourse has created its own
pantheon of idols with the power to enable the recycling of narratives,
thus denying the construct of the identity of the Orient. Rushdie’s The
Satanic Verses (1988), for example, does not read as a subversive novel:
the author’s skill was in trivializing the imaginary of Indian peasants
in order to cater – with a hefty dose of magic realism – to the tastes of

the London intelligentsia.
In the end, it becomes a dogmatic untertaking for writers to place
identity, hybridity, and religion at the centre of their writing, as if they
were merely engaged in a cross-cultural endeavour. Because these agen-
das come together, Maghrebi authors are subject to cultural reconstitu-
tion, just as in the case of the much-disputed process of Orientalism. In
a challenging reality, multiplicity, notwithstanding différence, is forged
into tools of expansion. It is not just that books are published and read in
the West; this spectacular reality of cultural consolidation also takes the
form of hyperbolic prejudice. Even Gareth Griffith, a pioneer and advo-
cate of postcolonial studies, recognizes, following in Fanon’s footsteps,
that “it is this world in its newly mythicised and essentialized form
which becomes the specific appropriated terrain of the new colonial
elite in projects of self-justification and self-aggrandisement.”38 More
than in any other scholarly endeavour, working through the frame of
postcolonial theory obliges one to operate with abstractions and with
experiments with the materiality of textuality. It is probably not fair
to ask Western academics to retreat unusual distances when think-
ing about an Arab or Muslim presence in North African and Middle
Eastern fiction. A similar pattern manifests itself in what Toni Morrison
wrote about the resistance to difference within American culture: “What
became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose
to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegori-
cal, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of
Africanist presence.”39 These prejudices coalesce to support the thrust
of performative interpretations in a way that sublimates the minority –
African, Arab, Muslim, Asian – into an already there (déjà là) deciphered
script. Orientalism related to imperialism in the sense that it rethought
the dominant narratives of Western histories. The fundamental strategy
was to represent not so much the Other as the Other in his place. For
example, Orientalism in its core ideology could never have conceived
of mass immigration, or of individualism, which was perceived as the
private domain of the Western political and cultural establishment. The
Other was robbed of its identity, then turned into an allegory and left
without any mediating function. By recasting Maghrebi intellectuals
as voices of hybridity, multiculturalism, diaspora, transnationalism, or
the instability of the “cultural sign,” postcolonial theory has in more re-
cent times enacted a debate presided over by the universalistic terms of
Western literature. Maghrebi authors, should they stand their ground,
avoiding poses and prejudices, could be expected to discard the fetish

at work between the narrative of the individual and the fable of the
nation. So what their writing summons up here is the question of legiti-
macy in the field of world literature, against an occultation that mas-
querades as analysis and admiration.
Considering its scope, postcolonial theory should speculate on the
dissonant process of total history. It should confront such questions as
“Are such concepts as East and West, centre and margins, valid any lon-
ger?” instead of concentrating on transnational approaches in which,
for example, intellectual codependency (of subjects, areas, attributes,
linguistics, etc.) arises and blurs the critical focus. Postcolonial theory
dawned against the backdrop of collapsing ideologies and national
narratives, yet it still draws from dualistic assumptions and paradigms.
For example, it is astonishing that the concept of empire is deemed
Western both as historical representation and as essence. Confronted
with the pernicious benevolence of unthinking homogenization (of
colonized and colonizers, Muslims and Christians, the traditional and
the advanced, the oral and the written, and so on), Western academic
consciousness40 must keep away from both political correctness and pa-
tronage systems, as well as from hidden discourses that predicate his-
tory in a repetitive mode.41 Across the political spectrum in France, for
example, transformative identities, the utopia of representation, and
static aesthetic viewpoints have long hardened into ideological posi-
tions. Nothing is axiomatically assumed so long as cultures continue to
engage in an itinerary of recognition, more specifically of heuristic op-
erations that postulate the Orient as a liminal space where everything
starts again – democracy, civilization, human rights, capital ventures,
military campaigns, and the many narratives of Scheherazade. This may
not happen until theory and political discourse more generally have
ceased being illuminated by Orientalist protocols. The give-and-take
of former colonial regimes, often intended to obtain mutual consent,
cannot lay the groundwork for an operative theoretical model. Calling
Maghrebi writers “metropolitan hybrids,” for example, denies them
access to authorship.42 The literary and paradigmatic fields become so
overdetermined that diverse cultural inscriptions cannot occupy a con-
tinuous narrative space. In Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation (1969),
the main female character is not the abused mother but rather Céline,
a nurse who is also the narrator’s abused French lover. Interestingly,
Boudjedra wrote his doctoral dissertation on the French writer Céline,
which generates these questions: Whose repudiation is it? Is it that of
backward Algerian family traditions, or of French canonical literature?

In gaining the French language, Maghrebi postcolonial literature seems
to have lost something. It seems that in contemporary postcolonial
theory, any stringent oppositionality has been domesticated, if not neu-
tralized. The problem is deeper than that of merely conjuring up the
scapegoat figure of the Third World (renamed by the West “emerging
nations”) subject. Maghrebi authors cannot undo the exoticist drama-
tization of their différence. The core thesis of the postcolonial discourse
would present a more compelling case if it made an argument in the
name of truth against collective fantasy – that the Christian West is sav-
ing Muslim women from Muslim men, for example, or that Maghrebi
authors cannot escape the aesthetic illusio43 of consecration in the West.
Assia Djebar became a major writer overnight after being elected to the
Académie française even though she had never been awarded a major
French literary prize in her more than forty-year career. In a theory in
which memory, subjectivity, essence, language, and location are privi-
leged as the origins of culture, writers are left with no option but to pro-
duce countermyths and to plot narratives against the rather functionalist
frame of postcolonial discourse. In that sense, postcolonial theory, like
Orientalism, enjoys a material existence through its institutional appa-
ratus (universities, publishing houses, international institutions, etc.)
and its practices (codes of knowledge, course syllabi, semiotics, reader-
ship, etc.). It should not be surprising that joining together theory with
sociohistorical developments turns out to be a trite combination that
portrays the Other once more as an outsider. In France, Maghrebi writ-
ers are considered “francophone,” whereas in American academe, they
are “postcolonial subjects.” By keeping authors in the circle of postcolo-
nial arguments and epistemic priorities in this way, are we not reviving
the old Orientalist assumption that Arab/Muslim culture is confined
to colonial negotiations and thus plagiaristic by definition?44 For ex-
ample, the past is perceived as constitutive of the speaking subject, and
this sleight of hand allows a revisionary use of origin as hybrid or im-
pure: the Maghreb amounts to the sum total of its various colonial inva-
sions.45 Yet what remains non-negotiable in Maghrebi literature written
in French is the French ingredient itself. Thus, the subaltern can speak
indeed, and what he tries to articulate is that “Maghrebi” cannot be
simply equated with “postcolonial.” Postcolonial narratives do more
than speak to forms of “good” story/history: they signal the irreducible
plurality of voices.
4 Unfinished (Literary) Business:
Orientalism and the Maghreb
Central to my concept and approach to latent Orientalism are the

overlapping layers and oppositions produced in the specific relations
between France and the Maghreb, a matter that has received little cov-
erage in postcolonial studies. The difference between postcolonial stud-
ies and francophone studies is a question to which I will return when
I address the works of Maghrebi writers. Without wishing to indict it,
on close examination I find this literature problematic. From earlier ex-
amples we will see how francophone literature from the Maghreb has
engaged in a dialogue even while failing to anticipate the ideological
unification of French hegemony since independence. What interests
me is the establishment and development of these relations and the
extent to which they have shaped space and agency for peoples and
cultures. Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “ethnoscape” is a useful point
of departure for such an inquiry, provided we take into account the
strong cultural and historical forces that have shaped the landscape
of French–Maghrebi relations over the centuries. We have seen that,
although postcolonial theory never ceases to challenge us, it remains
somehow hollow in terms of essence.1 Because it tackles too many is-
sues, postcolonial studies finds itself laden with an inchoative value
or gummed up with subcategories. But the real danger does not stem
from this type of academic dilettantism; rather, this is the ideological
object that looms large within the discourse.2 One risk has been what
could be called, for want of a better term, “canonical consolidation,”
the situation that results when one particular work casts a theoretical
shadow over a discipline. A case in point is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, a novel that has been parsed inside and out by great scholars
(by Said in Orientalism, Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, and Bhabha in The Location of Culture), becoming what

Bhabha calls “a symptom of pedagogical anxiety” (213). It comes as no
surprise that the initial notion of displacement turns into a single con-
tinuous reality – or does it surprise?
This ambivalence is best understood if one examines Maghreb writ-
ing itself. This will keep us away from Said’s monolithic Orientalism,
in terms of poetics and aesthetics, and help us avoid the pitfalls of
theoretical homogenization (i.e., bringing together under the same tent
everything that is not the West). In postcolonial literature, time, place,
language, and imagination work together, not so much to recapture
something universal as to be discovered and deemed unique. We know,
for example, that European literary realism does not and cannot ap-
ply to African postcolonial literature because the imaginative creative
process in Africa is caught between the demands for rationalized mo-
dernity (in terms of politics, aesthetics, etc.) and a return to tradition
that helps legitimize a certain idea of the nation. History still weighs
heavily on the output and exilic condition of most Maghrebi writers,
yet in their hands, the laws of traditional French literature are warped
by imagined narratives and pointed investigations into a recalled past.
Furthermore, one wonders to what extent the assumptions of the crit-
ic of postcolonial theory corrupt the postcolonial author’s integrity.
Today, for Maghrebi writers in particular, the motivation to write re-
sides in answering this question: “What is it that remains unclaimed
until it is worked through?”
Academics are so caught up in the ideological dimension of post-
colonial literature (e.g., in striving to signify the cultural in-between)
and its transgressive powers that they barely trouble themselves to
understand other vital elements of the corpus. When pieced together
patiently, the evidence reveals that the real condition of Maghrebi writ-
ing in French is staged not by ideology but by the non-representability
of cultural trauma. Postcolonial studies tends to eschew timelines and
the rhythms of history that “Oriental” subjects have produced from
within themselves. One aspect of the literary issue has to do with the
function and use of Orientalism. When discourses are dominated by
political visions and by paradigms of cultural enunciation, empirical
facts are sometimes overlooked. The postcolonial or Oriental writer is
treated as a signifier within a subject/object relationship – the publica-
tion/readership paradigm, for example – while critical value is driven
by political agendas that are postnationalist in content. A more valid if
not fully accurate critique must take into account the dominant forces
Unfinished (Literary) Business 73
at work in the Western humanities. For example, it is taken for granted

that postcolonial literature must either inspire or reflect national ide-
ologies that have come into existence since the end of colonialism. But
literature is not just an index of a given world – it is, most often, a prod-
uct of that world. Postcolonial writers cannot be essentialized in a set of
values or identities, in the way that Jane Austen is considered essential-
ly British and Marcel Proust essentially French. Within the confines of
Orientalism, consistently engaged in negating the identity of the Other
(whether Black, Arab, Muslim, or female), contemporary Maghrebi lit-
erature remains trapped in old modes of representing a still dominant
culture. Assia Djebar rightly points out the dilemma when she writes:
“Let’s agree that regarding the linguistic landscape of so-called fran-
cophonie I, for one, stand at the borders.”3
Maghrebi literature in French is by no means monolithic, though it
has been, for the most part, organized by an intelligentsia trained in
the Western logic of resisting and countering dominant discourses. We
know how novels written by male and female authors, of both younger
and older generations, blend the themes and topoi of Maghrebi cultures
with concepts common to European, and specifically French, thought.
For example, as early as the 1950s in Mouloud Feraoun’s Le fils du pau-
vre or more recently in Malika Mokeddem’s N’zid (2002), literary proj-
ects have met the narrative of a history and entity called “Algeria,”
although Algeria as such did not exist before French colonization. The
timeline from the blossoming of Maghrebi literature of the late 1950s
to today does not reflect the diversity of voices. Yet Maghrebi literature
is nonetheless operative in the theoretical discourse, with for example
the denial of subjective content compensated for by the historical and
social material. Therein lies one of the conflicts between literature and
nationalism: Europe supposedly succeeded in claiming and merging
both, whereas authors from formerly colonized countries are suppos-
edly still figuring out which language is theirs and from which place
they are speaking and writing. Most writers attempt to flaunt their
historical interpretations along nationalist lines or against the dismay-
ing post-independence condition of their homeland, yet they seem to
lack the insight and authority that would counteract, if not end, the
pervasive neocolonial logic evident in books published, stamped, ap-
proved, distributed, and read in the West. Maghrebi writers in French
with any success in the Western-dominated global marketplace find
themselves dispatchers of cultural products; Maghrebi readers have be-
come outsiders to their own literature. And no matter how successful
book fairs in Algiers or Casablanca appear to be, they tend to express

a bold line of thinking out the domestic political reality more than a
subdued aesthetic behest. State censorship provides another reminder
of the plural and unstable identity status of francophone literature in
the Maghreb. Francophone readers in the Maghreb – a statistical minor-
ity – read books that explain the universe in fantastic or realistic terms,
but they also reclaim the French language to read about the minutiae
of everyday life. Even if these two are connected, both readings cannot
be right. When we confront this cultural conundrum, it becomes clear
that Orientalism is far from a mere discursive fiction: it continues to
operate as a grafting of oppositional representations. Only this time it
is working among Orientals themselves. The Orientalist ideology was
based on the notion that the colonized is fixed, even quasi-universal.
This false assumption has affected the arts as much as it has the policies
constituting the foundation of human laws on both sides of the colonial
divide, as demonstrated by Albert Memmi in his Portrait du colonisé. But
in literature, which is as nuanced and unpredictable as the real people
who write it, there is no such thing as a static nucleus of values or an
unalterable world view. In Maghrebi novels, perceptions of coming to
birth and of the archetypal quest for wholeness should, and do, over-
ride the Orientalist topos. Yet cultural accommodations of any kind on
the part of the Western establishment have remained token efforts (e.g.,
welcoming Algerian bourgeois women “writers” during the civil war
of the 1990s, publishing critical essays only after dictator King Hassan
II of Morocco died, organizing literary conferences in Tunisia at a time
when it was a police state), and these efforts have rarely been validated
by reciprocal projects. At the heart of the matter, we need not look for a
Maghrebi Marguerite Duras or Claude Simon; rather, we need to point
out the heterogeneous cultural and aesthetic expressions of the cho-
rus of Maghrebi voices. Is it not the main challenge for postcolonial
Maghrebi authors to escape that universalism, which has faded among
Western postmodern writers?
The story of Edmond Laforest, a Haitian writer, who on 17 October
1915 tied a thick Larousse dictionary around his neck and jumped off a
bridge to his death, is well known. Laforest’s action symbolizes the im-
possibility of assuming both the legacy of a minority culture (includ-
ing its religion) and the language of the former master. Fortunately, no
Maghrebi writers have yet been led to this kind of existential “inden-
ture.”4 However, francophone writings indicate that both culture and
nation fail to provide homogeneous and reliable systems of expression.
And the exilic condition has clearly undermined the coherence of na-
tional identity, at least in construing literature historically. There is a
great deal worth saying about this disconnect – a disconnect in the lit-
eral, historical sense – but one example strikes a chord: Mohamed Dib,
after settling permanently outside Algeria in the mid-1960s, stopped
writing about his homeland’s history. To this extent, fictional works
of the Maghreb are experiments in postmodernity, with its emergent
fragmentary voices, even as they break away from strictly Western lit-
erary codes. We notice in works by Moroccan poets Abdellatif Laâbi
and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, for example, that writing is intended
as an exploratory practice, an ongoing discourse between the iden-
tity of the individual and the identity of the nation around issues of
the father figure, the mother tongue, freedom of expression, religious
taboos, exile, and so on. In this context, these poems reveal the distinc-
tion between the French language and the Oriental condition, placing
Maghrebi cultures and peoples into categories, not just of acknowledg-
ment but of existence and non-existence. The postcolonial ambivalent
use of “I” in French enforces the empathic value of literature itself,
even in cases of borrowed subjectivity when Arabic or a Berber dia-
lect is the native tongue. As they compete, the syntactical, aesthetic,
and ideological paradigms at work reveal the artificiality of so-called
francophone literature. Once the French literary model as a universal
organizing unit is set aside by Maghrebi writers, they must tackle the
persistent myth of being a defined nation, not just in terms of imagi-
naries and ethnicities, but most of all in terms of loyalty. Each nation
of the Maghreb is thus reified into a fact of nature, a process that, pain-
fully enough, was the rationale for the Orientalist ideology, in what
Edward Said called a “discipline of detail.”5 Most often, writers find
themselves entertaining a monocultural conversation scrutinizing the
past, as in the references to archives in Assia Djebar’s work, or the
function of tribal memory in Rachid Mimouni’s novels. By telling a
story, the postcolonial writer brings history alive, and this illustrative
power does not historicize the former colonized because the narrative
possibilities do not depend on Otherness.
Literature becomes irrelevant when the fact of cultural difference
is itself the defining core of discourses. It comes as no surprise that
Marxism, cultural studies, deconstructionism, and new historicism
weigh heavily in textual interpretations of works by postcolonial writ-
ers. Such an affiliation with Western theory draws into question the
quasi-silence of postcolonial voices, who can be tempted to break away
from that silence and representation so as to encourage a fundamental

national revival. In the specific case of the Maghreb, authors who write
in Arabic operate outside both the sphere of francophonie and cultural
pan-Arabism are still locked in a colonial experience by the mere fact
that they seek to differentiate themselves as Algerians, Moroccans, or
Tunisians. In the twenty-first century, the main concern of francophone
counterparts in these various countries has been to move beyond con-
cepts like hybridity in their writing.6 The resulting configuration of
knowledge gives the illusion of engaging writers and readers in “bor-
der thinking”7 even as it encourages further intellectual stereotyping.
For example, novels by Tahar Ben Jelloun still unintentionally privilege
a kind of belated but comprehensive Orientalism. Nation and history
are rendered obsolete in these works. What, then, is the epistemology
of literature written in French by Maghrebi authors?
Heidegger linked knowledge to meaning in a way that articulates an
inflation of narratives or, more precisely, an investment in textuality.8 Yet
this proves true only so long as systems of thought, the cultural subcon-
scious, and what Barthes called le plaisir du texte are the conditions for
knowledge and not mere tools used for creating disciplined boundaries
and differences between the dominant and the subaltern. Centuries ago,
Muslim theologians, while eschewing any distinction between the spir-
itual and temporal worlds, anticipated the consequences of mapping
history onto a cultural order, with its subsequent stifling hegemony.9
This insight is paralleled by the enthusiasm of Western critics for cat-
egorizing and dividing. Of course, any such Islamic theory would have
had maximum impact in any language other than one from Europe.
Now, in the context of voice versus authority, what makes Said’s work
and public stances so seminal is that he managed to take hold of the
discourse of cultural appropriation still pervasive in Western humani-
ties as well as to hold a mirror to the debilitating binary oppositions
underlying the Orientalist construct. In his postulate for the Orientalist
praxis, knowledge and meaning are indeed two different realities. In
an essay predating Orientalism (1978), Said stated that “what is possible
to do is to analyze the structure of thought for which such a phrase as
‘Arab society’ is a kind of reality – and this structure as we shall soon
see, is a myth, with its codes, discourse, and tropes.”10 To this day in
the current mix of geopolitics and Western media frenzy, there is talk
of “the Arab street” when referring to the national mood in Arab coun-
tries, yet we continue to point to “public opinion” for peoples in the
West. Potentially liberating theoretical discourse appears to be locked
in a never-ending representation of Western subjectivity. Call it latent

Orientalism when it comes to splitting the global Muslim Other (from
North Africa to Central Asia).
Maghrebi literature in French denotes to what extent knowledge
considered interesting in the Oriental world – in this context, the
Arab/Muslim world – is from then on considered marginal by a self-
proclaimed “advanced” culture such as that of France. In this regard,
it is striking to note that autobiography remains a minor genre for
Maghrebi writers, whose approach fails to reinforce the centrality of
a subjective voice. Rather, they turn autobiography into something
that speaks for the nation, to which all powers of identification must
be turned. In L’amour, la fantasia, Assia Djebar acknowledges that “my
fiction is this autobiography in progress.”11 One’s own life is rarely the
subject of art, as though it were paramount to evade personal and fac-
tual history and to keep the traces of cultural imperialism and neocolo-
nialism on individuals as abstract as possible. Nonetheless, something
important emerges from the anxious desire to keep a lid on the personal:
a refusal to play intermediary between an underdeveloped homeland
and a welcoming yet intrusive West. It can be said that the near absence
of autobiographies in and from the Maghreb accentuates the inherent
ambivalence of adapting to a new community that, although freely
chosen, still keeps its exotic guests as tokens of both xenophilia and
xenophobia. Autobiography as a literary genre is trumped by whatever
might be imagined for the nation. The creative distance does not flow
from a literary ruse played on readers, as in Sartre’s autobiography, or
Robbe-Grillet’s. It is rather a matter of playing around with myths and
representations that are bigger than the self and that too often remain
taboo. In reference to one of the favourite topoi of Orientalist discourse,
one may surmise that Maghrebi literature in French claims for itself the
dialectic of veiling and unveiling.
The parochial and sometimes narcissistic dimensions of contempo-
rary French literature place limits on effective criticism, but this con-
straint does not delegitimize canonic literature as a point of reference
for contemporary literary endeavours in French. At the same time,
the terms “francophone,” “hybrid,” and “postcolonial,” although quite
popular in the Western humanities, undo the assumptions underlying
the other terms. This is why Maghrebi literature in French is typically
understood as embedded in broader cultural and political forces, with
any national meaning only provisionally established. The literary ap-
proach of postcolonial writers from the Maghreb resembles a continual
exercise in demystifying the Oriental subject. It is clear that from the

inception of Maghreb postcolonial literature in the 1950s, when the
French colonial empire was beginning to crumble, Sisyphus has been
its defining figure. There is a fault in the Western literary critique of
literature from the Maghreb, a critique that attempts to objectively
categorize the Maghrebi subject. Writers are both de facto exiles and
postcolonials; they are also extraterritorial figures in any vein of or-
thodoxy or criticism they might choose to adopt. While literary and
narrative representation only corresponds to a discursive object, the
Orientalist topos is rarely taken to task for exploiting the failures of
the post-independence condition because it is, structurally, a copy of
European colonial ideology. When Rachid Boudjedra deconstructs the
madness of post-independence Algeria in three of his first four nov-
els, the project is essentially an inventory of knowledge concerning
politics, sexuality, religion, and the social order that tows the line of
liberal humanism. At the same time, postcolonial selfhood remains an
assumption, a stand-in for the clean conscience of the French.12 In the
name of legitimacy, nationalism strives to make political and “cultur-
al” power timeless and natural; for its part, Orientalism pushes into
indefiniteness its own brand of superiority when advocating the privi-
lege of Western literature – for example, over that of the Arab/Muslim
world. Literature bears the residues of old struggles. It is impossible
not to think of the history of Algeria as the history of a colony, of the
power of French and the Western humanities, and of the market forces
that turn books into ideological and theoretical commodities, especial-
ly in North American academe.
For the Maghrebi intellectual, writing back can mean deconstruct-
ing and exposing the cultural patterns that make literary theories ap-
plicable to postcolonial writers. Kateb Yacine and Abdelkebir Khatibi
have developed a discourse of resistance within the corpus of Maghrebi
literary production. Concepts such as “legitimacy” (a replacement for
the broken postcolonial identity) and “natural laws” (as justified in the
academic world for ideological purposes or for career ambitions) find
themselves exposed to critical examination. It is remarkable that these
two Maghrebi writers have rejected the theoretical name-giving that is,
in essence, an act of power. When francophone literature rejects name-
giving, it dislocates an order that is repressing its own imaginative and
discursive structures. In this regard, Kateb’s first novel, Nedjma (1956),
is indeed a narrative of interruptions. History in this novel is mixed
with myths concerning genealogies, an original language, identities,
and so on, and those myths give way to metaphors. For Kateb, any con-
ventional use of language must coincide with the growing awareness
that history is a purely aesthetic experience that creates and destroys
both ideas and individuals.13 Under the systemic and descriptive pro-
cedures of Orientalism, which are informed by colonialism, culture and
civilization cancel each other out. Most remarkably, in Kateb’s novel
there is no such place as “home.”14 Instead there is a force – Nedjma
(“star” in Arabic) – that guides a people struggling for independence to
an unknown place where they might transcend their condition. But be-
cause Kateb rejects a narrow concept of nationhood, his heroes lack his-
torical validity. The dynamic of Western historical change is rendered
idle by a new poetic phase that is able to penetrate the truth behind the
colonial experience. Khatibi is another writer who, by advocating cul-
tural fragmentation, delivers a concrete, historical Otherness. Whereas
Orientalism tends to crystallize the event or fact of domination, Khatibi
builds a system of thought predicated on true dialogue that counters
the neocolonial patterns in French culture and cultural policies. In his
first text, La mémoire tatouée (1971), the loss of a reality defined by the
old colonial presence and the importation of the novel and autobiog-
raphy genres into the Arab/Muslim literary world become themselves
the defining concepts of post-independence nationhood. The Western
metropolis as a seat of power has been dislodged but has not yet been
replaced by another location of power somewhere in the East. In the
works of these seminal authors, the ideological stakes are spread thin,
as if to downplay both the centrality of the Western position and the
idea of a possible multiplicity of locations and temporalities between
Europe and the Maghreb.
In a sense, the works of Kateb and Khatibi help reconcile two kinds
of Orientalism – historical, and ideological. In this context, one must
pay attention to the rationales for cultural openings offered by the es-
tablished powers, be they political, economic, or academic. Applying
this to the intellectual life of exiles and migrants, Arif Dirlik states:
“Postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current crisis,
and in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals
in global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficia-
ries.”15 Dirlik’s accusation underscores the permanent discontinuities
among power, knowledge, and action. In francophone literature and
studies, such discontinuities are symptomatic of what is being consis-
tently denied. Maghrebi writers are trapped within representations
and identifications that render void concepts such as nation and native
culture. Nowadays, the matrix16 associated with literary texts has less
and less to offer, not because it has become impossible to reclaim any-
thing purely native, but rather because hybridity and/or métissage are
often turned into mimicking exercises. This is problematic, for example,
in the case of the philo-feminism of Algerian writers, which has too
often been allied with the dominant, discursive, anti-Islam ideology.
Instead of avoiding the pitfalls of Western universalism, the Algerian
literary trend of the 1990s proclaimed, loud and clear, the fetishization
of the Oriental woman. The novels of that decade consistently buttress
the signals of gender and identity hegemony. In Mokeddem’s novels,
for example L’Interdite (1993), the Algerian woman appears as a natu-
ral-born victim who transforms herself into a heroine thanks to over-
rated Western humanistic standards played out at the expense of native
Algerian culture. To borrow Said’s words, Mokeddem has become, wit-
tingly or not, a “witness for the Western prosecution.”17 Other female
writers have been a little more nuanced in their treatment of the plight
of women in contemporary Algeria. For example, Latifah Benmansour,
while denouncing the Islamic fundamentalist factions of the 1990s civil
war in her novels, suggests that solutions to the problem should origi-
nate within the Muslim world itself.
It is significant that, in Maghrebi literature in French, the scrutiny of
self and society takes place outside the realm of nationalism. Crossing
borders, be they national or intellectual, remains the hallmark of the ef-
fective decolonization of space and minds. Given that the Western me-
tropolis has long been blind to its own cultural world view as it relates
to the Maghreb, finding an appropriate response to latent Orientalism
is the great challenge. For Maghrebi writers in French, the postcolo-
nial symbiosis is apparent at the levels of social interaction and semiot-
ics. There is no doubt, for example, that Assia Djebar’s election to the
Académie française was at some level intended to valorize the European
intellectual tradition and contain any diasporic voice. It is France, as
a Western nation and still an influential power in the Maghreb, that
enables or blocks the very existence of the postcolonial symbolic po-
lis. The cultural imprimatur flows from the old metropolitan centre,
and despite the witnessing power of the postnational narrative, there
lingers a sense that the much vaunted concept of deterritorialization
has been undercut. Much remains to be unlearned, notwithstanding
global perceptions of heterogenity and hybridity. As was implicit in the
old Orientalist ruses of the past, it is understood as necessary that the
Maghreb nations fade away in order for postcolonial literature to take
root. Again, in a world of border thinking, the validity of naming is fun-

damental. Whether it is the migrant figure, the female victim, the dis-
enfranchised father, the tragic leader, or the abused child, disconcerting
archetypes are visible in most Maghrebi novels. In this vein, Maghrebi
writing continues to paint self-images reminiscent of the outsider fig-
ures so emblematic of Orientalist authors. For example, Chateaubriand,
Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and Gustave Flaubert all tried
to step out of the Western modern world, as if the change would open
up real transculturation. More recently, three Goncourt Prize winners
– Michel Tournier, Didier Van Cauwelaert, and Jean-Christophe Rufin –
have tried to tell stories from the perspective of subalternity, only with
a Western voice and a subject who remains unable to represent him- or
herself.18 There always seems to be a disconnect between emancipation
(displacing narrative authority) and juxtaposition (maintaining a hier-
archy of voices). Literature, both national and postcolonial, withstands
these attempts and still fails to recognize that the notion of cultural
hegemony stretches beyond post-independence reality, whether in the
West or in its former colonies.
Latent Orientalism struggles to exist in a world with indeterminate
borders where the “career” of ideology is reborn either within academe
or in geopolitics.19 The Islamic Orient, which patently lacks the Western
virtues of democracy, modernity, and advanced technology, remains
the object of discourse. The canonical politics of interpretation have
frozen the Oriental subject in a posture of either need or fear. But the
written text and world reality must not be confused with each other;
rather, each must accommodate the other. In the case of Maghrebi lit-
erature, the quasi-absence of autobiography as a literary genre suggests
that there has been a rethinking of the individual voice in favour of a
collective account. The idea of a unified self is shattered by the com-
bined experiences of race, gender, and class. The migrant, whether a
nineteenth-century French writer or a postcolonial Maghrebi exile, re-
lies on the control of cultural capital over the repression of historical
narratives.20 This is more than a question of literary legacy; the power
of latent Orientalism implies an economic structure that articulates and
guides historical and ideological determinations. An essentialist posi-
tion can turn out to be a selling point in cultural settings where identity
is no longer a matter of who?, but rather how? and where?21 Maghrebi
writers are aware that they are something more than what theories and
ideologies say they are. For example, a key theme in the novels of the
Moroccan writer Driss Chraïbi is the constant renewal his protagonists
undergo.22 The seeming narrative cohesion of his works reveals a deep

distrust of syncretic or self-righteous linear readings. The author de-
lights in frustratingly objective conclusions, which are often concealed
behind the production of knowledge over which Western humanities
believes itself the sole proprietor.
A post-independence era fosters the idea that identity is always
given, not only because of a logic of migration but also because trans-
gressive discourses hang over narratives. Maghrebi literature manifests
divisibility among different states of consciousness, narrative strate-
gies, and imaginaries. No surprise, then, that many authors, in their
efforts to establish a unique voice, inject the Arabic language (and, at
times Berber dialects) when writing in French. But such intertextual-
ity – which is only the façade, as it were, of the issue at stake – hardly
reflects the individual’s own geopoetic condition. Although the French
language is a natural tool for Maghrebi intellectuals trained in French,
there remains a scepticism that calls for a more comparative approach
in the writing process itself. So on the one hand, Maghrebi literature in
French appears somewhat bland and overrated, while on the other, it
trips up scholarly analyses. The mix of historical, psychological, gen-
dered, semi-autobiographical, and ethnic voices referencing the post-
colonial condition represents an attempt to distil the Maghreb’s own
ontology. Mohammed Dib’s writings best illustrate this point. For Dib,
an Algerian, imagination and origin needed to connect; that is why he
worked to expand the power of metaphors instead of relying on collec-
tive memory or history. Dib was one of the first Maghrebi writers to for-
go the idea of national history and culture atfer independence had been
gained. For example, in Le Sommeil d’Eve (1989), written when he was
close to seventy years old, the adversary to reckon with is neither the
colonial past nor any type of post-independence authoritarian regime,
but forgetfulness itself. In Dib’s writing, the story necessarily remains
in dialogue with the reader, with the past, and between cultures. The
one who forgets is doomed to lose control of his or her fate. This novel
can be read as a model for describing how identity is recomposed both
at home and abroad, even while in exile.
It would be far too reductive to suggest that latent Orientalism
overcomes nationalist endeavours. In novels by the Moroccan Abdel
hak Serhane and the Tunisian Mustapha Tlili, the failures of post-
independence states are mentioned as seemingly aesthetic comments
levelled at incoherent Arab/Muslim modernity itself rather than at
the West’s overreaching actions. The question remains: Who benefits,
if anyone, from experimental writing? Maghrebi literature in French,

although undoubtedly proliferating, seems bereft of any attributes that
might actually benefit its sources. There is no obvious rejection of bi-
ases when the writers speak for someone else, and their own voices
are too often reduced to rehashing familiar discourses of culture and
narrative. For example, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s best-seller, L’Enfant de sa-
ble (1985), examines hierarchical oppositions (of traditions, mentality,
institutions, etc.) inherent in the postcolonial condition, but it fails to
reverse any of them. If, for a writer, the imaginary is not affected, how
is reality supposed to be acted upon? The novel’s reconstruction of a
woman’s identity strikes one as distrustful of Moroccan views: there
is no speaking subject per se, nor is there any interpreter of Ahmed-
the-girl’s society. In this literary instance, what is possible is not cred-
ible. The global design of gender identity (a daughter raised as if she
were a son), as it were, is bypassed in a local impetus to reveal the
Oriental Other as inferior and backward, if not dangerous. In this re-
gard, Maghrebi literature distinguishes itself from Caribbean literature
in French by relinquishing the epistemological perspective. The vital
knowledge of identity matters less than the scope of – or rather the pos-
sibility of – different existences in several worlds (Maghrebi, Muslim,
female, French). Diverse discourses rise up only to collapse onto one an-
other, and end up streaming into a predictable monotone. Ben Jelloun’s
emphasis on speaking and storytelling is a narrative strategy, but it is
also a means to set aside the world of fiction as if it were incompatible
with the competing languages and cultures of the Maghrebi–French
encounter. The exotic duplication in Ben Jelloun’s novels forces French
readers into the same artificial realm as his imagined Morocco. That is
the key to their success.
A core tendency in latent Orientalism is most visible in its acts of
privileging the past and freezing the present. Maghrebi literature rarely
reclaims the old anthropological stance of a pure native voice; however,
deeper variations of the idea of cultural oneness must be called into
question. The dearth of credible literary institutions in the Maghreb, be
they independent or systematized (e.g., academies, book prizes, criti-
cal journals), makes the notion of a national or regional literature seem
hollow and easily influenced by other cultural and canonical modes,
as well as by economic powers. We can surmise that the act of writing
in French, while liberating at first, later became a trap of its own. One
reason for this could be that, as Said indicated: “The study of Islam [in
France] played a far more central role for its own sake than anywhere
else in Europe,”23 and that the notion of the Muslim Other could not be
liberated from the system of thought from which it originated. More
precisely, a Maghrebi writer is bound to accept the premises of Orien
talism at the same time that he or she is denouncing them. The hidden
law of Western language,24 with its insistence on resolving its own bour-
geois neuroses, always debunks the subject’s authority. Furthermore,
chronological and spatial accounts, as well as historical developments,
end up being limited by language itself, and French has become the
major conduit of Maghrebi literature. And setting aside the cultural
gap, the act of writing in French elicits questions of representation, ex-
perience, and textuality. To discover the author’s actual intentions, we
require the regulating power of discourse. Francophone literature by
Maghrebi writers becomes the representative link between two entities
lacking a point of origin and trying to make their own systems of mean-
ing intelligible. For example, one does not need to believe in Rachid
Mimouni’s genealogies to make historical reconstruction correspond
to a given reality. And when Tunisia does not appear, per se, in Fawzi
Mellah’s novels, the author’s aim is probably to produce a composite
place called the Maghreb out of cultural and political fragments. After
the initial trauma of colonization, neither the writer nor the reader can
rely any more on the integrity of self-identity and history. No wonder,
for example, that novels by pied-noir writers25 have presented a com-
pletely different picture of Algeria. It is as if the shared fragments of
narratives and memory were only available by way of translation. One
common language, French, spoken by diverse tongues, generates dis-
tinguishing manifestations and fails to organize the hoped-for event
that a cultural coming together should be. From his childhood memo-
ries, Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb acknowledges this poten-
tiality: “By learning French it is possible to come to terms with those
who hold power. This would also bring about technological advance-
ment, even recognition and material comfort. Thanks to this symbolical
structure, the appeal was compelling.”26 What strikes one in this type of
statement is its detachment, as if writing, or literature, was the constitu-
tive norm for Maghrebi culture, and as if no effort was required to en-
compass other modes of cultural transmission or expression. It is clear
that along with the linguistic issue comes that of cultural moorings.27
Whatever Foucault says about humanism, and whatever Said says
about Foucault, one can argue that, given the link between humanism
and Orientalism, Maghrebi literature in French must be framed with-
in a dialectic of engagement/désengagement. Inherent in the Maghrebi
postcolonial condition is an understanding that history is, right now,

being made in regions formerly deprived of discourse. But a dissec-
tion of Western cultural ideologies by “Oriental” novelists has hardly
occurred yet, because these writers have been unable to provide any
real alternative to the postnational imaginary other than turning accul-
turation into syncretism.28 Indeed, little attention has been paid to the
postcolonial regeneration that has taken place in the West itself. Instead
of reading from nineteenth-century travellers who set out to escape a
“nihilistic” Europe, Maghrebi writers see in the West the last possible
refuge from a “decadent” and “undercivilized” Orient. The very condi-
tions of being an exile, a migrant, or an asylum seeker undo the subal-
tern discourse, as if the density of collective memory requires its own
ground, both physical and epistemic. For example, in the case of North
Africa, cultural alienation has resulted in antagonism between a mi-
nority Berber identity and a hegemonic Arab Maghreb. Kateb Yacine,
Mouloud Mammeri, and Nabile Farès have argued in this direction
of cultural identity, turning fiction writing into a commitment to their
origin.29 The fundamental question comes down to this: What does the
subaltern past allow them to do? It is puzzling that Maghrebi litera-
ture remains bogged down in the old colonial paradigm of ethnic divi-
sions, which had once been applied for the sake of foreign domination.
Fewer and fewer writers have delved into the denotative and territorial
discourse inherent in Maghrebi identity itself. The novelist-poet Tahar
Djaout, clearly of Kabyle descent, never raised the necessity of map-
ping people and cultures within Algerian nationhood. Is escaping indi-
genism30 the best strategy for questioning the authority of Orientalism?
It seems that this strategy merely bypasses the conservative label of
authenticity, a label applied too often by the former colonized them-
selves. The idea of purity of culture, formalized by post-independence
regimes, has yet to be truly established in the works of exiled authors.
The main reason may be that genuine archival and cultural rituals were
never constitutive of colonial and postcolonial societies. Nearly every-
thing needed to be (re)invented, and francophone writers banked on
Western knowledge and science. As a result, they came up with what I
would call Maghrebtopia.
The invention of the self in contemporary Maghrebi literature strikes
one as familiarly detached. This becomes more of an issue when the
process is reflective and transcendent, individual and collective, com-
modified and fantasy-driven, or put simply, a frantic escape from the
Western canon. In these terms, Maghrebtopia is the art of worrying, of
trying to make the absent present in someone else’s language. By ex-

trapolation, tools of Orientalism offer the possibility of bettering one-
self in the eyes of the former or actual dominant power. If we view this
process as a kind of symbolic circumcision, we must wonder whether
a full castration is not looming. Fortunately, even if something is miss-
ing or obliterated in Maghrebi literature in French, the texts still pro-
duce their own signifying structures. One could point to the differences
between Maghrebi literature and other world productions in French.
There is indeed a double-exposition for and within writers of the
Maghreb, one that both corrupts and enriches their output. The laws of
Orientalism refer to a fixed point made intelligible only as a representa-
tion, whereas Maghrebi literature’s own theoretical project is to signify
the reference and to uncover ideological or cultural desire by way of the
initial circumcision (colonialism, religious dogma, post-independence
ideologies, exile, native tongue, etc.). In the surge of post-independence
euphoria, aspects of the national culture may go missing, but at least
everything is visible. For Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, the process
behind the idea of nation or culture is highly qualitative, shaped by a
dialectic of worlds lifted by doubt, fear, maladaptation, and ambiguity.
Independence symbolizes a clear-cut separation, yet it seems that there
are several “fathers” (the nation, Islam, Arab or Berber culture, Western
political traditions, Orientalism, economic hegemony, etc.) imposing
their laws on literature. In his poetry, Abdellatif Laâbi describes the
situation for the Maghrebi intellectual and how creation itself verges
on chaos and rebirth:
We are indeed alone empty sick and tired

at the foot of the Wall of walls of truthful lamentations
surrounding us from below and above
with its signature of disaster.31
The work of art creates an effect of divisibility that actually overlaps the
unidimensional colonial grid. The principle of dichotomy (West vs East,
Christian vs Muslim, Caucasian vs Semite, canonicity vs Maghrebtopia,
etc.) helps formulate a kinship, if not the superiority, of one culture in
relation to another. Orientalism does not engage in a potentially varied
topos of superiority; rather, it holds to a fixed image of superiority as
everything that the Other inherently lacks. The discourse of Maghreb
topia reflects this particular function of the Other within the realm of
narratives. This is one of Said’s operative premises when he writes in
Orientalism that “for a number of evident reasons the Orient was al-
ways in the position both of outsider and incorporated weak partner
for the West.”32 In this respect, independence as the ultimate destiny is
the continuation of an ideological fiction.
It should come as no surprise that Maghrebi writers’ attempts to
cope with Otherness are a reformulation of the postcolonial condition,
limited for the most part by a system of impossible universality. Any
critique of Eurocentrism has proven futile because the discourse stems
from a humanist tradition, which in the postnational age is presumed
to be global and all-embracing. As for broader theoretical projects, they
tend to force writers away from multilingual paradigms, which rarely
relate to core literary considerations. In Amour bilingue, Abdelkebir
Khatibi puts it this way: “From then on I am fully free from being bi-
lingual on my own terms. Freedom of happiness that tears me apart,
only to advise me of the thinking of emptiness.”33 Thus Maghrebtopia
posits a permanent space of difference even while seeking a logic sys-
tem that takes its cue from radical rootlessness. If the postcolonial
condition is to rid itself of Orientalism, it must be accepted that the
Maghreb is an extension of France, not its Other. Tangible arguments
can be made to connect the history of Algeria to that of France, and
vice versa. Literature invokes an even deeper connection, one that sub-
sumes designs and myths, embarking on an inward journey within the
individual and the Western exilic condition. Novels by Maghrebi writ-
ers, predicated on an antihegemonic imaginary, transgress the frame
of any single Maghrebi unit or voice per se. Authority, instead of being
transferred, is diffused. This sets in motion a counter-discourse that
is best exemplified by the state of the postcolonial mind. Camus, for
example, taught himself how to fight his other self, how to disown
the pursuit of independence. By contrast, Algerian writers have turned
their independence into a conquest, not of France, but of that which is
probably most sacred: its culture.
Could it be that latent Orientalism is a double-edged sword? The
ideology behind Orientalism has served to maintain both national and
individual unconsciousness, but it has also led to the recognition and
empowerment of those “Others.” The paradigm of transfer that rides
alongside the postcolonial condition does not replicate the debilitating
state of the former colonized. It is a matter of transcendence, although
without the helpful and natural inscription of a national discourse.34
It is striking that almost no novel in French by an exiled Maghrebi au-
thor offers a resolution based on the fact of nationhood. The conflicts
and resolutions in these works continually re-enact an obsession

with a lack of place. There can be little doubt that the innovations of
Orientalism (naming, designing, attracting/repulsing, inventing, etc.)
remain instrumental in tracing one’s own empty signifier within the
illusion of postcolonial mobility, both intellectual and physical. The
advantage for Maghrebi writers is that, having laboured inside the sys-
tem, they are saved by its shifting ambivalences. The metaphor of the
double-edged sword implies that literature has become both a com-
modity and an intrusion.
Once racial exclusivity and cultural arrogance have been vanquished
from the latent Orientalist scene, what is left is the traumatic trinity
of language, nation, and assimilation. For an insight into how prob-
lematic the situation is for the writer, one must calculate the density
of the symbolic field. One key theme, related to nearly all others, is
that of the nomad. This theme comes as a reply to the Orientalist rep-
resentation of nobility and spiritual possession. In works of Maghrebi
literature, the reader must gather for him- or herself a feeling for the
origin, the extension, even the timelessness of each work, until it is pos-
sible to receive the meaning from its recovered traces. In Abdelwahab
Meddeb’s Talismano, for example, the saturated language becomes the
vehicle of a weak but nonetheless significant metaphor for the urgency
of escaping Western history: “Let’s take up to the desert again and the
mountains, let’s break away from this history the final cataclysm of
which could catch us unawares.”35 The experience of freedom evoked
lies, not in an invitation to a journey in the Atlas Mountains or the
Sahara Desert, but in the thought process itself. Maghrebi literature in
French seems to be a terrain of both verbal-intertextual/lingual and
symbolic-physical worlds, even while coping with the anxiety of sepa-
ration from the motherland and the mother tongue. It is on this ground
that Orientalism is contested and reshaped and can never add up in a
world where totalization spurns from ideological fantasy. Could it be
that the “Oriental” has developed this uncanny way of displacing the
horizon, where there is no origin yet where it all started – in the West,
the new Maghreb?36
5 André Gide and Imperial Dystopia
In earlier chapters I discussed an approach to Orientalism partly

rooted in historicism; Said’s tantalizing and ambivalent argument;
how postcolonial studies can negotiate Orientalism’s legacy; and how
Orientalism has unfolded for Maghrebi intellectuals. To make my ideas
clear in relation to literature, I now present a case study of French writ-
ing on the Maghreb. Here, I want to emphasize the challenge of lit-
térature engagée in the colonial condition. It is difficult to argue with
the idea that nineteenth-century French literature delved more deeply
than any other century’s into the history of – and therefore the attrac-
tion to – the Orientalist topos. At no other time in European history did
cultural praxis utilize so profoundly its own material representations to
create a basis where the narrative forms were the experimental mode
of a sublime mission.1 For a sense of the scope and implications of the
Orient in the French popular imagination, one need only consider that
the original title of La Comédie humaine – the longest and most panoram-
ic literary endeavour of the nineteenth century – was Les 1001 Nuits de
l’Occident. Balzac changed that title, perhaps because he became more
preoccupied with the subversive social nature of his work than with its
supposedly exotic forebear.
My treatment of Orientalism in French literature will focus on how, in
the twentieth century, it accentuated a discourse of self-interpretation
whose primary interest was to generate self-dialogue. Rarely has a liter-
ary genre engendered evaluation and interpretation so impressively in
parallel. Beginning with André Gide at the turn of the century, one can
detect on the European moral horizon a presentiment of decline and, at
the same time, a metaphysical presence underscoring a powerful his-
torical unity.2 On the one hand, there is a sense of civilization’s decay; on
the other, a quest to maintain a coherent identity when confronted with

overwhelming power. I will try to show that contemporary literature,
taken as a cultural institution, reflects the rise of ideology about knowl-
edge as much as it represents a technique of domination. The broader
suggestion that ideology and aesthetic judgments are highly arbitrary
affairs whose goal has been to enhance canonical writing draws from
a post-structural celebration of discontinuity. Armed with Gide’s em-
blematic example, I will underscore the ambivalent and multifaceted
relation of an engagé intellectual to colonial ideology and reality.
In a way that scholarly, privileged, and emblematic ideologies have
not (Marxism, feminism, Western aesthetics, etc.), Otherness has been
able to replicate the strategies of metropolitan domination as a repre-
sentational system of right and duty on a global scale. While it is highly
likely that the notion of Otherness grew as a by-product of colonial
ideology, it is literature that underwent a change in orientation and
praxis, caught as it was between a colonial periphery (which was a cen-
tral contributor to two world wars, to colonial exhibitions in Paris, to
French expeditions across Africa and Asia, to the cheap import of exotic
produce, etc.) and an imperial métropole too self-absorbed to acknowl-
edge plurality.
Throughout the nineteenth century, probably starting with Chateau
briand and extending into the late twentieth century as far as Genet,
the French literary fascination for the Arab/Muslim world continued
unabated, amounting to a kind of loyalty. It is safe to say that among
the many lands where French writers journeyed, Algeria epitomized
a historical hors-texte – that is to say, it never was acknowledged on its
own terms because under the guise of radical colonialism, its history re-
quired France’s narrative. The relationship between a need to bear wit-
ness and the temptation to indulge in fantasy was as obsessive as it was
self-reflexive. Many writers fit into the topos of Orientalist uniformity
(guilt-free sex, exotic agency, performative identity to achieve author-
ity, etc.), but André Gide stands out for his anti-epistemic position and
for his use of aesthetics and ethics to drive his point home.3 No author
provided a more profound, effective, and disturbing contribution to the
subject of French colonial Otherness than Gide. His engagement with
issues of Otherness and the Arab/Muslim world is manifold but best
illustrated in L’Immoraliste (1902), Amyntas (1906; composed between
1899 and 1904), and Si le grain ne meurt (1919). One could add to that
list Carnet d’Égypte (1939) or his Journal 1939–1949, in which he treat-
ed Africa as the reification of experience under brutal colonization,
André Gide and Imperial Dystopia 91
notably in Congo and Chad. Gide’s life is well documented, and he

worked hard to that end, particularly by maintaining multiple epis-
tolary relationships. While he never set foot in Asia or the Americas,
he travelled extensively in North Africa: six journeys between October
1893 and December 1902. Then he settled down in Algiers between
May 1942 and April 1945, after disassociating himself from the collabo-
rationist writers in Paris. He also visited Egypt in April 1939, and re-
turned again in April 1946, spending several weeks in Lebanon as well.
Along with his singular and subversive reworking of Western mor-
als, Gide is closely associated with two key principles of the French
Revolution – individual freedom and universal responsibility – that
turned literature into a performative tool, “committed literature” (so
it was termed after the Dreyfus affair).4 Yet strangely enough, Gide
failed to break with the totalizing cultural context of France’s Third
Republic, most evident in its colonial undertakings. Even the most
progressive of intellectuals accepted that France’s civilizing mission
overseas was both genuine and proper.5 This was not blind arrogance
so much as poor judgment. Insisting on creating a historical commu-
nity without collective responsibility and denying the existence of le-
gal standards placed the crimes of colonial occupation on the African
continent and the war crimes of Europe on the same level in terms of
unacceptable behaviour.
Furthermore, French politicians and social theorists deemed true as-
similation through universal rights to be impossible because the colo-
nial subjects would always be outsiders whose understanding of those
rights could never be more than shallow.6 No wonder narratives about
or from the various colonies bore some degree of mystical undercur-
rent! Arab women were lascivious, and black men were beastly, and if
this reinforced the comfortable bourgeois identity of the time, fed by
capital investment and return, then fine. Progressive writers like Gide
provided colonized peoples with history in exchange for both markets
and fertile ground for fantasy. In Gide’s case, that history turned out to
be deeply intimate, as we will see.
Most writings on the Orient had been works of fiction.7 Gide made
the experience deeply personal by resorting to autobiography or auto-
biographical literary playfulness (who, if not Gide himself, is Michel
in L’Immoraliste?). Boundaries did not exist solely in space; they also
existed in language, and Gide was keen to invert them. Unlike scholars
of Orientalism interested in philology or religion, Gide considered it
self-evident that true knowledge was to be found within the Oriental
subject. This may be why some of his key protagonists were Arabs,
with proper names and roles within the narratives, not just stock char-
acters such as those in the short stories of Albert Camus, for example. In
an age when favourable representations of the Orient tended to polar-
ize communities,8 Gide in his works fostered interracial desire, not just
homoeroticism. Setting aside hypotheses related to moral discourse
and cultural logocentrism, important questions lurk in Gide’s writings
about the Arab/Berber world. Why is the colonial condition deliber-
ately disregarded in these works, even though he discusses it in his
essays on sub-Saharan Africa? Did Gide, like Job, his favourite Biblical
character, seek to be tested and to reconcile body and soul with a host of
clashing horizons (e.g., French Algeria versus France, lapsed Protestant
versus observant Catholic)? Were his stories set in the Arab world his
attempt to recognize cultural perversion and move beyond a sexual un-
derstanding of it? Greater attention to the confusion represented by the
poetic thrust of sexuality and ideology is warranted. We will examine
to what extent, in André Gide’s writings on North Africa, Orientalism
fed its own historical conflict and mutated into a dichotomy of imperial
mimicry and intellectual dissonance.
One thing that Gide’s works of fiction do not do is herald the Western
world as the absolute political authority. His literary wanderings do not
supplement nationalism, be it based on literature, religion, language,
or economic hegemony. Gide writes – to use a very appropriate French
term – with a méthode, a specific literary strategy, in this case based on
desire. To put it simply, the libido itself, no matter how rampant, cannot
be conceived independently of representations. Pleasing ones at that.
To use Barthes’s hypothesis, pleasure brings comfort and reinforces the
ego by making it compatible with cultural expectations.9 Gide was also
well aware that Beauty, by virtue of its imaginative capacity, was not a
valid concept when cultural encounters were being assessed. The Arab
and Berber adolescents he met in Tunisia and Algeria intensified his de-
sire for accepted differences (in contrast to the non-identity promoted
by the Orientalist ideology). North Africa became the treasure house
of a signifier named desire, with one possible trajectory – from subject
to ego. Gide refuted the demand that Beauty be cast as a literary deity.
Language was to be emptied of its cultural alienations, then invested
with the content of aesthetic and ethical possession, something that in-
cluded subversion and transgression, at least in the bourgeois mode of
sex commodification.10 For too long, European writers and travellers
had treated Beauty in Kantian terms, as something whose particulars
could be summarized and simplified. Thus, the Kasbah of Algiers was

beautiful, but its people (prostitutes, criminals, pedophiles, zealots,
Hashishins) were dangerously ugly. Beauty was not just selective; it
also shirked ethical standards.
Nothing North African seemed to contain Beauty at its core. Argu
ably, Westerners were incapable of appreciating the foreignness of the
foreigner in his own land. Gide did not see Beauty in abject poverty
alone (e.g., in drinking tea in dirty glasses or sleeping in bug-infested
beds), or in sexual promiscuity with the young men he sought there.
Rather, he traced out a new order that imperialist France was unable
to control, by making the Oriental the subject of its own representation,
but never of assimilation. In a way, Gide saw something that was non-
negotiable from the perspectives of both capital and culture. This real-
ization has had incalculable consequences for the topics at hand and
for French readers as well. At the opening of Amyntas,11 Gide states his
terms unambiguously: “[…] no compromise just yet between the civili-
zation of the Orient and ours which looks unattractive especially when
it claims to mend things.”12
Amyntas does not fit into any pre-existing literary genre. It is a trav-
elogue, a diary, and an existential essay as well. The text depicts a time
and place largely unknown to French readers of the early twentieth cen-
tury. Gide’s self-positioning as a man who professed to ignore Christian
and political dogmas has had a powerful impact on how we read the
works of the European travellers who pre-dated him. Before him, writ-
ers churned out a patronizing, sentimental whitewash of their own
value systems. Instead of a self-reflective perspective on his own story
or identity, Gide offers his readers a blunt representation of the strange-
ness of the self. In Algeria, he comes across not as an intruder but as the
exemplification of Otherness. In a sense, he has freed himself from the
struggle against archival memory and idealist assumptions.13 His expe-
rience opens up to this: “Anguish dwells only in us; this country is, on
the contrary, altogether calm; yet, an issue grips us: is it the before-life
or the after-life?”14 To make a colonized land the source of this feeling is
a tremendous gesture, since “anguish” and “us” are markedly French.
In so doing, Gide turns to a metaphysics that is no longer necessary in
order to shape Western aesthetics. That is what makes his writing so
modern – indeed, liberating.
Gide’s encounter with North Africa cannot be reductively equated
with sensual promises and erotic appreciation. His main desire is to
expunge materiality from literary expectations. By materiality, we
specifically mean interpretation, hierarchies, and canons. For Gide, the

Orient provides the explanation for how interpretation leads to alle-
gory or credits Western literature as the paramount institution. For him,
it is evident that the fantasy of empire is not the source but rather the
substance that thwarts regulating norms. Such an endeavour was not
free of challenges.
Gide’s writing disrupts Orientalist literature; it also seeks fertile and
challenging experiences for their own sake. By incorporating the earth
science, the texture of stones, the root systems of garden plants, and
even the quality of the air, Gide’s writing leans towards a mythocriti-
cal reading and its archetype of the treasure. Here, the psychological
aspect is reunited with the physical through the sheer force of the quest
for individual fulfilment. Gide adds himself to the Oriental landscape
without replacing the colonial signifier or evading the colonial episte-
mological category: “Ah, to know when this thick black door, in front of
this Arab, opens, what will be in store for him, behind it … I wish I was
this Arab, that what awaits him would await me.”15
Gide upends Orientalist logic by raising the colonized subject to his
own aspirations as a foreigner; still, the terms he uses are somewhat
blurry in the presence of the mystique of Islam. By invoking doors
and expectations, the author’s quest becomes more intuitive than po-
litical, even barring factors such as the fiction of switching identities
(a Western “I” changed into an Eastern ‘he”). That sense of being re-
duced to a difference within oneself rather than with the Other comes
close to the position developed by the Algerian poet Jean Amrouche
later on (after Amrouche became established, thanks to Gide’s support
in the late 1940s).16 Of course, a modern critique cannot overlook the
post-identarian paradigms of hybridity, nomadology, anti-essentialism,
and so on that purport to address broader concepts such as nationhood
and globalization. Yet in the case of Gide, identity is inherent in the
suspect notion of universal and/or canonical literature. This tendency
both to celebrate and to question literature coloured literary critique
until after the post-structural age, as we can see in Julia Kristeva’s com-
ment on Camus’s L’Étranger: “The strangeness of the European begins
with his inner exile.”17 It is difficult not to think that the same idea fits
Gide’s situation in North Africa. His existential anguish seems acceler-
ated by a metaphysical geography. In Amyntas, Gide travels to many
places, which always seem both familiar and new. The dramatization of
place correlates with a sense of loss and with boundary transgression,
and all the while, the traveller remains a distinctly foreign element.
The special attention paid to detail in Gide’s diary undermines the all-
encompassing, high-level frame of the colonial endeavour, exactly like
an alternative version of the misguided French undertaking in Africa.
This happens not just in political terms (although Gide moved closer to
the Communist Party in the 1930s), but also and indeed mainly in terms
of his aesthetic and idealistic responses. The question now is this: Did
Gide simply substitute Orientalism for another pattern of domination?
Whether in the field of theory or by way of individual experience (ex-
istential, metaphysical, erotic, etc.), Gide’s writing in and from North
Africa challenges the representation of the canon, while setting aside
any constructive judgment on Arab/Muslim cultures. One should
not be fooled by the fragmented, wandering Gidian type of narrative,
which supposedly runs counter to the traditional scholarly travelogue
of the Orient. Rethinking the writing process is key to contemplating a
solution to the problem of unidirectional history written from the per-
spective of the conqueror. That is why Gide eschewed the saturated
realism that is so overwhelmingly present in colonial literature, with its
depravity, disorder, corruption, fanaticism, and all sorts of other evils
that amounted to nothing less than the complete justification of impe-
rial designs.
There is no pre-existing text that would force itself onto Gide’s tour-
istic performance, although he was a committed tourist. Even the ho-
mosexual and pedofilic overtones are kept separate from the colonial
frame, unlike those of Gustave Flaubert in Egypt18 and Tunisia, and
Henry de Montherlant in Algeria,19 for example. Yet in the assumed
harmony between Gide and North Africa, there is no room for the
Other to contribute to his own story. The writer’s fascination often ex-
tends to glaringly patronizing statements: “Arabs get used to us, we
seem less foreign to them, and their practice, clouded at first, changes
its ways.”20 In that sense, the value system of desire displaced from
France to North Africa only serves to validate a subjective point of
view. The organic metropolitan ideology of Orientalism, shaped by
stock literary references to La chanson de Roland, Les Lettres persanes, Les
Orientales, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, and so on is slowly emptied
of its wholesale endorsement of what French culture stands for. Gide
argued for a decentring or skewing of both subjectivity and desire,
even though he failed to free himself from his paramount erotic script.
His shift of identification was from heterosexual to homosexual rather
than from imperial to independent. He opposed the literary system for
signifying difference and attempted to remodel his world against two
other figures: Proust, whom he deemed a hypocrite for having always

declined to acknowledge his own homosexuality, and Wilde, because
when they met in Algiers, the English writer humiliated him by point-
ing out that his heterosexuality was a mirage21 and affirmed its true
nature by introducing him to the young Mohamed.22
In its strictest sense, canonical literature projected one category of
conformity and individuation that would have condemned Gide to
endless repetition. But at the same time, desire, in all its warm and ful-
filling sameness, was far from peaceful territory. Even so, it was a per-
fect means to redirect the focus from national republican fascination to
enlightened narcissism. Gide’s vision of and commitment to the Orient
needed to accommodate paradigms of European culture that had al-
ready been debunked by other writers before him.23 One difficulty was
to relinquish the full-fledged colonial agitation that was smothering
everything else at the turn of the century.24 His experience, based on
many journeys to North Africa, enabled him to quickly figure out that
Western culture was dedicated to capital rather than to culture: “Next
to us, in front of a wretched hut where three Arab men take refuge, a
woman clad in saffron-colored rags washes a skinny five-year-old girl,
she is standing naked in a black cauldron […] If you are not familiar
with this country, for starters, imagine just that: nothing.”25
The class disparity that was so evident in Zola’s novels, for example,
is no neutral clearinghouse that can be adapted to overseas narratives.
Gide seeks to invalidate Europe’s sense of conducting rational and
beneficial mission in its colonies. The highly principled ideological en-
gineering of the French is erased by any possibility of self-expression
(Gide remains the speaker) and self-determination (natives are turned
into fetishes). At the same time, Gide unwittingly creates a mythical
land that is doomed to be left adrift by history. He seems caught be-
tween something he does not know (the Oriental and his story) and
something he does not like (the republican betrayal of the revolution’s
democratic principles). The point is that, if there were no locus of ac-
cumulation of power, mostly economic, fed by stealing land and con-
trolling resources, there would be no need for canonical establishment.
The wretched, as they appear in Hugo and Zola, cannot compare with
colonized victims, despite those writers’ progressive messianism, be-
cause, as Ricoeur puts it, “the system got rid of what constituted their
raison d’être.”26
Yet Gide is neither a historian nor a politician. As the narrative
branches off in different directions, he tries to cut across the literary
genre itself. It can be argued, by the same token, that Gide’s capital is
desire. The metaphor of the desert expanse develops as an accumula-
tion of both freedom and repressed emotions. Fredric Jameson identi-
fied “the place of the strategy of containment in Conrad”27 in the sea; it
is easy to see that the desert plays the same role for Gide. The desert is
limitless yet has been turned into a space of control, with, for example,
the establishment of French military bases, the sending out of scientific
expeditions whose ambition is to rationalize the imperial terrain, and
the closing of traditional trade routes for fear of foreign influence. There
is no possible escape from this kingdom.
What is easy to dismiss is Gide’s belief that in Algeria he can escape
the moral strictures of Christian orthodoxy through a show of individ-
ual piety. Religion may be a complex ingredient in the colonial mix,
but it is never a political starting point for Gide. His conflicted (mostly
Protestant) Christian values tell only half the story. For him, religion
amounts to repressed content concealed beneath the formal surface of
the colonial condition: he can identify neither with the missionnaires
nor with the faith of the natives. Thus, religion only contributes to the
escapism associated with desire and separation from cultural and ca-
nonical expectations. Indeed, Gide credits the “Arabs” for helping him
scrutinize the imperialist ethos, a label that also applies to him: “I had to
step aside to hide my tears from the others. Within the piety of this van-
quished people […] within their hopeless faith in something else, so the
desert’s grief was rising.”28 He must conceal his tears from outsiders,
just as he does from the outsider within himself. In a strange twist of
logic, the brutalized colonized people find themselves living in a nega-
tive landscape, one in which space, like individuals regardless of their
origin, is itself acculturated. Only Gide seems to position himself on
another level, one on which body and spirit intersect. What is perplex-
ing is that Gide uses “Arabs” as an index to measure nature’s power
over culture. He is substituting colonial logocentrism for another kind;
thus, his quest for status and meaning ends up silencing the Other.
Together with the dramatization of space, the acting out of colonized
homoeroticism adds to Western ideological momentum. Because of this
contradiction, it is safe to say that Gide denies assimilation from with-
in. When, for example, he teaches the young Athman the rudiments of
French literature, Michel immediately anticipates an amusing outcome,
mostly touching on matters of credibility: “Athman reads like Bouvard
and writes like Pécuchet. He studies like one possessed and writes
down just about anything.”29 Gide’s modernity is characterized by the
manner in which he tells another man’s story by talking about himself.

What we have here conveys the denunciation of a given colonial order,
while the experience remains a free-floating narcissistic object.
Gide criticizes the grandiose totalitarian framework of French impe-
rialism even while overlooking his complicity in it. No wonder that, for
example, he mentions money never as if it were an idle constraint, but
very much as a consideration in the segregated European neighbour-
hoods and the Arab slums. The author rarely derides the imaginative
treatment of his position, but he fully acknowledges having become
a self-hating benefactor, especially by way of a touch of materialism.
This is one of the rare instances in which the colonized is able to turn
money into a Trojan horse: “The hotels are full of travellers; they are
swarmed by charlatans and they pay a lot of money for the fake cer-
emonies staged for them.”30
Gide’s textual complicity in his rendering of North Africa receives a
sounder understanding in L’Immoraliste. The moral issue evoked in the
title points to several possibilities, yet Gide carries on with his unique
vision of the Muslim Orient. At first, the issue of immorality leads to-
wards France: the hero, while on a honeymoon trip to Italy and Algeria,
ends up being more interested in Arab boys than in his wife of a few
weeks. The narrative suggests that sex affects the colonizer, his values,
and the social contract with which he is expected to comply. His fal-
libility clouds the Frenchman’s authority, and this movement seems
propelled by Gide’s sentences, which transform a given reality into a
series of impressions that foreshadow the loss of Western narrative con-
fidence. Where the binding ideology is religion together with the bour-
geois order, and aesthetics becomes the tool of mediation in the conflict
of modern subjectivity.
Gide transforms the novel genre into a tale told by two characters: a
narrator, and Michel, who believes he is in charge of his own narrative,
which is actually written for a Monsieur D.R. Nothing is stable, or per-
haps credible. And therein lies the irony in L’Immoraliste. By challenging
the meaning of “moral” and its process of consciousness-taking, Gide
can open up his story (it is not a novel, according to his own words!) to
the practice of sex instead of limiting himself to the external discursive
effect of sexuality.31 Sex cannot be the universal ground, the felicitous
object of Western narratives. For Gide, sex is more likely what makes
sexuality stumble over itself. The question that comes to mind is this:
If rejecting the bourgeois order is conceived within its own cultural
frame, isn’t it therefore bound up with its own metaphysics? Certainly
the extension of the rebellion to the colonial empire must somehow

compound the issue at hand. One wonders whether the convergence of
sex and place does not help atone for the rarefied vision of an already
post-Christian world slowly unfolding towards fascism. Wasn’t colo-
nialism the exotic rehearsal of Europe’s own nihilistic upheaval?32
In L’Immoraliste, geographical descriptions serve their own purpose.
First, they do justice to a historical crime: Algeria was occupied by
France. Second, space re-enacts the ideological dreams of an outside
world that would fit within one’s own narrative. Because of his de-
sire, first for the Italian coachman and then for the Algerian youngster,
Michel seems to be the only character who is able to acknowledge the
world’s diversity. Even so, his understanding of place is more iconic
and intellectual than that of a tourist’s chance encounter. To that extent,
Michel emulates his social class: travelling entails recognizing place as
already identified in a wider scholarly frame (Roman ruins, Moorish
mosaics, ancient Carthage, etc.). Third, at the prestigious Collège de
France, he is a professor of philology whose field of study is the barbar-
ians of northern Europe. The reference to high culture is an exercise in
self-criticism, and furthermore, the contrast with popular and forbid-
den romance strips the virtue from imperialism. Michel belongs to the
Goths, whom he seems to know well. Knowledge, value, and posses-
sion are intimately linked: “The moral meaning, perhaps, I said, with
an unnatural smile. Oh, simply that of ownership.”33 It is obvious that
despite the exotic topos (the heat, the music, the whiteness of Algiers,
the women by the river, etc.), Michel feels at home in Algeria: “I forgot
my fatigue and discomfort. With each new step, I approached ecstasy,
silent elation, and exaltation of the senses and the flesh.”34
The much-vaunted bipolar vision advocated in Orientalism takes its
cue from within the European world itself. Algeria becomes the other
France where Michel can be and act his true self. North Africa (Algeria
and Tunisia, in the narrative) comes to life only through images; the
land seems to possess no materiality. French monuments and places of
power (town halls, schools, banks, gendarmeries, etc.) are noticeably
missing. Gide’s Orient is a system of identification where the meaning
of desire hovers between the historical and the contemporary. There
is neither nostalgia for native cultures (Berber, Islamic, Arabian) nor
hope in the imperialist present. Support for political causes in Gide’s
writing would have to wait until the 1920s. As of his writing in the
early 1900s, Gide is a qualified observer, free of everything except his
own native culture.
Michel’s sightseeing verges on voyeurism, the kind that is unwilling

to leave much out. Fredric Jameson talked about “cognitive mapping”35
with regard to how colonial empires surveyed other cultures; Gide ad-
dresses a moral problem that touches on the Oriental subject deemed
a commodity. The power of consciousness is all the more conspicuous
when we observe how Michel cherry-picks boys as companions: for
their visibly feminine features and prepubescence. The sensual/sexual
demands made on the Arab boys by the narrator are not just exclusive
and selfish; they are also demystifying, so long as the evanescent sat-
isfaction Michel receives comes as a rebuke of the European’s myth of
re-creating one’s family in the extended self of the empire.36
The narrative in L’Immoraliste unfolds in a dystopian mode: just as
with the Europeans’ powers in Africa, or in the New World a few cen-
turies before, Michel wants to rule over and debase the boys he discov-
ers: “Bachir followed me, talking the whole way; loyal and agile like
a dog.”37
Gide’s character always seeks what seems authentic in the Algerian
landscape, be it an urban neighbourhood or a village on the edge of the
desert. The author conflates his scholarly knowledge, always historical
in nature, with his intimate expectations, which are mostly promiscu-
ous and therefore immoral in content because they are based on a pow-
er relationship. No principled classification emerges from the journey
apart from a desire to stand out from the European crowd in Tunis or
Algiers. One may argue that this narcissistic desire is akin to the very
ideology Gide craves to debunk: the cultural difference (based on the
moral paradigm) defaults to the empty French bourgeois model. Gide’s
reality construction – that is, that Arab boys are readily available – fails
to question the fiction process in terms of ideology. Does the Algeria he
is writing about exist, or is it yet more colonial misrepresentation?
To return to voyeurism, it is evident that scenes and objects, sup-
posedly produced by the narrator’s memory, must be delivered to the
metropolitan readers as if they were paintings or photographs (espe-
cially postcards). And what they are invited to see is not so much one
particular colonial condition (Gide was not attracted to black men or
to Indochinese boys) as an acting out of some cultural anticonformi-
ty. His erotic competition, his pleasure in being surrounded by many
Arab boys, goes to the heart of the liberal view by declaring him to be
the one who is able to understand these people. The cultural integrity
of the natives is shredded by this patronizing exploitation; over and
over, the Arabs are reified and passive, just as in Delacroix’s paintings
of Morocco, in postcards of Algeria by the Geiser brothers, and later

in Camus’s short stories. Unable to step out of this role, Oriental na-
tives are condemned to stage their own exclusion, as illustrated in that
scene of the perpetual return: “I do not recognize the children, but the
children recognize me. Informed of my arrival, they all rush in. Is it
possible at all that they are the same ones!”38
By fact alone, as well as by its literary challenge, L’Immoraliste can-
not be compared to any other work of the time. Gide elaborates on a
personal journey while striving to bridge the gap between culture and
colonialism. Yet the cliché only camouflages the fractures within French
society itself. One cannot blame Gide for not condemning colonialism
altogether. After all, even Karl Marx disapproved of the colonized’s re-
volts against European powers (e.g., India against England).39 Stepping
on historical materialism’s preserves, one ascertains that, according to
Marx, it was in the interest of both parties to establish a new social
order, regardless of the sacrifices this entailed. For Gide, the colonial
world was a vector of individuation as well as an opportunity to nego-
tiate identity in opposition to difference. After all, Algeria was the other
France, a place where Algerians dwelled in another matrix in the zone
of capital accumulation and the cultural tabula rasa.
Michel is haunted by images and impressions; however, no clear un-
derstanding of the Orientalist situation underpins the narrative. It al-
most boils down to a matter of sheer consumption: “I sat down on the
first bench I came upon. I was hoping a kid would appear […] The one
who showed up a little while later was a fourteen-year-old boy, tall, not
shy at all, who immediately gave himself.”40
With the Arab boys, desire bears on an expression of the quantitative
(their number, the frequency, the bargain rates, etc.), and this aesthetic
of repetition aims at neutralizing the moral fault of a pedophiliac mar-
ried man and his ambiguity. It is common, therefore it cannot be a sin
or a crime. Michel attempts to naturalize both landscape and people;
furthermore, he knows their feelings and thoughts, which are sup-
posedly guided by greed and desire. In a sense, because Michel finds
himself presented with generous possibilities for experimenting in ho-
moerotic play, Algeria is turned into nothing more than the ground
for an Orientalist praxis. And in the end, it is all about quality rather
than quantity. Moreover, the children’s identity is always introduced
under the umbrella of the empirical, as if to provide some degree of
homogeneity. This is a return to the rhetoric of the Oriental’s oneness.
Gide proves unable to represent in depth or at length the subject he
claims he knows so intimately. He is mixing his journey with the na-

tives’ status quo, partly for strategic reasons – for example, his alleged
obsession with the desert has mostly to do with being cut off from
European society and exploring at will the terrain of pedophilia. The
desert scene evolves into a voyeuristic topos; at the same time, Michel
needs the screen of distance. Contrary to what was previously postu-
lated because of Gide’s humanistic and liberal posturing, he is actually
expanding the boundaries of Orientalism under the guise of taking the
side of the colonized.
L’Immoraliste takes the reader back to a paramount question: What
does desire have to do with colonialism? In many respects, the nar-
rative can be characterized as a tirade against the writer’s feeling of
exclusion. A section of the story involves Michel, front and centre: he
does not care much for his wife after she miscarries – basically, he al-
lows her to die of tuberculosis. This part of L’Immoraliste keeps telling
us what it is – a moral tale that will never be erased because the hero
repeatedly fails to reinvent himself: “And I would compare myself to
palimpsests […] What was that hidden text? In order to read, didn’t I
need to first erase the recent texts?”41 As the narrative unfolds along
different moral pitfalls, it becomes clear that Gide’s project is funda-
mentally logocentric. Most significant for the argument of Orientalism
is that the discourse of idealization (married life, the colonized’s safe
condition, the availability of sex, etc.) offers itself to critical strategies.
For example, Michel’s economic and political privileges become nega-
tive expressions of sexual fulfilment. The myth of assimilation42 boils
down to a lubricant of selfishness, arrogance, and most of all, a trick to
strip the colonized of their subjectivity. The distinction is at least as im-
portant as the segregation the colonizer firmly maintained, be it based
on housing, employment, education, or language.
Even though Gide goes to great lengths to secularize his view of love
and sexual relations – by, for example, emphasizing his interest in boys
over his recent marriage – he draws on a horizon of continuity that is at
least one part theology: the glorification of sacred desire. The Arab boys
are always desirable by nature, and once in the hands of the European
man, they become the servants of his affections. In theory, this may
well provide a model of inversion; still, the collective voice and point
of view fail to add up to a coherent whole. The real perversion here lies
in the switch from the legal, sacred couple (Michel and Marceline) to a
cleaving of the subject himself (due to a different original sin), who be-
comes unable to recognize himself in his desire and ends up a castaway
in the literal and metaphorical desert in search of redemption. The logic

of L’Immoraliste traces two cases of alienation that are trying to exploit
each other. Michel is never loved by any of the boys; Gide’s writing
amounts to an attempt to relive or resurrect his dreams of the Orient.
Back home at his Normandy estate, Michel tries to seduce a farmboy,
without success. The hero on his quest quickly becomes saddled with
melancholia. While the Arab boys lose their innocence, Michel finds
himself in a state of mourning, yet with no guilt attached. A very ma-
ture Derrida, in his reading of colonial monolinguism, has problem-
atized this particular state of loss with regard to a cultural authority
reduced to what he calls “the hegemony of the homogeneous.”43
Gide’s original pursuit of the Oriental treasure is transformed into
a bourgeois narrative saturated with dystopian universalism. There
are no dates in L’Immoraliste, as if to halt the historical hemorrhage
brought about by the colonial endeavour. Seasons, sometimes months,
are provided, but only to shape the importance of Michel’s flight to-
wards the Orient. This strategy also helps blend history into fiction, and
vice versa. Just before the episode of his “friendship” with Moktir, an
Arab boy he has invited to his rented accommodation, Michel quotes
the Bible. Michel’s capacity to balance moral issues depends on how
he has experienced them at a given time. Of course the situation is not
immune from interpretation. One may wonder whether Michel’s evo-
lution is not the exact opposite of that of a Christ-like character: from
the sacred to the morally unsound, with little room left for redemption.
Gide piggybacks both on morals, by juggling values and individual
desire, and on politics, by denouncing the deceptive simplicity of the
colonial condition.
In L’Immoraliste, place – or perhaps location – engages in an exchange
of meaning, with little symbiotic relationship possible. For example, the
narrative presents no interaction between the French travellers and the
French colonizers. Here, Marceline, Michel’s wife, is the perfect foil for
the old-fashioned patronizing posture, with her well-intended deeds
that amount to a static national model of authority. Gide demonstrates,
perhaps unwittingly, that cultural grounds for mutual understand-
ing were few and far between within the French colonial frame. In the
end, Marceline is never truly at home anywhere. So it is she who must
be sacrificed: “Marceline is trying to sit down in her bed […] the bed-
sheets, her hands, her gown, are covered with blood […] I am trying to
spot a place where I plant a horrid kiss on her face, drenched as it is in
sweat.”44 Setting aside the Judas–Jesus reference, the imaginary models
are too familiar with rather clueless characters and their tentative grasp
of social forms, of creeds, or simply of space.45 In the end, Marceline’s
life has become non–place-specific, for her love hinges on a man whose
experience transcends borders; his expansive cosmopolitanism never
addresses local issues. In the end, Michel cannot be fully separated
from either France or Algeria. Reflecting the homogeneous nature of
colonial literature, he is the prosecution witness for the failure of impe-
rialism. Marceline is buried in a village on the edge of the desert. Here
again, place is another means to grasp the full significance of identity.
By becoming an extension of France, the Orient ceases to be a powerful
paradigm of nomadic possibilities. Gide’s Algeria smacks of romanti-
cism of the worse kind because it is turned into a righteous instrument
of the anthropomorphic norm, whereby narrative resources dry up and
merge into a narcissistic call devoid of tragic purpose: “Take me away
from here now, and give me reasons to be. I, for one, cannot see any.”46
In the process of knitting together pedophilic desire and an obses-
sion with the Arab Orient, Gide converts a political situation into an
existential one by way of a narrative capable of providing some meta-
physical challenge. As with Si le grain ne meurt and Amyntas, the main
argument of L’Immoraliste consists in sketching the horizon of being,
along with what is predictable or disturbing. Subversion is rarely on
the agenda; rather, Gide seeks to realign himself with a new order. In
the end, Michel stays in Algeria for a time after Marceline’s death; he
shares his home with a prostitute and, at times, with her younger broth-
er. While movement and relationships were valorized at the outset, the
new concern that overrides everything else is that Michel has become a
prisoner of his own life. He has failed to free himself by overthrowing
the social prohibitions related to sex and colonial identity. The problem
for Michel – and, by the same token, for Gide – is that he could not see
that identity is a product, not an origin. Orientalism was so bent on
positing essentialism that intellectuals, most of whom demonstrated
progressive colours and petulant affection for the wretched, did not see
that the struggle needed to take place on another plane.
Ultimately, one wonders how a writer with a social conscience such
as Gide47 could come to terms with the colonial condition and with
how colonized peoples were framed as fetishes. In a famous Sartrean
scheme, we know that the sway of colonialism wanders in circles;48 but
another side of the argument may be that literature is only a reminder
of repressed Western violence. Gide’s narrative calls for scepticism with
regard not just to the stereotyping of the Oriental subject but also to the
silencing of a subject who tells no tale. But again, the author’s prem-
ises could not be misinterpreted or rejected because European power
had already crystallized in its own alienation. Michel symbolizes the
alienated French figure. He is confused, but he is never bewildered by
contradictions. Michel is indeed a non-transcendental character. The
beauty of L’Immoraliste is that it operates through two antagonistic
proper nouns: Algeria and France. Yet Gide could have taken the issue
a step further and argued that political culture begins at home, that
violence is both the starting point and the endgame of colonialism, and
that Orientalism has lived off established formulas of sexual inhibitions
repressed in the home country.
6 Fables of Maghreb Nationhood
One might expect postcolonial theories to conduct a less one-sided his-

torical and cultural analysis – and interpretation – through a better han-
dling of mediation, or what we have called “representation,” as Said
would view it. In this chapter, I find that the most promising approach
is to examine the evolution of the Maghreb’s nationhood, for the sake
of clarity as well as to avoid embracing the imperial vista that postcolo-
nial studies so vigorously opposes. Independence entails more than the
end of colonization; it also means introducing modernity in such a way
that the new citizen becomes the measure and the centre of the postco-
lonial condition. In the Maghreb this has been a long process. The ques-
tion of nationalism is implicit in its political origins (Enlightenment
and Marxism) but also in its discontinuity with the Western tradition.
Following up on issues of French representation of the Maghrebi sub-
ject, I will discuss to what extent it is not enough simply to suggest
that Orientalism represented a turn towards naturalizing the Maghebi
Other. I will focus on political activism and literature, a pairing that went
a long way towards contesting the colonial unconscious in the first half
of the twentieth century. While often going to great lengths to avoid
politics per se, Orientalism, in its association with colonialism, in effect
established a political orthodoxy opposed to nationhood in the Orient.
From this particular perspective, and without referring to aesthetics and
sciences, Orientalism created a realists’ utopia, largely by theorizing the
infeasibility of nationhood outside the French sphere. This time around
the situation did not emerge from deep within the cultural constructs
of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment or the anti-infidel narratives
of the Christian Middle Ages. The dynamic in all its absurdity derived,
instead, from the fact that Orientalism’s bulwark against nationhood
Fables of Maghreb Nationhood 107
was the modern concept of the nation itself. Throughout the nineteenth
century, the French model of national identification carried on with
the concept of “nationhood” as its theoretical blind spot. For example,
the Third Republic’s obsession with national commemorative events
heightened the tension between the revolution’s universal premises
and local loyalties within France itself.1 What can be said, then, about
Orientalism’s symbolic menace beyond the national borders? Perhaps
that the fantasy of excluding any other national “us” became the hall-
mark of a free-floating virtue that ignored the resistance it generated
among the colonized. More specifically, the fantasy of Orientalism grew
out of the perception among its pseudoscientific practitioners that so-
ciety was homogeneous and needed to maintain an inherent purity.2
Faced with the “narcissism of self-generation,”3 this continuous nar-
rative (in both space and time) of the French nation could not meet
the conceptual indeterminacy and the instability of knowledge outside
its borders. In theory, just as in practice, France with its colonial em-
pire could not reinvent democracy by starting from a distorted image.
Perhaps it is less salient to work out how to couch the colonial situation
within French universalism than to grasp that nationhood resists politi-
cal theory even though it is the handiest tool for generating collective
power. The situation of France and Algeria, or rather one against the
other, is probably the best example of this.
The significance of colonialism is that it did not present itself simply
as an ideological performance that extended the artificiality of French
nationhood beyond its natural borders. Colonialism also loosened the
bounds of belonging in space and time for colonized peoples. While
borders in Europe were being drawn many times over, in war after war,
colonial possessions slowly turned outward the forces of nationalism
and the Industrial Revolution; in this way they themselves became loci
of power. So in a sense, colonialism bowed to the worst possible threat
by depoliticizing its own ideology. The colonial ideology switched
from a modality of analysis, as expounded during the Third Republic,
to a modality of practice, permeated by geographies and by the no-
menclature of multiple identities. Domination was thereby naturalized
and even fetishized, because it never confronted a different source of
knowledge. So one may wonder: What were the pre-existing identi-
ties that had been suppressed throughout North Africa, especially in
Algeria? How relevant were they when faced with the colonial cultural
onslaught? How did imperial identity stake out a part of the world
and operate within it before it actually produced a framework for the
Algerian nation in 1962? And lastly, how does the concept of nation
impact our reading of Orientalism today?
From the mid-nineteenth century on, the French nation was char-
acterized by its values, interests, and common ethnic background, on
its actual territory and indeed anywhere in the world where French
people settled down. For peoples of the Maghreb, the semantic scales
pulled in the exact opposite direction by subtly shrinking the discur-
sive space where a sustained political unity could be developed. The
importance of French ideals was slowly matched by that of Maghrebi
myths that had taken root over centuries, based on both religion and
local ethnic identities. Still, what shape could nationhood take with-
out sovereignty? The colonial condition was such that nationhood was
more than a challenging concept; it was something that had been “sto-
len” by the performative power of colonial Frenchness. Colonies were
in effect a new country that comfortably slipped into old hegemonic
modes, fed by Orientalist representations and a nationalist yoking of
identity to political institutions. In nineteenth-century North Africa, the
Arabic language and the Islamic faith, although highly relevant, failed
to counter French Otherness because they never emerged as a force at
the macro level. Algeria was a patchwork of ethnic groups (Berbers,
Arabs, Jews, Turks) that were often too busy fighting one another to
shore up their legitimacy or to derive benefits from the new colonial
power. This suggests why the Emir Abdelkader, in his armed resistance
against the French invaders (1832–47), was unable to unite the Algerian
factions or to convince the Moroccan king to provide crucial military
support when it was most needed.4
It is fair to say that nationalism throughout North Africa was shaped
by nineteenth-century European ideologies, as well as by the need to
somehow develop political coherence and ultimately resist colonial rule
by force of arms. All the while, the asymmetrical historical situation gen-
erated mirages insofar as the occupation confounded any coherent na-
tional narrative. A historical fact about Algeria that is often overlooked
is that while France was striving for absolute control, it brought con-
siderable military force to bear on establishing new aristocratic native
families, with the goal of suppressing any national sentiment.5 These
extended families, called khalifas, naïbs, or bachagas, re-established feu-
dalism within the colonial institutional frame. Behind the veil of colonial
rule, the imaginary Maghreb created its own blank state. The central
trope of political discourse mobilized a new point of view: that dis-
course was to retreat before the supranational, commanding colonial
arrangement. To take root, this dysfunctional system (dysfunctional be-

cause illegitimate) needed to eliminate dissenting voices and forces.6 It
is no coincidence that early Algerian nationalist leaders were exiled to
distant lands of no return, as far away as the South Pacific (e.g., to New
Caledonia).7 Nor is it a coincidence that Maghrebi inmates were lumped
together with Republican forces during the 1871 Paris Commune. The
idea behind these harsh policies was that native national unity had to be
made too costly to ever be realistic.
A paradox of colonial rule was that instead of holding colonized peo-
ples stranded in a regressive state in which history was deemed illegi-
ble, it actually generated political power. This was a dramatic departure
from Orientalist binary constructions that rendered cultural difference
barely intelligible because Maghrebis were supposedly caught in some
teleologically warped essence. By means of this French ideological take,
democracy was happening “now” while the value system of the Arab/
Muslim Other was supposedly lost in time. Islam, the foundation of
Maghrebi cultures, was no longer consonant with the rule of law and
became strapped down by misleading labels. The symbolic system of
colonial rule, articulated with its own language and logic, unintention-
ally spawned a movement based on Islamic reforms and cultural dyna-
mism. Exclusive identities thoughout North Africa were as powerful
and goal-oriented as the colonial nationalism of the early period. In the
twentieth century, the native elites, trained in the French schools and
colleges in France,8 helped brush the dust from the fossilized body of
native customs and traditions that had once prepared the ground for
colonization. For one thing, until the twentieth century, critical atten-
tion among Muslim scholars had hardly been directed at challenging
Western political philosophy and historical materialism. Colonialism
had caught the Islamic intellectual sphere off guard.9 Then, wielding
Western intellectual tools, Maghrebi nationalists, most of them secu-
larized, began questioning France’s dominance in terms of both laws
and cultural presuppositions. Colonialism had propelled the natives to-
wards following French forms of intellectual inquiry. Some may argue
that this encounter was overdue, but the subaltern did not accept unre-
flectively what was “presented” to him. The process took time, access to
education was limited, and education itself was closely tied to colonial
ideology.10 The Maghrebi elites were mainly low-ranking civil servants,
non-commissioned soldiers, pharmacists and physicians, or teachers.
By 1962, there were fewer than 10,000 French citizens of Algerian de-
scent in a country of 7 million Algerian natives.11 As a consequence,
among the Muslim population, the notion of an elite took a different

route in terms of internalizing the value of citizenship and rethinking
the nationhood reference. For one thing, the elite did not speak for the
nation, and they were viewed by Algerians at large as living proof of
colonial contamination. The French education system was expected to
emancipate its pupils by validating the glorious colonial undertaking.
In many ways, it failed to do so – too few Algerian natives attended
French schools for cultural assimilation to take root. By the 1920s, the
widespread representations of French culture were being shaped into
new ones throughout North Africa, in ways that turned the distant ter-
ritory into a contentious centre of power. Had it not been for the Second
World War, the independence struggles would have started much ear-
lier. Indeed, there was more in the air than unrest and demands. In
1920, the Destour Party was founded in Tunis, with the unambiguous
goal of drafting a constitution for an independent Tunisia.12 As if to
drive the point home regarding France’s political worries vis-à-vis its
colonies in North Africa, a decree of March 1949 stipulated that bills
issued by the Ministry of Education concerning Algeria would have to
be approved by the interior minister. This only strengthened the links
between nationalism and the politics of culture. Imperial France had
long ago convinced itself that it had stabilized North Africa by bring-
ing technological progress and a market economy. But it was quickly
becoming clear that antagonism toward colonial status was permeating
every aspect of North Africa’s civil society and that the future was go-
ing to be a bloody one.13
The people of the Maghreb never recognized the dominant culture
as legitimate.14 At the same time, the colonial power viewed the na-
tives as incapable of critical resistance (and of self-government) – as
meriting, at best, patronizing empathy. Under its universalizing mode,
whatever colonial rule claimed to offer, it always left something out.
But eventually, cumulative subjective change brought about class and
national consciousness.15 Once collective anxiety was displaced from
culture to politics, a national awakening began. By the interwar period,
it was clear that French colonialism amounted to a clash of two na-
tionalisms: one that oppressed the colonized, and another that was to
liberate them. In the national struggle throughout North Africa in the
twentieth century, the French institutional powers hijacked the concept
of a native elite in order to transform it into a harmless, neutral ideo-
logical means to control the rest of the colonized populations. National
historiography became an ideological tool in the hands of the Front de
Libération Nationale (the National Liberation Front; FLN), which devel-

oped its own comprehensive, universal pretensions. The native elites
had to ensure that they did not impede intercultural communication,
but also that they did not curb the emancipation dreams of their fellow
Maghrebis. This vacillating in-between-ness well illustrates the “third
space” of the colonial condition.16 A gradual shift took place from the
elite to the general population, from the lofty ideals of French repub-
licanism to a rather nationalist individuation of the colonial subject.
Was it that notions such as “nation” and “freedom” were so overde-
termined by France’s history as to be left alone by the colonized? In an
ironic twist, Mohamed Larbi Madi, a founder of the FLN, wrote from a
French prison: “Soon you are going to celebrate in Paris the anniversary
of Bastille Day. We stand with you in thoughts for we certainly recall
its meaning. And such a recollection keeps our faith strong, and gives
meaning to our hopes.”17
The Algerian freedom fighter set out to hinder French political proj-
ects in the colony, portraying them as already obsolete. It turned out that
Orientalism, as a result of its fixed representations, had itself become
fossilized. The habit of metaphorically casting the Arab as a histori-
cal subject succeeded only in articulating resistance, often beyond the
colonial borders, as became the case with liberation pan-Arabism from
the 1940s through the 1960s. In the late 1950s, France began to consid-
er extending citizenship to the natives and granting broader access to
public education, but by then it was too late to salvage the empire. The
tropes of domination could only be transposed onto the deconstruc-
tive enunciation of self-determination and independence. Once history
began to “accelerate,” especially after the First World War, the national-
ism arising from the colonial condition began breaking moulds, shap-
ing new representations, and encouraging the colonized to struggle
for historicizing political power. All of this was transpiring worldwide
by mid-century, and it inscribed the present of the colonized, whether
on the Indian Subcontinent or in the Arab world, onto the timelessly
imagined Orientalist paradigm. Furthermore, the counter-power of lib-
eration wasbeing elaborated not from beyond the unknown or unimag-
inable fringes of the metropolis, from Paris or London, but right from
the heart of it. Intellectuals and anticolonial activists, such as Césaire,
Senghor, Bourguiba, Messali Hadj, and Ho Chi Minh, all located im-
perialism in the heart of the modern state, whose very strength was
to promulgate world-systems against those it intended to dominate if
not eliminate. So, although this was not originally an expected political
outcome with regard to France, the patterns of authority dismantled

their own cognitive landscapes.
Given that colonized peoples had little if any say in what was enacted
in their own lands, it comes as no surprise that elaborate programs for
reform, and later for national liberation, took root outside North Africa,
mainly in France. By 1919, an estimated 100,000 Algerians had settled
in France. This accidental community was dazzled not so much by the
métropole’s technological or economic achievements as by its political
organization. What the émigrés had seen and known back home was
quite different: abject poverty, colonial oppression, religious supersti-
tion, the tyranny of local leaders appointed by the French authorities,
and a close-mindedness that had become as corrosive as any imperial
ideology. The sharp decline in living standards in Algeria had caused a
steady flow of immigrants, overwhelmingly male, to the métropole from
the countryside.18 These former peasants and day labourers were well
aware of what it meant to lose one’s own land. They were also the keep-
ers of the resistance spirit that had been fostered nearly a century ear-
lier by the Emir Abdelkader, who had drawn his fighters largely from
the countryside. It is safe to say that before they became nationalist
militants, the émigrés were patriots; and their world view was not the
leitmotiv of some social project, but rather was deeply rooted in the re-
ality of nationhood that had been so far denied them. Their views on
nationhood could not be changed by theoretical enunciations on such
issues as intercultural assimilation, or later on, a shared community
of interests, as advocated by Albert Camus and other left-wing think-
ers, for example. But the polymorphousness of the struggle confound-
ed the identity epistemology, which had been associated for too long
with religion and ethnic syncretisms. In other words, the grand over-
arching sense of national belonging developed slowly and in multiple
layers, regardless of social background. Human dignity, shared citizen-
ship, and nationalist aspirations evolved over many years, often pain-
fully. In Morocco, for example, the war in the Rif (1921–6) epitomized
the inner turmoil within a kingdom torn between the demands of the
French and Spanish protectorates and the identity and rights claims of
the Berbers. In the course of the twentieth century, the much-vaunted
Orient turned into a schizophrenic space, split into two directions: from
France to the Maghreb, and from the Maghreb to France. Assertions of
Algerian-ness and Moroccan-ness were a response not only to politi-
cal oppression and appalling economic conditions but also to the fact
that France was no longer identified with talismanic pronouncements
on democracy and the mission civilisatrice. So the main question in the

colonies, as well as in France with its immigrant workers, could have
been this: Who were the real people, and for what nation?
In the narrative of Orientalism in North Africa, there was no room
for peoples and nations. But at the same time, France itself reiterated
the failure of the imperialist ethos to pursue any sublime mission – one
predicated on the overblown imaginary figures of the colonized and
the colonizer. Against this alienated condition, the insular critiques of
the liberation struggles expanded into dramatized political relation-
ships. Under the leadership of Messali Hadj, the Étoile Nord Africaine
(North African Star; ENA) was founded in 1925 in Paris, as a labour
organization close to the Communist Party; soon after, it evolved into a
nationalist movement. In 1929 the French government tried to dissolve
the ENA, and soon after, its leaders were sentenced to prison for re-
establishing it as an underground organization. Liberation movements
became far more attractive to North African intellectuals and immigrant
workers than the pipe dreams of colonial assimilation and watered-
down reforms. Nationhood brought with it an ontological possibility
as well as a novel self-conscious reflexivity rooted in faith, language,
and land. The independence discourse evoked history in contrasting
Western ideologies with national constructionist accounts. The same
discourse pointed to the crucial need to start imagining a model of ac-
tual territorial rootedness and, against the odds, a globalized culture
able to endure the impact of colonial hybridity. The challenge for the
new nations would be to reorient the epistemic premises of the West
towards new identity territories.
At the same time, France slowly began disavowing its own brand
of overseas nationalism.19 Even conservative critics, such as the well-
known journalist Raymond Cartier, advocated unilateral withdrawal
from the empire as a precondition for salvaging the original spirit of the
French nation-state.20 The outmoded dialectics of progressive–regressive
nationhood regarding the “Arabs” reappeared as a discursive ploy that
applied empty nationalistic claims and offered a strategic escape from
a war in Algeria that was locked into the same self-defeating para-
digm of what had happened in Indochina between 1945 and 1954. The
Orientalist pull derived from the notion that under France’s patronage,
the colonies had been subsumed into national identities. Within this
frame, national independence throughout Africa – and the Maghreb in
particular – was linked to a modernization program that mobilized the
West’s icons and ideologies. In a pamphlet published in 1957, Raymond
Aron declared that the time had come for Algerians to make their own
history because economics and demographics were no longer on the
side of the colonial undertaking.21 In light of the hegemony exercised
by global Orientalism, national sovereignty was to gain the upper hand
because it was truly political, or rather, it was a stark reminder of the
significance of a “from now on” identification of history with the peo-
ple. Ironically, this consisted in filling up the emptiness – created by
the colonial anti-logos – in the classic manner of humanism by turn-
ing the colonized into a subject in his or her own right and by restor-
ing some original presence (historical, cultural, and economic). There
is no need to underscore how this exercise in national relabelling was
resoundly ahistorical, and the fiasco of the FLN, which meddled with
myths and national memory, only helped put the case to rest. Before
independence, the self-projecting French ego and its strategic use of
essentialism had proved incapable of accounting for views of other po-
litical contexts as well as historical modes of consciousness. This was
one reason why the French could never have won the Algerian war.
Military might only replicated an outdated geopolitics. In an attempt
to skirt this strategic impasse, which was unsustainable both economi-
cally and on the diplomatic front, Raymond Aron developed an argu-
ment that embraced some sort of a transnational flow of capital instead
of pointing to the historical fault lines of colonialism.22 Another part of
his historical analysis fed on the old paradigm of a clash of civilizations:
he believed that the European minority could not live in and adapt to
an Algerian republic. In essence, the former rulers could not morph into
non-French citizens. This puzzling position would lead us to believe
that the European population of Algeria did not “own” their history,
that it was given to them by circumstances that compelled them to ob-
sessively invoke their origins.
Of more consequence for a discussion of Maghrebi nationhood is
that throughout the liberation struggle, the natives had to turn the po-
litical gaze on themselves rather than against the French. The North
African liberation movements that originated in France in the 1930s
were seemingly governed by the demands by workers and unions, by
political configurations reacting to the rise of fascism, and by metro-
politan audiences with a weak interest in the colonies; nevertheless,
those same movements informed the essential character and desire of
the colonized peoples in terms of what had previously been sketched
out in the Orientalist discourse. Members of different cultural and eth-
nic backgrounds converged on Paris and organized against the colonial
establishment, and this helped strengthen the boundaries of nation-

alism and revitalize France’s self-image as the crossroads of intercul-
tural dialogue. An example was Le Paria, a magazine founded in 1922
in Paris by Louis Hunkanrin of Dahomey, Max Clainville-Bloncourt of
Guadeloupe, and Ho Chi Minh of Indochina that was published from
1922 to 1926. The journal claimed to be giving a voice to all people
subjected to colonial rule, thereby establishing the first “inter-colonial
union.” Despite Le Paria’s communist slant, Algerians and Moroccans
were eager contributors to it. They ensured that their Islamic faith
did not fence out ideological communication and collective struggle,
especially from the socialist atheistic side. Pragmatic subalterns were
perfectly capable of organizing and speaking for themselves. France’s
military setbacks in the world wars against Germany did not help end
colonial occupation and institutional dependency; they did, though,
ensure that triumphalist imperialism and its supporters were from now
on open to attack.
The argument that a purely imperialistic solution could quash expec-
tations of nationhood among a colonized people rooted in their own
religion, culture, historiography, and native soil found itself strongly
challenged. The independence struggles were founded on the prem-
ises of cultural authenticity underlying the epistemological pendulum
between what was truly foreign and what stood for home. By the early
twentieth century, the project of a global French nation found itself rely-
ing more and more on exhorbitant and anomalous narratives as well as
political sleight of hand in order to maintain its ideological usefulness.
The nationalist concept and imaginary that France derived from its co-
lonial experience was broad in its geographic and cultural reach, but
it was applied only in a narrow and technical sense, and this became
more troublesome when the market system of exploitation was “put
on stage,” quite literally. In 1930–1, France organized in quick succes-
sion both the centenary celebrations of Algerian colonization and the
Colonial Exhibition, with the avowed purpose of impressing the French
people with the grandeur of overseas France. These political displays
came attached to an anachronistic and chimerical mandate to proclaim
and reinforce France’s cultural world mission, and not just as a rival to
the British empire. These exhibitions were extremely popular, with about
8 million visitors between May and November 1931 for the Colonial
Exhibition alone. In his inaugural speech, Paul Reynaud, the colonial
minister, flatly declared that “colonization is the greatest feat of History.
Does it ring true at all that on this day we are celebrating a crowning
moment that is close to falling into decline? Never have a soaring spirit
and its outpouring been so powerful as they are today.”23 The discourse
on differentiated hierarchies and perspectives went so far as to claim
that the colonies could become the birthplace of a new European man,
a true pioneer for the French race in every sense.24 However, political
opposition to these archaic valorizations of the nation lacked a centre
and a privileged point of view. The Communist Party, with the vocal
support of Surrealist artists like Aragon, Éluard, and Tanguy, organized
a counter-exhibition from September to November that denounced the
excesses of imperial France and promoted the native arts of Africa,
Asia, and the Pacific Islands, although this project met with little suc-
cess. With no genuine working class existing in the colonies, left-wing
intellectuals and activists stood between two centres of attraction: na-
tional assimilation, and cultural association. Both meant the continua-
tion of the colonial paradigm: from a fixed symbolic order (represented
by the civilizing mission) to patronizing overtones that denied the true
realization and rewards of independence. Whatever the French politi-
cal spectrum had to offer, the notion of full-fledged independence had
not yet gained traction in the national political consciousness. Even left-
wing intellectuals were busy papering over the natives’ identities, out
of sheer ignorance or perhaps because acknowledgment of them might
flare up into an engine of social change that would slip out of their
control. So it is no mystery why Maghrebis set out to redefine their own
culture. After all, even Sartre’s account of “situational engagement,” in
his preface to Senghor’s Anthology of African Poetry,25 while it addressed
the complexity of the epistemological roots of the colonized, was only
able to frame the liberation movements within the Marxist doxa and
its limits on emancipatory humanism. The word “anticolonialism” had
been coined in the name of French republican values and designated
what only the colonized peoples longed for. In Hegelian fashion, an-
ticolonialism in the 1930s turned out to be a form of alienation, from
which a brighter future could not be distinguished. In that sense, the
rightful aspirations to self-determination had run up against a pro-
found sense of betrayal over what France had failed to achieve beyond
its own borders. The nationalist militants from the colonies wanted to
wrench their political reality loose from centuries of oppression.26 One
obvious conundrum was that they applied Western concepts and meth-
ods without endorsing them. Furthermore, they had become a diasporic
people, which forced them to think and act in more syncretic terms than
their fellow militants who had remained at home. France continued
to rely on a morally uncertain principle of “vital space” to maintain

its empire; meanwhile, resistance from the colonized sprang from an
egalitarian ideology slowly turned upside down until it became fully
validated by a total break-up.27 It can be argued that the native soil as
the foundation for nationhood was all the more relevant since it set the
stage for postcolonial modernity in an ethically crucial way: the tempo-
ral dislocation resulting from colonial occupation could, at long last,
be spatialized. Recall that Orientalism engaged in deep scientific con-
versations concerning cities and dynasties of the Maghreb, for example,
while eschewing discussion of the nations of this same area.28 For too
long, Muslim natives had been caught in a metaphysical construction.
The contours of Orientalist discourse were congruent with an always
inadequately explained self-determination. Logically, nationhood and
independence were to reclaim a historical point of origin. Because of
this deflation of ideological authority, it was not so much a question
of catching up with one’s own history as defeating the terms of coop-
eration inherent in the new Occident–Orient paradigm.
The 1930 exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French
colonization of Algeria demonstrated the extent to which France had
squandered its moral prestige. The exhibition had been meant to foster
a sense of cultural proximity between France and Algeria, yet the event
was choreographed to generate a sense of ethnic superiority and to of-
fer a facile justification for the “self-ordained” colonial project. Algeria
was important not just to vindicate France’s republican nation-state;
indeed, the exhibition promoted itself as offering a programmatic view
of the “global nation.” Foreign cultures and peoples were documented
within an ideology of knowledge with design, something that did not
seem to obviate the need for racially inflected Orientalist theories. For
example, the use of the French language helped underscore how far
France was willing to go to escape the consequences of its imperialis-
tic ambitions. All the same, the absolute denial of Algerian nationhood
was based on the political meaning of France – a meaning detached
from its own principles. As soon as the task of colonial domination
and exploitation began to operate with full force, the leitmotif of de-
mocracy and Western superiority collapsed into a device aimed at its
own image. The colonial exhibitions, and the attention paid to them in
the media, offered evidence of France’s racist unconscious. The pur-
pose of the colonial ideology was to turn an allegory of power into a
political tool that could shape the consciousness and minds of French
citizens. Given the French government’s significant investment in these
colonial exhibitions, it was clear that the paradigms of French histori-

ography had settled into an unstable orthodoxy. The method and the
dynamic were prescriptive and doctrinal. Instead of being entertained,
French visitors were “educated.” The sea of performative visibility on
offer was premised on the distinct characteristics of the colonized peo-
ples within the nation’s culture. Quite a feat. One goal was to show
the global indigènes within a broader pseudoscientific framework, and
here, the effect of shaping the natives with an objective discourse con-
sisted precisely in “protecting” all sense of their identity from inter-
pretation. The allusions to empire legitimated the reference system of
an unstable republic even while hiding other peoples behind the veil
of a monarchic-type order. Under the colonial fallacy, the boundaries
between a French “us” and a native Algerian “we” did not run along
territorial lines, but rather through a desired national entity that natu-
ralized segregation and disenfranchisement. The colonial exhibitions,
the metropolitan media, and even the film industry contributed to the
new arrangements of history to the extent that the essence of the colo-
nies no longer lay within some exotic frame or economic advantage.29
Rather, that essence was set out as some vital quality important to the
state and its organization. With a nod to social Darwinism, the colo-
nies, especially Algeria, symbolized the healthy, forward-looking part
of France and – by extension – of Europe as well. In the 1920s, Albert
Sarraut, probably the most influential French colonial minister during
the Third Republic, could state in a seemingly rational fashion: “We are
living through times where the very future of life dictates that we must
expand our vision beyond horizons we are familiar with.”30
The political traditions that had altered identities throughout Europe
were predicated on the drawing and subsequent erasing of difference
in the colonies. More specifically, the universalist foundations of French
politics allowed for a myth of objectivity and a rational policy process,
admittedly in a nationalistic mode. For example, under colonial rule it
was not uncommon to see more land appropriated by the government
after the First World War, based largely on the ludicrous argument that
there had been no such a thing as a system of private property before
the advent of colonialism. Every cultural misunderstanding vindicated
France’s right to pursue its unilateral economic interests and to real-
ize its geopolitical aspirations. The 1930 exhibition of the centenary of
Algeria’s colonization brought the naming and knowing of the empire
into the modern archive of history. To make good on its intention of cre-
ating a history of its own, France recoded the categories of Orientalism
from representation according to inception. How so? Through displace-

ment, disguise, and numerous disjunctive processes that underpinned
and eventually mapped out a single prescribed version of history.
Within the highly ritualized framework of the French republican cel-
ebration, Algeria stood out as sacred ground. The budget for the ex-
hibition was astronomical – more than 130 million French francs for
an event that lasted from January till July 1930.31 In Algeria, most of
the celebratory events were military in nature; in Algiers, for example,
there was erected a statue of General Lamoricière, who was lauded for
his victories against the natives’ resistance, which involved slaughter-
ing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the exercise of absolute pow-
er. There were also travelling exhibitions of photographs, bearing on
military exploits and the lives of European pioneers who had settled
on the “unforgiving” Algerian soil. This self-serving collaboration be-
tween the centralized French state and local branches of colonial power
insisted on the historicity of the imperialist system; this amounted to a
political argument based on the idea that the ties between France and
Algeria were unbreakable. Was the colonial situation an instance of
positivistic reduction of political theory?32 In Algeria the anniversary
exhibition helped embody unified communities, yet coherent identi-
ties were missing and an Orientalist mindset was folded into the mix.
In the sciences, for example, a neuropsychiatric school was founded
in Algiers, where Professor Antoine Porot conducted a famous study
that supposedly indicated that the Maghrebi brain cortex was dwarfed,
which allegedly proved that the natives were mentally inferior.33
The masquerade of the centenary exhibition ushered in a new, more
vigilant stage of the nationalist struggle by contributing to Maghrebis’
understanding of how politics worked and by validating their collective
conversation, at least among émigrés. Very early, the Communist Party’s
influence on Maghrebi nationalist militants wore off. Even as they
struggled against capitalism, the independence activists opposed the
unidirectional importation of conceptual apparatuses largely shaped by
European and Soviet perspectives and experiences. The concept of class
struggle was meaningless within the colonial situation and was per-
haps even dangerous for nations that needed to remain united against
a single enemy. Also, most of the North African leaders belonged to the
bourgeois class back home and had by then been compromised by their
strong ties to the colonial establishment. The political challenge was to
reconcile Marxist temptations with nostalgia for a mythical homeland
and the demands of Islam, of which intellectuals had little knowledge.
Even so, the unsettled situation in the 1930s demanded that Maghrebi
activists not only reject the magical narratives of the colonial culture
but also appropriate status quo methods for their own purposes. It is
fair to say that the nationalist struggle did not arise from a linear set of
correspondences between oppression and self-determination but rath-
er from opposition to both traditional native cultures and the unstable
(if not misleading) French republican discourse. The various North
African political movements did not see eye to eye, being divided at
times over matters of socialist theory, at other times over matters of
religion. Sometimes they were mesmerized by the conspiracy-addled
French colonizers; other times, when they came back home, by the
politics of the Near East as discussed by Syrian intellectuals, in par-
ticular, who lived in exile in Paris.34 Independence leaders found it
hard to apply their ideas in a world where the models they had expe-
rienced in France either did not exist or, worse still, were controlled
by Europeans.35
Trade unions, political parties, and even athletic associations were
rolled into one Western sphere of influence. Only religion seemed to offer
a pure political path. So, at least until the Second World War, Maghrebi
leaders and militants conceived of themselves as Muslims before they
claimed any political label. Islam was what unambiguously separated
the true natives from the colonizers. And religion brought with it a so-
cial model that did not rely on myths of Western modernity and that
gave meaning to the origins and cultural practices of the peoples of
the Maghreb. This religious element within the nationalist movement
meant there was less room for compromise with the colonial world. By
1945, hostility to the colonial state had swept away any expectations for
meaningful dialogue, even among those intellectuals for whom French
cultural and political life had held some appeal. For practical political
purposes, the ideal of assimilation had lost any traction it might have
enjoyed in the past. As a cultural alternative, Islam was more power-
ful, and the colonial power had few means to oppose it in the political
arena. Relatively few militants were religious, yet religion turned out to
be vital to their understanding of their state of dependency. Realizing
they had no control over transnational capitalism, the militants turned
to religion as an original essence that would enable nationalistic truth
to take hold. Is it possible to talk about a metaphysics of nationhood?
Nationalist militants felt justified in reaching the paradoxical conclu-
sion that it could; for them, there was room for both a deep-rooted faith
and a brand-new idea of the nation. While French humanists entangled
themselves in the Industrial Revolution and historical materialism,

the Maghrebis’ identity grew stronger because their debates arose from
the very roots of their nations. Orientalist essentialism – its cultural
and psychic servitude – was methodically turned upside down. This
pre-modern historical certainty would surely bypass the colonial ex-
perience. There was, however, a major difference between the Algerian
independence movement on the one hand, and on the other, the Moroc
can and Tunisian independence movements, which kept the door open
to negotiation and compromise with the French, simply because their
politics of national identity seldom traversed the canonical divide of
religion and historical obliteration that characterized the Algerian colo-
nial experience. For example, the first Moroccan national organization,
the Comité National d’Action, was founded in 1933. The party brought
together the secularized urban bourgeois (mostly from Rabat and Fez)
and leaders from Islamic schools. Their goal was to bring about com-
prehensive reforms within the French protectorate. Independence was
never on the agenda, and membership was limited to a few thousand
men. Yet the organization was dissolved by the French authorities in
March 1937. Only in 1943 was a true liberation political party founded
in Morocco when the Istiqlal Party succeeded in merging all the politi-
cal forces of opposition to the French protectorate.36 Their charter de-
manded immediate independence and the founding of a constitutional
monarchy.37 By 1952, with the support of the United States and the Arab
League, the nationalist movement was growing in both numbers and
influence. By March 1956 the Istiqlal Party was a key participant in the
political negotiations over Moroccan independence. The Moroccan na-
tionalist movement enjoyed unity and cultural coherence. Mediation
regarding the consequences of French imperial rule was diverted by
a search for democratic consensus revolving around the king. History
would prove Moroccan nationalists wrong as far as civil rights, gender
equality, and economic emancipation were concerned.
Early in the independence struggle, Algerians wanted to oppose an
Arab/Islamic core to the French Jacobine tradition. One advantage of
resorting to religion was that the movement would benefit from a col-
lective dynamic.38 The cultural fetish located in colonial rule was from
then on conceived of as a necessity, a vehicle for social transformation.
The colonized had to unlearn Otherness, and that process could not
be embedded across all the North African nations in the same manner.
The peoples of the Maghreb had all embarked on a struggle for nation-
hood and identity; however, Moroccans and Tunisians chose to explore
political constructs whose discourses conformed to the narratives of

Western liberal democracy. Also, Morocco and Tunisia had relatively
small European populations and thus were more attuned to the topos
of authentic native identity. Algerians, by contrast, tended to enforce an
essentialist subversion in order to counterbalance the tabula rasa applied
to their own recent history. Algerians needed to locate the concerns of
identity in a more remote historical structure, given that the colonial
undertaking had pushed deeper the organizing cultural assumptions.
All the while, the Orientalist posture allowed simplifications based on
binary modes of opposition. For example, instead of articulating true
humanist cognition from the bottom up, the colonial exhibitions ex-
emplified and implemented both racial taxonomy and the first stage
of hybrid modernity. The struggle for nationhood urged one to ask:
How does one assess the advent of emancipation and independence
in a world in which normativity consists in enforcing ideological fanta-
sies? Just like a traumatized body, a colonized nation has to invent sur-
vival strategies. The harsher the colonial impact, the more potent the
insurrectionary agency. The Algerian historian Mostefa Lacheraf had
this take on the situation: “In Algeria, society had been more deeply
wounded than the nation, and yet it was the latter, not society itself,
that became the ultimate goal, and held all the stakes. This truly meant
attempting the impossible when everything was determined in an in-
direct fashion by the attitude of the enemy who denied the Algerian
nation because they had no hold on its spiritual wholeness, its hidden
reserves of recovery.”39
Orientalism had opened the door for patriotism, but by the 1950s its
ideology had been soldered to modal approaches and theoretical dead
ends. By definition, there was no such thing as a destiny process, nor
was it possible to attain a telos for the colonized. To rationalize the un-
canny nature of the colonial imago, liberation movements sought what
would best promote universal freedom and national aspirations. One
dimension of the deconstruction of nationalist Orientalism appeared in
what was later called “francophone literature.” Maghrebi writers had
been contributing to newspapers and literary reviews as early as the
late nineteenth century. The first recorded short story in French by a na-
tive North African author was La Vengeance du Cheikh, by Si M’Hamed
Ben Rahal, in Algiers in 1891. The first novel was Ahmed Ben Mustapha,
Goumier by Si Ahmed Bencherîf, in 1920. These works were derivative
of the European canon and vaguely autobiographical. Their importance
lay elsewhere: they had been written for objective purposes, notably
that of restoring the presence of the subaltern to literature and history.

Existential anguish in the face of cultural and national desintegration
had precipitated a search for a signifying project that would sustain a
sovereign self-identity. How better than by resorting the language of
the enemy? Writing in French did not mean turning towards the fu-
ture and erasing the past – a highly literary and glorious Arabic past
at that. The truth was that most of the Maghrebi elite trained in French
schools had been poorly educated in formal Arabic. So despite their ad-
mirable intentions, too often French was their default language. After
the First World War, a wave of Maghrebi francophone writers drew on
non-linear as well as more complex critical relationships between aes-
thetic value and political purpose. While French editors and readers
judged Maghrebi authors for their ability to create plausible characters
and plots associated with the native exotic, it became obvious that there
was more to their efforts than that. What had been rejected and de-
formed by the colonizers was now being reintroduced behind the veil
of non-contentious cultural politics, mostly because there were hardly
any native readers. Fiction writing, especially after the Second World
War, cultivated an anticipatory consciousness, resorting to either satu-
rated realism or autobiographical scenarios that dramatized subjectiv-
ity. This barely challenged the prevailing orthodoxies, be they French
or native, but eventually literature would compete with politics for the
spotlight in the emancipation movement, which became the defining
feature of postcolonial literature until the early 1980s.
What matters most is that francophone literature slowly aligned itself
with the dominant historical narrative. Something more was needed to
shoulder the political struggle, even if the writing itself could hardly
be deemed nationalistic. Perhaps the emphasis on the literary process
added more rootedness to an identity issue that had been buried under
decades of self-hatred and the subjugation of a national consciousness.
The central point to draw from this form of reorientation is that, as it
sought a unified vision of subject and nation, it conceived of new pos-
sibilities where before there had been no prototype, no true account. It
should not be surprising that it was in Algeria, where colonialism had
been most enduring and most brutal, that francophone literature first
appeared. Fiction writing by Maghrebi authors was a tool for a reduc-
tive ideology and a place where decolonization of the self could begin.
Still, were these native intellectuals liberated from an alienation from
their own history, and from the symbolic structure of language? The
French language made Arabic look older. Furthermore, fiction writing
brought out social issues related to origin and mimesis. Orientalism

had posited Arab culture in terms of confrontation, to the point of
negating its scientific legacy (from the ninth century onwards); now,
francophone literature from the Maghreb was setting the challenge of
nationhood on a steeper course by keeping to an “I” that spoke both
for the individual and for collective resistance. Mouloud Feraoun, the
last novelist of the colonial period, who was assassinated in March
1962 during the final truce, wrote in his diary: “Is it possible that while
labels abound, I don’t have my own? What is mine? Somebody tell me
what I am!”40
7 A View from Diversité:
Writing and Nation
It is in the postcolonial condition and literature of contemporary France

that I find my strongest illustration of the impact of latent Orientalism.
Indeed, this is certainly a better option than becoming the negotiated
term in my own cultural impermanence in a country where unease with
postcolonial politics has been considerable – probably as considerable
as the unease with moral relativism and with the many incarnations of
the mission civilisatrice. Beur literature will highlight the particular no-
tion of a social text and its many challenges. But my purpose is not to
market postcolonial Frenchness, which has been created, as we will see,
out of a process of unlearning and an estrangement of identity. Rather,
I will draw on the domain of subjectivity and what has been alluded to
as the fabrication of the cultural subject while old national parameters
continue to erode …
In chapter 22 of Le tiers-livre de Pantagruel, Rabelais merged fantasy
with cultural realism in his depiction of the marrabais, the Christianized
Arabs and Jews of sixteenth-century Spain. Rabelais’s creation of de-
generate monsters reflected political realities in Western Europe, where
nationhood was gathering momentum and purity was on the agenda.
The word marrabais, a compound of mécréant–Arabes–Rabelais, under-
scored the dangers of miscegenation in France at a time when puri-
ty of national language and culture was an emerging concept.1 Half
a century later, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act I, scene ii), Caliban,
whose mother is from Algiers, threatens to corrupt Prospero’s lineage
by populating the island with his (Caliban’s) descendants. These chal-
lenges of physical presence, displacement, and destiny are not simply
critical tools that have sprung up in postcolonial theories. The seman-
tics and subject matter of identity, both national and individual, did not
materialize in opposition to the tenets of imperial control until the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the story is much old-
er and runs deeper. In Europe alone, national identity has been acted
upon for centuries, albeit with a single shared purpose – to read oneself
as advanced, superior, and self-aware. This fantasy of domination cul-
minated in the colonized’s voluntary submission. More precisely, this
ideological illusion rested on a sense that domination worked because
the colonized Other desired to become like the European. The great
trick of Orientalism was to transpose fear onto recognition; the French,
to become fully French, had to build a dependency on the Other. For
this reason the colonial designation itself took different names over the
course of more than a century.2 So, what can we read in this condi-
tion? Does it apply to twentieth-century North African immigrant com-
munities in France? To what extent can the descendants of the former
colonized become qualified French citizens? These questions draw us
towards the vast field of cultural studies and its irksome relative cat-
egories and treasure trove of rhetorical activism. Certainly the postco-
lonial condition in France seems mired in “being,” “representation,”
“minority,” “the real,” and “subjectivity,” yet the discourse itself is
overwhelmingly subsumed by amorphous, transcontinental nomencla-
tures. Latent Orientalism is all the more potent because national charac-
ter and sovereignty, both in France and in Europe, have been withering
away; it all comes down to entropy. To be clear, the ideas I have chosen
face their own challenges; what matters most is that we pursue them in
such a way that their value is vested in the autonomous subject, both
postcolonial and academic.
The identity framework initially seems to have been determined
by the dominant culture, within the boundaries of a nation that still
yearned to prove itself at the expense of the Other. The immigration
of Arabs and blacks was at first a continuation of their colonial status.
A strategy to abjure tendencies towards independence helped control
North African immigrants. This political and economic platform op-
erated rather smoothly, largely because the immigrants bowed down
on their basic rights and even felt grateful for improvements in their
economic condition; this helped buttress both French power and the
immigrants’ own humanity. In France, the purity of colonial hierarchies
was maintained by political and class structures, as well as by varying
degrees of material comfort – or at least the promise of it. This dynamic
changed for the children of postcolonial immigrants, who valued and
claimed the principle of universality and French citizens’s rights. The
A View from Diversité 127
abstract universalism of the Enlightenment (established as the founda-

tion of the civilizing mission) yielded when faced with the reality of col-
liding worlds. The children of immigrants co-opted the right to vote that
had been denied to their parents (most of whom kept their citizenships
from their newly independent native lands); they also self-consciously
resisted dealing with language and citizenship issues. A monolinguism
with few guarantees of dialogue took root. Where Arabic was the lan-
guage of the parents, French was always the children’s mother tongue.
Language was a conduit for the pain that official history dismissed or
failed to convey. Between a Maghrebi background and French citizen-
ship, the identity feature has hardly been understood for what it is: a
defensive strategy for coping with historical silence and social invis-
ibility. Little wonder that the first wave of expression from immigrants’
children arose in the heart of French cultural fetishism: in literature,
and at the exact time when the Ministry of Culture heightened its vis-
ibility while the Ministry of the Colonies faded away. The symmetry is
striking and raises this question: How do we theorize France’s national
character from the vantage point of postcolonial culture?
Between 1977 and 2007,3 Beur writers in France published more
than 170 novels, plays, autobiographies, and diaries.4 A mere number,
though, does not capture the breadth of the revolution that has occurred
in French letters. Were all of these works merely fledgling expressions
of life in the banlieue, or are they symptoms of a multicultural transition
in France? The abundance of articles and essays about Beur literature,
on both sides of the Atlantic, strongly suggests that literary criticism
is substituting socio-scientific terminology for the terminology of the
old anthropological paradigm. Michel Laronde, Alec Hargreaves, and
Mireille Rosello have offered forceful accounts and critiques of how,
since the mid-1980s, a new literary semantics has fused with the age-old
concept of a national language. How is France’s identity being tested
by its postcolonial citizens? One need not be reminded that assimila-
tion was shaped by steady and violent contact between the dominant
nation-state and the peoples of its empire. Rosello suggests that Beur
authors balk at playing identity politics, that they have been “reluctant
witnesses.”5 Of course, the spectral power of France has ceased to be
operative because French truly is the mother tongue: colonial suppres-
sion simply does not function any longer. It has been replaced by the
rhetoric of identity, something that drags Beur literature onto the lop-
sided terrain of the postcolonial condition and its rationalizations and
historical legacies. For example, the deconstructive turn of Beur literary
writing (its use of slang, hip hop, American English, Arabic, and French)
is conveniently construed as an urge to preserve one’s own foreignness,
or what the French mainstream media call resistance to intégration. So
even if within the confines of the French republic, identity is somehow
untangled (they are French, aren’t they?), it still needs to be deciphered.
One matter in particular calls for attention: literary critics have left the
Beur literary phenomenon largely unexplored while they sketch cultural
confrontations between the Christian and Islamic cultural spheres and
parse out the differences between the Maghrebi migrations to France
and those of Poles, Italians, or Spaniards. Furthermore, those who ar-
gue from a postcolonial critique (especially a Marxist one) that Beur lit-
erature is the product of a linear view of history fail to note or to explain
that in similar circumstances, a similar mass movement had sprung
up even earlier in Britain, among the children of immigrants from the
Indian Subcontinent. Latent Orientalism is marked by a defensive de-
piction of the pain and despair of the now-French Other, which gathers
new meaning for the colonial trace it represents within the postcolonial
condition. It is no longer a matter of imposing representations from
the outside, but of letting the subjects themselves reprise the ancient
figures of irrationality, violence, laziness, and social inadequacy that
were once applied to them. No wonder the banlieue becomes saturated
with the stigma of lawlessness and linguistic breakdown, along with
the menace of a “foreign” core, something that especially sullies the
purity of a public education system that is meant to turn students into
citizens. As a consequence of the challenge to linguistic high culture,
cultural chauvinism has become embedded in all French institutions.
Alain Finkielkraut, a declared foe of postmodernism and postcolonial
studies, has been one vocal advocate of national culture against what
he calls “tribal cultures,” lamenting that third-generation French citi-
zens, descended from families from the former colonies, hate France.6
The fantasy of civic and cultural uniformity is not the only culprit here.
One wonders whether the publishing industry itself does not validate a
patronizing, beneficent intervention in the name of a recognition that is
failing everywhere else in French society.7 The year after the November
2005 riots that broke out in the suburbs, there was a near doubling in
the number of novels published by Beur authors. Did this surge relate
less to literary aesthetics than to a historicist orientation in the face of
Orientalist anxiety over the foreign-yet-French body?8
Scholars engaged in francophone studies too often find themselves in
a state of what could be called anticolonial indenture, whereby they use
Beur literature as a surrogate for all crises of authority in contemporary

French culture. Perhaps this new literature from within France reflects
an effort to break away from both French and francophone canons.
Hargreaves, a prominent scholar on Beur literature, contends that this
may always have been “a culture without a name.”9 That is probably an
accurate assessment, but it raises a question: Are we postulating a theo-
ry of cultural default, as if Beur literature amounted to a counterpart of
national allegories (the performativity of French national language and
culture post-empire)?
Actually, the literary disruption involves more than mere cultural
classification or authoritative labelling. Beur works reach into the heart
of a neocolonial ethos that is alive and well. Political and media dis-
courses, for example, engage in an endless performative act of signify-
ing French citizens of immigrant backgrounds as a threat to French
identity and to institutions such as French public schools and the
French tradition of secularism. When we fail to recognize this, we turn
Beur into a postcolonial, academic pursuit that is itself a matter of rep-
resentation and narcissism. This discourse on representation fails to ac-
knowledge its own hegemonic momentum. The impression that results
is that Beur literature has been placed on a continuum of liberation dis-
course, when in fact it never truly transcended colonial castration. Beur
authors write because they feel threatened with non-signification, not
because they are motivated by some uninhibited aesthetic endeavour,
as we will discuss later. It should not be surprising that it is in Britain
and North America, where postcolonial theories have flourished, the
Beur literary subject is now attuned to what critics and scholars gen-
erate in their resolutely culturalist approach. This perspective is not a
problem except insofar as ontological certainty is not guaranteed just
because someone else claims to identify Beur’s difference.10 One must
determine how critical methods – language analyses, for example – can
effectively disclose the merits and the spectrum of differences within
a national literature. Immigration literatures in Germany, Britain, and
France may share some basic assumptions (e.g., mother tongue issues,
social-class consciousness, religious practices); by contrast, Beur litera-
ture has claimed a core of aesthetic and ideological intentions. The latter
show, for example, the extent to which the issue of integration remains
predominantly a political one. Inasmuch as assimilation policies failed
during colonial times, the integration “buzzword” raises to awareness
forms of cultural denial that are already familiar.11 Identity itself, as seen
in Beur literature, becomes a quality conveying contingent meanings,
time- and place-specific, all of which are nonetheless entrenched in

an ineradicable brand of French universalism. For non-postcolonial
French citizens, the effective result is domestic imperialism: the Beur
generation is relegated to second-class citizenship, a situation identi-
cal to the predicament of their parents or grandparents during colonial
times. For example, the omnipresent symbolization of the dialectics
between margin and centre (banlieue/centre-ville) continues to signify
the denial of commonality, which in turn authorizes institutions and
economic powers to stigmatize the people of the suburbs. In this sense,
that Beur writers are being commodified by the publishing industry is a
small but painful marker of identity, a means for them to protect them-
selves against the loss of everything else.
Beur literature’s own awareness of its altered state of identity defines
it in the first place. The texts are characterized by a mutating verbal
activity that promotes the emergence of a new Hexagonal literature.
Baring their nomadic cultures (from Maghreb to France, from banlieue to
downtown), Beur writers display qualities that have little to do with the
ethnic chic that has grown out of post-structuralism. Beur borrows from
Maghrebi oral traditions (e.g., Berber tales, prayers, Arabo-Islamic nar-
ratives), Parisian slang, and an iconoclastic tradition that can be traced
back to Villon’s poetry. However new this fusion of genres and cultures
may be, its roots are not. A withdrawal into a so far non-identified self
(Arab, Berber, French, or all three?) and an outward impulse towards
a referential language (French) seem to reveal the distinctively transi-
tory nature of Beur literature. The mixing of codes has been prompted
by an essential quality of literature: verbal creation and identity vali-
dation. This may be one reason why Beur authors tend to ignore the
classic French literary style of writing and the intrinsic imagery of an
established culture. The frenzy for social intelligibility, especially as it
relates to the documentary dimension, should not mask the striving
for literary form. In an early novel, Fouad Laroui12 did away with the
stock character of the mother overwhelmed with work (at home and
moonlighting) who gets no respect for all she does: “Enough of all that!
I do not want to abuse her. She’s got to get off here (out of time, out of
plot) with some consideration. I will not talk about Mina any longer.”13
Most of these novels tell the journeys of their protagonists through di-
verse social spheres; they also assign a new kind of power to words,
when, for example, their authors realize there is no reliability in either
linguistic source, Maghrebi or French. Rhetorical devices such as faulty
grammar, the mutilation of standard French, and the juxtaposition of
verbs, tenses, and varied lexical fields all strip the language of its estab-
lished literary value. Stylistic expectations are indeed affected by this
postcolonial poiesis. Over time, the once crystalline social frame of the
author – what Mallarmé called “le Monsieur” and Barthes the persona
– and his or her work becomes impenetrable to readers who know the
banlieue and Islamic culture only through television news and Islamic
culture via a latent Orientalist proxy.
Beur works resemble post-1970s African American novels14 not be-
cause the French writers try to give an account of their racially charged
daily lives, but because they strive to find their own voices within a
dominant culture, while being wary of essentialist traps. French cul-
ture oppressed their parents under colonial rule and then again under
the economic exploitation that attended postcolonial immigration to
France. Over the same time frame, from the early 1950s to the mid-
1970s, the parents’generation were never really considered potential
constituents by any political party, including the Communist Party, be-
cause they could not vote and thus were less “valuable” than the tra-
ditional French working class. Politically and socially excluded from
mainstream France, immigrant parents most often felt they had no
choice but to force upon their French-born children an integration that
had eluded them for so long. In this acquiescent attitude, we find an
early sign that in the middle course of assimilation there would be no
homecoming. From then on, home rested on the former enemy’s territo-
ry. Place and time were challenged at all levels, individual and institu-
tional, and this made Beur writers anxious to catch up with social reality.
This is suggested by their works, which are saturated with discourses of
integration, or by what Barthes, in a different identity context, called la
demande d’amour.15 But Beur feelings always wash about in a highly po-
liticized space. Passive Orientalism has changed into active representa-
tion. There is nothing accidental in the social anguish of Beur narratives;
discourse and creation work towards a unified view of literary produc-
tion in order to heal a fractured image of the French Maghrebi self. The
literary weaknesses of early Beur writings in the 1980s – weaknesses
often construed as proof of authenticity (in stories revolving almost ex-
clusively around life in the suburban ghettos) – actually bore the seeds
of uniqueness. By echoing one another in contemporary France, Beur
writers were talking to and about their own country with a distinctive
language that was bound to become institutionalized by the publishing
industry and through self-recognition. Characters and plots pointed to-
wards a reality outside the merely socio-political sphere.
The paradox is that the stability of aesthetics and ideologies is achieved

through the fluid relationships the writer sets into motion. In Georgette!,
for example, Farida Belghoul explores the intricate relationship and
mutual expectations between a daughter and her father.16 In that sense,
Beur literature is embedded in a discourse of production, although not
necessarily along Marxist lines, because it relates to individuals rather
than to history as the controlled, distant narrative of class subjugation.
Yet the fact remains that whatever the eventual fate of their books may
be, Beur authors are not committed to a literary movement, nor have
they been fully accepted within their own ethnocultural community.
The immediate effect of such an existential dilemma is to establish new
standards for both writing and reading. Beur writers are blamed for not
making serious efforts to integrate themselves into French universal-
ism; at the same time, immigrant families view them as foresaking their
original culture. This double-bind transcends cultural relativism within
the frame of French literature through a unique style. The linguistic
combinations (e.g., French and Arabic dialects, various slangs, cultural
pastiches) form a discourse that has blazed a new path for literature
without rejecting the language of the Académie per se. The most striking
aspect of these works is their autobiographical content: they are more
than sociological accounts – they are quests for order of the self. The no-
toriously taxing determination of the self in colonial times is from then
on read as a device to valorize the identity momentum of the postcolo-
nial condition. Omnipresent humour and raw realism has so far man-
aged to accommodate the conflicts of the narrative voice, set in a larger
frame of identity overflow. Just as African American writers tried to
“lynch” or to jazz up the English language, Beur authors have sought to
shape the French language into a verbal game, one that rejects any as-
sumed objectivity validated by centuries of literature. More often than
not, this involves a close scrutiny of the national ethos – of anything but
a discourse of selfhood translated into words.
Beur writing is based on one fundamental premise: sacrifice. Authors
who create by writing in tongues cut themselves off from their com-
munity even while remaining at the margins of a strongly Jacobinic
literary world. This haunting position closely aligns that of their read-
ers. Indeed, Beur novels are not bought and read by the banlieue people,
the kith and kin of the authors. This literary “immolation” becomes
conspicuous in family representations in the novels, which, regardless
of their sometimes humorous or ironic content, tend to depict relatives
and friends as victims. Behind the hidden (or not so hidden) issues of
race and class, pain serves as the object for the stories, refuting through
its very expression the fallacy that a lack of cultural maturity is attrib-
utable to linguistic dislocation. This linguistic disparity is underscored
by the differences between an educated centre and an underdeveloped
periphery in contemporary France.17 Beur literature counterbalances
the cultural see-saw by returning the world of the margins to the centre.
It also turns the physical visibility of Beur youngsters, as a stigmatized
and dangerous population group, into an intellectual one, as if the for-
eign body were replaced by a home-grown language and, it follows, a
validated narrative.
Yet the postcolonial, theoretical language of a centre–periphery para-
digm reveals itself as a code for colonial capitalism. The overarching
trope of Beur fiction is one of the many incarnations of the profits yield-
ed by cultural exploitation (e.g., by publishing houses, the media, and
academe). The broad idea of French integration consists of literary pro-
ductions that resurrect the whole concept of foreignness, except that the
situation is no longer a matter of cross-cultural negotiations between
East and West; rather, those negotiations are conducted within France
as a postcolonial nation. Once the postcolonial culture (in literature as
well as music) has replenished the national ethos in the guise of some
benevolent multiculturalism – although the French cringe at that word
– the pitfalls of a masquerading identity are not far off for Beur artists.
Although the issue of style remains open to subjective responses,
for Beur writers, accommodating several cultural backgrounds pro-
duces greater richness of meanings. Their translinguistic exercises are
reminiscent of invocations that eventually call attention to a changing
culture. The stories allude heavily to the social realities of the ban
lieue: police harassment, drug trafficking, high unemployment, gender
issues, discrimination, the place of Islam, and failing schools. But they
also bear an irrational side-characteristic of spiritual experience. Beur
writers are re-creating a world they know all too well, but they are also
separating themselves from it by the very act of writing. This process
of separation appears both systematic and inspired: systematic because
the same structures (narratives, lexical fields, themes) are used time
and time again; inspired because it is a new phenomenon in French
literature that is helping redefine the cultural order and a sense of iden-
tity within society itself. Writers like Artaud, Desnos, and Michaux
have experimented with a language-beyond-a-language and cultural
transfers (notably with Asia), but their experiments remained sporadic,
highly individualized, and limited to the field of poetry. The language
of classical French literature and that of the media are rendered unus-
able in Beur fiction because of changes to both the function and the
spirit of writing. Beur authors no longer conceive of immigrants and
their children as victims unable or unwilling to talk back when con-
fronted with the neocolonial reality of France. Their spirit and func-
tion have changed also because they do not underplay institutional
violence, according to which, for example, the paradigm of universal
humanism is defined in terms of French culture, as represented by the
official language, public schools, the justice system, militant secular-
ism,18 and centralization. While the new literature highlights the extent
of the damage done to non-Gallic French citizens, it cannot be taken as
some kind of social project speaking for the oppressed. Indeed, Beur
writers tend to separate themselves from any process of subjugation,
be they postcolonial victims or members of the dominant culture. In
their works there is a sense that writing is first and foremost talking
to oneself. The Beur’s literary affinity consists of dramatizing selfhood
under the fetishistic demands of French diversité. In this light, the au-
tobiographical and schizoid dimensions of Beur literature acquire the
status of outer-directed assertions as well as inner-directed testimonies.
Beur pracitioners denounce the unfairness of the job market, an unmis-
takable hallmark of discrimination: “We are unemployment fodder as
they were cannon fodder … And what about the hundreds of mailed
résumés – for nothing! What about job interviews – for nothing! What
about open applications – for nothing! Even worse, internships: lies,
legal tricks, a mockery of jobs, damn it all – Oualouououou!”19
The awareness of a dual position, French and foreign (i.e., non-
postcolonial, non-Christian) at the same time, shows the line of sep-
aration between francophone and Beur literatures. It is within itself
that literature becomes a awareness of one’s Otherness in the sphere
of identification that French literature has always been. For example,
Dumas père, Zola, Proust, Beckett, Sarraute, Kundera, Makine, and Dai
Sijie are all considered French writers par excellence, even though none
of them qualifies as truly Gallic.20 However, the principal difference be-
tween those writers and Beur novelists lies within the former colonial
frame and its unavoidable cultural inheritance. The novels enunciate
the invocations of cultural commitment and the legitimizing strategies
for national identity. In Beur writing, Otherness still needs to be domes-
ticated against homegrown exoticism.
In a sense, Beur literature bears the promise of redemption, but whose
redemption? The geographical literalization of intermingled Maghreb
and France induces in Beur writers a conviction that literature has be-
come both a blessing and a challenge. It is from the particular point of
view of mixed cultural identities that the meeting of tongues can be-
come a tool for denouncing historical conditioning and cultural depri-
vation. Language itself is a series of subjective vibrations that are close
to Barthes’s famous concept of adding up in order to erase: “While talk-
ing, I can never rub out, erase, cancel; all I can do is to say ‘I cancel, I
erase, I correct’, that is I still talk.”21
The language of Beur writers seems almost French because, while the
syntax and the lexical fields are predetermined, the writer’s own iden-
tity remains unknown – or rather, appears unstable, because of his or
her awareness that there are no models on which to base one’s own
cultural assumptions. It is not surprising that Beur writers are acutely
aware of language, be it used for caricature or for pseudorealistic pur-
poses. Laroui, for example, plays with words and with the reader at
the same time: “I was chased after by the tors. The what? The tors. The
collec-tors! What’s the matter? Can’t you understand French?”22 The
verbal scheme expresses the sense of continuous transition of the self
that flies in the face of the ethos of a classic French aesthetic as best rep-
resented in its literature. It is not surprising, then, that a self-declared
far-right writer and Islam-basher like Renaud Camus, for example, is
also an advocate for pure, classical French writing.23 He turns culture
into an accessory for letting racism off the hook. In this sort of confron-
tation, Beur literature does not obsess over singularity or foster “anti-
French” taxonomies; rather, it “extends” itself, just like the multiple
branches of the transit system that runs between the banlieues and Paris
– a connection of sorts.
Under the veil of postcolonial status, something remains hidden or
undiscovered. Perhaps that something is a response to the republican
obsession with intégration, or perhaps it relates more to an unsettling
Maghrebi heritage. The exterior materiality (mostly identity politics)
gives way to textual indeterminacy – something that tends to explain
the emphasis on realism in Beur novels. For example, the deterministic
grasp of space – one in which the banlieue itself becomes a character –
establishes a sense of separateness, a sort of metaphor for individual-
ity. The newer generation (Rachid Djaïdani and Mohamed Razane, for
example) expect to be read against the elder generations (like Mehdi
Charef or Azouz Begag), but then they break away from ethnic con-
straints. This dialectics of “us” versus “them” (all of whom are French) is
propelled by a struggle for objectivity and recognition. In a sense, latent
Orientalism sits right there, unconscious, even amorphous, yet some-

thing that creates new levels of resistance against alienation, or rather
an overidentification with a cultural learning curve that would over-
take generic distinctions. In this context, Beur literature distinguishes
itself utterly from so-called francophone literature, which requires not
only a clear historical, institutional, sociocultural, and ethnic identifica-
tion but also subcategories such as Maghrebi, sub-Saharan, Caribbean,
Asian, Acadian, Québécois, and European. Furthermore, Beur literature
is not rooted in historical, confrontational modes of “us” (i.e., former
colonized people) versus France, where the language assumes political
ramifications as well as ideological slippage. On the contrary, Beur nov-
els read like a convulsion from the inside; they express a strong desire
to belong even while asserting one’s own cultural features. So literature
is less a matter of exorcising some colonial sin than of trying to use
culture in every possible way because it is theirs, and the language is
only a property of the writing. The struggle to assert oneself becomes a
function of the writing itself, a way to play with language so as to take
the edge off words and refract them into a consciousness of Beur-ness
in society at large. The writing helps project a postcolonial symbolic or-
der that supersedes worn-out claims of Otherness in favour of a much
vaunted legitimacy.
This literary dialogue is all the more disquieting in women’s writings
(Farida Belghoul, Djura, Leila Houari, Tassadit Imache, or Soraya Nini),
as if these writers were calling into question all dominant discourses.
They compete to be heard both at home and in their books. Generally,
the point of view of the writer provides a sense of unity, although early
Beur literature seemed to be mostly in the same thematic vein: explor-
ing a socially closed and determined world with social stereotypes and
stock characters within a pre-established system (confrontations in the
classrooms, banlieue/downtown oppositions, dysfunctional families,
racism and self-hatred, representations of the police as the arch-enemy,
conflicts with employers, and various forms of denied love). Then in
the 1990s came more political disillusionment, when the artifice became
all too visible or predictable, so Beur authors shifted to a more reactive
type of writing, as if its first incarnation had been necessary to denounce
all forms of authority. Violence was a historical and aesthetic extension
of the deconstructive drifts so natural to their identity crises. A dynamic
begins to take shape in this literature as it becomes the component of
a new expression that is neither sociological theory nor part of a mul-
ticulturalist manifesto. Instead of simply tackling issues regarding the
soul or consciousness in a work of art, Beur literature has evolved into

a matter of writing in a new language that refuses to be a commodity,
fetishized through the dialectics of French latent Orientalism. More re-
cent Beur writing seems to bring into being the conventions of anticon-
formist individualism with dissonant, schizophrenic characters. In one
of her most recent novels, Des nouvelles de Kora (2009), Tassadit Imache
alludes to identity as an unstable mental condition that predetermines
the subject’s desire for her roots. France and Algeria fail to embody
the imaginary safe and atoning power. Eventually, the mother projects
more ambiguity, more splitting of the signified of identity and being:
“To live, you’ll find out dear daughter, is to manufacture forgetfulness
and lies.”24
French literary institutions (the publishing establishment, the liter-
ary prizes, the Paris-based media, the academic institutions) inevitably
position themselves as ahead of or behind Beur literature. With Beur
writing, one can talk about a critical movement in all possible mean-
ings of that term. This is a cultural as well as a temporal process, whose
purpose is to clarify itself in order to elude the complexities of social re-
alism. Beur-ness as a cultural archetype is to be replaced by Beur-ness as
an artistic identity. In that sense, Beur literature should be subordinated
to political conjecture because its authors want to unplug themselves
from representations of the oppressed, downtrodden minority as medi-
ated by French cultural and economic actors. The mixing of languages
parallels the confusion of cultural issues with questions of race. Not
surprisingly, the stories themselves bear a performative charge rather
than a simple identification with words, as if the writers were churning
the waters between cultures. By strongly personalizing themselves and
motives, the authors establish a specific cultural space for themselves
while maintaining French as an imprimatur of significance. This dual
existence explains why Beur literature rarely touches on the Maghrebi
culture of the parents, who are not French citizens and are often still
strongly attached to their native lands. The children of immigrants are
unlikely to turn to Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia for their cultural an-
tecedents. This cultural distance draws on an identity argument that
claims to negate the immigrant parents’ own identity. In this sense, Beur
writers are trying to construct a more powerful platform for themselves
by being first writers, then Beur. This emphasis on creation constitutes
a final break from colonial castration. That is why the Maghreb is rarely
a destination; there is no bonding ritual with some lost paradise. Not
surprisingly, what that seems to interest the most recent Beur writers
more than anything else is American hip hop, not the Maghreb’s mu-
sical or literary traditions. This is obvious in Rachid Djaïdani’s Mon
nerf, in which the main character appears to be both mentally unstable
and dead as well as carried away by his own semantic music and alit-
eration rythms: “I’ll head for the train station and melt into the guts of
my train, my choo-choo, my suburban railroad car. To run away to my
shrink and spill the beans.”25
Once the paradigmatic movement has been identified, a key condi-
tion for literary creation has been met, albeit with a certain amount of
selection. The Beur writer chooses from images or situations that pre-
existed him but that the subject under the French assimilationist steam-
roller either denied or knew nothing about.
In this sense, Beur writing is informed by identity conflicts that tend
to preclude any conception of a hegemonic culture because more often
than not, the writer’s experience is based on the model of a colonized
people. French literature is thus reshaped and made accountable for
what needs to be formulated with regard to the sustained negation of
equal participation in the dominant culture. This offers no pretext for
bourgeois bewilderments about artistic traditions or for the intellectual
essentialism embedded in elite Grandes Écoles. Beur writers leave aside
that which does not interest them about French literature, an entity that
is embedded in a system that would exorcise their foreignness. Writing
becomes a flight from the fixation on or repetition of an Orientalist pres-
ent that wishes to shape the Beur writer into a referential token of litera-
ture – a demarcation between history (colonization and immigration)
and the archival sphere of (French) universal textuality. Here, publish-
ers’ attitudes ought to alert us to the patronizing project (and fantasy)
of mapping French diversité in terms of the postcolonial condition. If
such a project were to succeed, Beur literature would find itself medi-
ated not through writing, rhetoric, and style, but through a twisted ref-
erent based on essentialism and globalized construction. France would
then be able to boast its own multiculturalist fetish with these “French-
Arabs,” just as the British have with their Anglo-Indian or Anglo-
Pakistani writers and the Germans with their Turkish-German writers.
Beur writers pick and choose elements of French culture and lan-
guage in order to construct a new literary system capable of addressing
their own identities. By denying the French language its pre-existing
values, they make it new. They expand the borders of cultural poli-
tics – something that has always made the intellectual establishment
uneasy. But this exercise in “undoing” the possibilities of a national
literature does not amount to theorizing some homegrown deconstruc-

tion. For one thing, does Beur literature exist in itself or is it a histori-
cal by-product that has taken the shape of a cultural commodity? Put
another way, are Beur writers fashioning a new literary subjectivity into
something French, thereby creating more instability?26 Alienation, like
possession, is more about the subject than the culture: Beur novels do
not represent French culture; they are French culture with the imagi-
nary wholeness of identification. This distinction is something that
latent Orientalism, with its narcissism about nationhood, has never al-
lowed, because différence means division.
Perhaps these writers became influential because they generated
forms of power by countering their parents’ situations as well as that
of the suburban community at large. One wonders where the multi-
cultural paradigm then stands. Against the dialectics of cultural and
multicultural realities, Beur literature opposes a typological difference
within the whole of French culture. By betting on, or playing down,
the opposition inherent in a dialectic of “us versus them,” Beur writing
tends to reinforce the essence of French culture, in terms of both dura-
tion and change. Ambivalence helps avoid any reliance on racial and
cultural stereotypes. This literature adds a qualitative dimension to a
multicultural concept that is not yet fully understood within French
institutional life, both political and cultural. Contrary to the Anglo-
Saxon model, in France it is not the society that is multicultural but the
individual. The far from perfect “separate but equal” British model be-
comes in France a disavowing moment for the postcolonial subject: citi-
zenship is reiterated not just in terms of conformity but also within the
time lag of the former colonial situation. So it is not surprising that Beur
writers are never conferred the authority of intellectuals; their works
are unequivocally framed within the postcolonial experience, that is
to say, they are perceived as a matter of flowing identity rather than
representative ideas.
The allegorical place of such a reality is the city, which in Beur lit-
erature happens to be divisible (into ethnic neighbourhoods, foreign
languages spoken, and the emergence of value systems). This split sug-
gests mediation, just like graffiti in the suburban housing project or
tags on subway cars that claim “I am here” yet remain anonymous. The
city also represents the sum total of its various aspects. Such a liter-
ary representation often shows a subject at home among those separate
modes but also torn between different worlds. These novels help rede-
fine the concerns within the French postmodern cultural consciousness.
For example, Paul Smaïl depicts the urban native space of his protago-
nist hero as follows: “Apart from the far away University of Paris-X, that
is to say Nanterre, to where I used to commute by train, I have spent
all my life within a territory marked out by La Fourche, La Chapelle,
La République, La Trinité [all located in working-class districts in the
northeast of Paris].”27 Here the actual locations point in the direction
of one interpretation, always assumed and rarely acknowledged: the
city becomes the confirmation of the subject with a clear identity, that
is, a born-and-bred Parisian. The supposed foreignness of Beur, both
physically and linguistically speaking, transcends the boundaries of
the “here versus there” of latent Orientalism. These relics of the indus-
trial age, with their working-class neighbourhoods, coexist with a post-
colonial repossession of space, which in this particular novel contains
an extra layer of cultural simulacra. But of course, what is missing is the
Orientalist, moralist view of cultural enlightenment and technological
improvement even while ghettos underscore France’s record of “multi-
cultural” achievements.
A prevailing development in Beur literature is that it explores the
complex relationship between convergence and division within French
society over the past thirty years. Guiding the act of writing is the op-
position to Jacobinic visions of French culture and its language on the
one hand and the protean identity of the Franco-Maghrebi subject on
the other. This highly significant topos helps locate the direction of daily
life in the banlieue and in working-class Parisian neighbourhoods. It
took a long time for French institutions (the media, political parties, ac-
ademe) to recognize this cultural mediation: Beur novels first appeared
in the early 1980s, at a time when a Beur generation existed, although
more as a political oddity than as a cultural symbol. The tongues they
wrote in attracted curiosity, if not scepticism, from the French literary
establishment. Nowadays, at a time when the literary imagination in
Franco-French literature has fallen prey to self-indulgence, narcissism,
nationalism, and autobiographical exhibitionism, Beur novelists show
a love for linguistic exploration and are refashioning public discourse
after their own experience. This gift for cultural translation has kept the
texts alive but also left them quickly outdated. No wonder that after
thirty-plus years, not a single Beur writer has been awarded a major
literary prize in France. This exclusion speaks to more than a national
literary system that long ago lost its panache.
Beur literature proves that literary solipsism (“I am what I write”) is a
variant of sociological solipsism (“I am what I live”); it also transcends
the mere communicative function of writing in favour of a quest for

experimentation. This decentring of the French culture from within has
sharply demystified European as well as Maghrebi narratives. Beur nov-
els are less indebted to intellectual trends than to an exceptional bold-
ness of expression, without mistaking politics for history. In that sense,
these new French writers work out everything that corresponds to a
determined historical period in terms of temporality (the emergence
of a new generation), difference (the emergence of a new literature),
and heterogeneity (the underscoring of ethnic identities over Franco-
French assumptions). Their language is performative in character and
aesthetic in content; however, the transfer of Beur literature into films
or rap music testifies to the limited range of the generation’s voice. A
concern for Arab and Berber origins and explorations of French real-
ity and language can heighten emotions but rarely achieves aesthetic
fulfilment. Personal history and sociological self-consciousness are not
enough to make literature. All of the linguistic, cultural, and ideological
codes that Beur novelists have inherited have helped fix the moment
of truth when the reality of being French meets the sensation of it. It is
all about being within a fiction, but is it explicit enough? In Les ANI du
Tassili, Akli Tadjer illustrates that cruel moment when the hero takes a
symbolic reverse passage across the Mediterranean and realizes that he
cannot understand Algerian culture, much less fit into it, and that he is
a Frenchman in spite of himself.28 Thus Beur identity appears to be in-
formed by both cultural criticism and emancipatory pronouncements.
Of course, the topos of transnationality conflates globalization with
French universalism without addressing the latent Orientalism that
feeds on cultural difference or a sense of superiority. Early works were
too often autobiographical; Beur writing offers new literary forms that
stake out an individual space along the French ideological spectrum.
Unlike the novelists of the Nouveau Roman, whose break from tradi-
tional structures and the bourgeois content of high realism coincided
with the purest use of the French language and a strictly Gallic perspec-
tive, Beur novelists occupy the dissonant space between identity and
culture in contemporary France. The conflation of form with language
is facilitated by committing attention both to a reality kept silent for
too long and to a need to map out a new imaginary landscape. Beur
writers, preoccupied with the modes in which their fellow Beur are con-
stituted into French subjects, turn their literary scrutiny towards ev-
eryday language, family breakdowns, racial and sexual violence, and
the workplace, as well as to the political impact of the school system
and the media. As if to make amends for the failures of the colonial
undertaking, the French institutional system has pretended to integrate
at any cost French citizens of foreign origins, yet evading material his-
tory does not make Beur literature any more legitimate within France’s
cultural institutions. In this respect, the convergence of what fiction or
autobiographical characters feel, think, and say has become a constant
feature of Beur literature: that is the new script of national character
where cultural transfer happens. The novelist turns out to be both a
transmitter and an advocate of this important dimension of contem-
porary French culture. One can say that Beur literariness calls attention
to itself by bringing out affective meaning (personal experience) and
a referential function (an inescapable postcolonial condition). Rosello
observes about this particular subversive state: “‘French’ culture can
conceive of itself as an autonomous entity only because its foundational
discourses foster a sort of amnesia about its origins.”29 In the particular
case of Beur literature, the novelist’s position within the culture reflects
as much a linguistic venture as a dramatization of recent French history.
The unique use of codes generates a transmutation from social experi-
ence (life in the banlieue) to aesthetic pursuit, one that belongs neither
to what francophone Maghrebi literature stands for nor to the literature
produced by middle-class French authors. Beur literature’s attitude to-
wards writing contradicts past tradition. For Beur novelists a book is
rarely a projection of a single point of view or a single aspect of society.
It is rather a process of relativizing the writer’s status and an insight
into the genealogy of French discourses. Beur writers translate the posi-
tion of the postcolonial subject in society and history. There is a story
that needs to be told, regardless of the genre used or the socio-historical
contexts, in which the radical act of writing makes it even more difficult
to answer subject-centred questions such as, “Who is the I that says I
for us Beur people?” As Michael Riffaterre put it regarding reception
theories: “History is pertinent only to the circumstances of literary pro-
duction, that is, to the genesis of the work of art and to its reception.”30
There is a sense that there is no historical origin, no natural affirmation
of linguistic codes (Arabic is not recognized outside the home/banlieue,
and at home French is mutilated, consciously or not), and a decline of
the idea that the unique French culture legitimates the claims of Beur
writers to poetic necessity. The world of the banlieue cannot be left with-
out formulations about a new territory, filled at first with graffiti, then
with novels. Yet these original formulations tend to fade away as Beur
novelists try to create their autonomous literary selves.
In Beur literature, French culture is not threatened by plurality but

rather enriched by it; this is the much-worked concept of remapping
postcolonial France, sans the magic name of Benedict Anderson and his
“imagined communities,” which may share few interests in contempo-
rary France. The age-old duality of “us versus them,” reinforced by the
ideologies of the French Republic and latent Orientalism, is shattered
because that Other, who is also French, albeit not Gallic (in the national-
identarian meaning) and even less Christian, claims an identity of citi-
zenship, rights, and language. The challenge for France is that there exists
sameness yet no affiliation. So while Beur literature is self-inscriptive, it
is also divested of its signifiers. The French publishing establishment is
well aware that the Beur phenomenon is what we call today a culture,
inseparable from the idea of France, both for historical reasons (colonial-
ism) and sociological ones (the emergence of post-immigration genera-
tions). Beur literarary artistry is not limited to trendy multicultural codes
whereby France, like the United States, produces a crop of multicultural
writers. It is, rather, a matter of possessing the language. The truths of
French literature pale beside the Beur world’s version of reality. The dis-
placement factor from the margins to the centre disappears along with
the cultural complexities (“Who are those French writers who don’t
even have Christian names?”). Farida Belghoul explains the delicate bal-
ancing act between value and fact in fiction writing: “If I were writing
in Arabic, there would be a sort of continuity; by choosing French I have
the feeling that I am trampling on my heritage.”31
The affective and intellectual charge generated by the imposition
of language sets aside other cultures in terms of both production and
meanings. At the same time, as it has slowly transformed itself (as of
2013, there have been at least four Beur generations), French society has
learned to address some of its accepted ideas such as anti-Islamic preju-
dice and stereotypes of the banlieue world, even though those peripher-
als of the postcolonial condition are patently French.32
The argument for cultural exchanges through Beur literature be-
comes the marker of self-cognitive status as well as public knowledge.
In Charef’s first seminal novel, one of the characters replies to a po-
lice officer: “I am a Frenchman. I live in my own country. What do
you take me for? An Arab, or what?”33 The language itself points to
a controversial notion, a way not only of communicating but also of
being. In France, French equals non-Arab, but what about Arabs who
are French? Clearly, there is no cultural determinism here but rather a
series of principles that are either validated or rejected. The subaltern,
proletarian figure is cast as a radical foreigner because of language and

religion. This is perhaps how French can turn into a tool for resentment,
not simply the premise for national identity. Such a reality calls to mind
a literature at a crossroads between languages, histories, gender, and
religion, where it is no longer the object that bears the brunt of criticism
but the subject. That is why Beur writers seem to assume their new posi-
tions as speakers and creators within a national culture in crisis, those
crises being the inevitable integration of France within the European
Union, the loss of power on the international scene, an obsession with
preserving its language, issues of immigration, and the place of Islam
within a secular framework, not to mention the tide against political
correctness that is opposing postcolonial theory. If it is language that
has established Beur literature as such, then writers have managed to
examine French culture from their own vantage point, be it in the banli-
eue or even the Maghreb.
In that cultural transition, from what is seen to what is chosen to
be told, literary works turn out to be less sociologically oriented and
more situated within the framework of complex novelty, with litera-
ture serving as a point of departure from the constraints of high cul-
ture, as if writing itself had become the metaphor for migration. Beur
linguistic relativism is a paradoxical branch of multiculturalism, since
it is rooted in a belief in, or an attachment to, a specific culture – name-
ly, French. This literature, though, keeps open cultural windows that
authenticate the French language as a medium for communication,
whatever its claims to exclusivity. Yet those linguistic formulations do
not mean that the Beur world speaks French. It is simply programmed
with a language that causes writers to hold beliefs about the connec-
tion between language and identity. In a way, Beur literature is a cor-
rective to French ethnocentrism, having situated itself as far as it can
from neocolonial mimesis. This writing turns the glances inward with
a new language of identity struggle, thereby forcing other Frenchmen
to speak on their own.
French readers are often required to decode Maghrebi references, be
they linguistic or cultural. This interplay of translation reflects a con-
scious resistance to voyeuristic exoticism. Latent Orientalism, which
operates with identificatory mechanisms, is activated and set back to an
aggressive mode of external images and Otherness. The writing visual-
izes power inasmuch as it represents an expropriation of the dominant
culture. Yet the disavowal is incomplete, because Beur literature fulfils
only partly the promise of citizenship by turning the suburban subject
into an authoritative symbol. The Beur desire for recognition is ambiva-

lent and may reveal a neocolonial continuum in the guise of intercul-
tural interpretation. This sort of literary pragmatism may be inspired
by Maghrebi francophone literature, which attempts to write out any
neocolonial takeover, although the vast majority of works continue to
be published in Paris, largely for French readers.
Because of their early literary contradictions or limitations (their
works comprise mostly autobiographical accounts, repetitive topoi, and
stylistically coarse and stereotypical representations), Beur novels tend
to demonstrate that French society has been derailed from its ethno-
centric dynamic. In such a system, the unidimensional national subject
manages to speak in the name of the new citizen involved in cultural
exchanges. Beur literature chronicles the slow erosion of the French lit-
erary canon by playing those two subjects – national and Beur – against
each other. It is not surprising that most Beur novelists are suspicious
of morally upstanding protagonists (indeed, all are afflicted with many
flaws) and are unwilling to incorporate genealogical inquiries into their
stories. At the core of this type of writing is the validity of the sub-
ject. What identity? What language? What function? Unsurprisingly,
French academe tends to treat Beur literature as part of francophone
studies. There is still a temptation to think of the French world as pos-
sessing a static essence, particularly in how it privileges language and
a universal narrative. Insurmountable cultural barriers are less signifi-
cant for French-Arab writers, who tend to identify their works with
Hexagonal literature, not that of the Maghreb. One writer goes so far
as to state: “They [Beur writers] are motivated by references that belong
to French culture and are activated by their will to become French.”34
Without being too categorical or parochial, Beur literature succeeds in
isolating the forces that govern the postcolonial condition in France,
namely Orientalist attraction and post-9/11 political revulsion towards
the Arab world. What seems true about these forces is that the original
culture and language of the parents, who were born and raised in the
Maghreb, hold little relevance for the children born in France. Too often
the Arabic language (or rather the Berber and Arabic dialects spoken
throughout North Africa) presents the Beur generation with a disjunc-
tive reality. They never fully mastered Arabic in the first place, so it
comes to symbolize the patterns of exclusion and humiliation endured
by their parents in their daily lives. No wonder this particular literature
seems shaped by an alliance of antagonisms describing the process of
a spirit gradually becoming self-conscious and thereby enriching itself.
With an abundance of possible meanings, Beur novels have produced a

language in themselves, but one that is different from that of the banlieue
because they are reclaiming imagination for their authors even while
exorcising postcolonial hierarchies. A balancing act between self-hatred
and self-esteem remains inscribed in a discourse that sets the pace for
an emancipatory literature, or at least a discourse in search of its signifi-
cant centre. These forms of language stake out the never-ending quest
for self-development in a culture that conceives of identity from the
perspective of repression (in all senses). For example, in her Journal,
Sakinna Boukhedenna underscores the challenge she had to face:
It’s in France that I learned how to be an Arab.

It’s in Algeria that I learned how to be an immigrant.35
Both the parents’ culture and canonical French literature are faithless
mirrors. Literature helps act out the fantasy of origin, not that the origin
is unknown; rather, it is repressed. This structure of desire – masochistic
in French culture, sadistic in Maghreb cultures – strikes one as a unique
characteristic of the postcolonial condition. Whereas the parents repro-
duce an identified language, Beur writing creates a sense of awareness
that in some ways resembles a theory of liberation within the looming
cultural battles of the Hexagon. This literature can be violent, comical,
highly poetic, or realistic, but it always seems to point to the limits of
a dialogue within a country where culture matters more than anything
else precisely because it is political. Beur literature is impregnated with
meanings – both meanings related to identifying issues, and more tra-
ditional meanings – that address the creative process itself. The novelty
in the particular case of Beur writers is that meanings do not cancel one
another out; on the contrary, they create correspondences. Codes and
cultures are conceived as a series of levels that progressively dissociate
themselves from the referents of a strictly political reality. For example,
the attitude towards language (slang in particular) become more critical
than trusting in order to negotiate the passage to the writers’ own iden-
tities. In the Orientalist paradigm, the banlieue languages are true exotic
tokens. The old sexual and religious divisions are less pertinent than
the analytical conditions – and therefore the domination – of knowl-
edge and its indictment within the institutional powers. When critics
and journalists interview Beur writers, the authors joke that their inter-
est lies in producing creative works, not in writing about petty crime.36
As long as they write, they are still searching for something legitimate.
The purpose of such a literary system is to break from the social levels
of identification of what Beur people are supposed to be like, particu-
larly at a time of overwhelming media scrutiny. The novels resolve into
a dynamic animated by identity as well as linguistic experimentation.
In recent works, plots avoid traditional depictions of the banlieue, opt-
ing instead for a more introspective exploration.37 The body becomes
the location of speculation and discourse. The question of materiality,
historical and economic, is slowly substituted for the fabula of subjec-
tivity. In the work of Nina Bouraoui (though she is not technically a
Beur because she spent her childhood in Algeria and her mother is of
French stock), the body is symptomatic of literary jouissance (satisfac-
tion), something far more threatening to bourgeois vanitas than trying
to settle old scores with colonial history.
The shift may be one reason why Beur novels cannot be character-
ized as minority literature. In discourse about the nature of Frenchness
in recent novels, little has been said about the claim regarding relative
correspondences of meanings. For this reason, everything is recog
nizable in Beur literature because its patterns are constantly changing,
mirroring French urban society itself. Yet on close examination, Beur
writers temper the revolt of suppressed collective realities with a sense
of resistance and reconstruction of the individual. The motifs of the
early novels of the 1980s have faded away, as if their authors wanted
to emphasize a new attitude towards actual creative conditions. The
central elements in the narrative structures and various lexical fields
have become inconsistent in their own terms because their authors hold
that the experience of victimization itself is neither inevitable nor neces-
sary during the writing process. In Ramdane Issaad’s L’Enchaînement,
the story takes place in every possible country or city but never in the
world of the banlieue.38 As for the characters, they are international
gangsters, soldiers of fortune, or French call girls, not the usual sus-
pects found in other immigrant literature. The exclusion of the expect-
ed codes of immigrant writing makes the question of what a Beur novel
should be inconclusive and moot for those still in search of a sociological
basis for this literature. Instead of demonstrating and advocating Beur-
ness, these novels generate a criticism of cultural meaning within the
language itself, from the perspective of the protagonist foreigner. The
banlieue becomes a metaphor for that which escapes French cultural
centrality, both Jacobinic and nationalistic. The historical privileging of
the theme of nation is no longer predicated on a process of assimilation.
The fragmented cultural experience stands for the whole. In this way,
Beur literature elaborates a very important connection between French

nationhood and a postcolonial exchange. The banlieue produces a com-
bination of meanings that is translated into writing in tongues and self-
enunciation as communication capital.
Beur novelists feel and create from the tongue of the mother (Arabic,
Berber) into the mother tongue (French), and vice versa. Translation
itself becomes a narrative form, something that could be called, under
the sweep of postcolonial “hurray” discourse, a sort of “domestic trans-
national” endeavour. The law of fiction is both in and on the tongue,
and it keeps Beur subjects going from one cultural sphere to the next,
despite denials from the outside world, but above all from themselves.
So the question remains: When is migration over? Beur literature ap-
pears as a singular quest to communicate a collective loss. However,
writers find themselves confronted with a crucial choice: they must
either root themselves in a given language (risking an unwanted
come-down, or alienation), or set themselves adrift (and be doomed to
perpetual exile). This search for a unique locus between cultures and
languages points to the impossibility of dwelling fully inside both ca-
nonical French literature and the Maghrebi francophone world. The
double-paradox is that although the French language is the mother
tongue for Beur people, it is simultaneously a language of exclusion
that has been revised through different degrees of slang from the ban-
lieue and its syntax (backward slang or verlan). As for Arabic, if it is
indeed the tongue of the mother, it remains essentially foreign to the
children born in France. In the particular case of Beur writers, being “in
migration” implies being unable to distance oneself from the original
tongue, as well as the illusion of integration, which is eventually sym-
bolized by the publication of their books.
If literature does modify the identity of the one who writes, it hardly
affects the postcolonial community in France. What could be perceived
as “home exoticism” for Franco-French people becomes expected and
predictable, when not overrated, for potential Beur readers. They know
the context and the values, even though the latter may appear frag-
mented. On the one hand, Maghrebi cultures are almost inaccessible;
on the other, integration has been so successful that for those left out
of this “success” their Frenchness is openly disputed or denied, most
flagrantly in race-based discrimination in the housing and job markets.
Hence the function of languages involves more a quest than a reshuf-
fling of relations. More often than not, Beur writers know just enough
dialectical Arabic to cease idealizing it as cultural treasure. Moreover,
the cultural link continues to exist in the mother’s voice. Their original
identity, then, has not been completely erased through the ordeal of
immigration to France. What matters most is that by keeping in touch
– willingly or not – with the mother tongue(s), Beur writers elevate the
principle of emancipation in symbolic rather than historical terms. They
ask to be taken seriously within the framework of their cultural and lin-
guistic ambiguities. This interplay between several spheres makes Beur
literature seem schizophrenic, when in fact what it is doing is denying
French literature its utopian ideal – that is, one culture embodied in one
language. Beyond its palpable presence, Beur literature brings readers
back simultaneously to the starting point of the primacy of their culture
and face to face with a new perspective in which language exists on its
own, like a spirit poised to pass on stories.
8 The Challenge of Identities
and the French Republic
What identifies feminism within postcolonial studies is not the estab-

lishment of a distinct field of research but the correlative movement
between the two spheres. In France the matter turns more complex be-
cause of its barely addressed colonial memory and the recently stronger
ideological take on Islam – a take in which secularism looms large in
the debate. Even postcoloniality has become a code language for avoid-
ing recognizing the multicultural state of affairs in France. Intellectuals,
politicians, and the media seem to be missing the salience of the post-
colonial condition to the contemporary situation. A recent illustration
of what amounts to cultural autism came up in what the French called
the querelle du postcolonial, with Jean-François Bayart, an Africanist and
political science scholar. Bayart’s argument epitomizes France’s defen-
siveness: “In the present circumstances, one could not be accused of
being too polemical or spiteful in seeing the sudden success of post-
colonial studies, and the excoriation of French backwardness as some-
thing like a niche strategy carried out by academics eager to corner a
part of the market, a form of coquettishness halfway between American
snobbishness and French masochism.”1
This has been painfully clear in analysing the reaction to suburban
riots, especially those of 2005, and the ongoing witch-hunt against
Muslim women. It has become commonplace to poke fun at the French
for developing their own resistance to “Otherness” theory, yet I want to
pay special attention to the current identity challenge from the point of
view of the postcolonial observer. I will not be bemoaning neocolonial
hegemony for its own sake, and I will not be claiming that postcolonial
intégration is only a matter of time. This is a cultural distortion that has
gained currency with the greater visibility of the far-right candidate
The Challenge of Identities and the French Republic 151
during the presidential election in the spring of 2012. In view of the

deeply entrenched culture war now raging in French society, we should
assume from now on that the postcolonial is real.
Cast as a disruptive discourse in France, postcolonial theory may
turn out to be the best tool to reset French identity by demarcating new
intersubjective frontiers: a sobering corrective when différence takes
over from the mantra of assimilation. The rise of postcolonial identities
throughout Europe, especially in France, has significantly problema-
tized the ongoing political and cultural debates over identity politics.2
The implications for national inquiries often seek to challenge the
West’s epistemic assumptions about itself. In truth, Western academics
often need to question their own personal stakes in parsing postcolo-
nial issues; such an exercise can be either redemptive or patronizing.3
In much of Europe, conceptions of collective identity are marked by
imprecision as well as by a tendency to conflate geography with faith or
to gaze at faith-based identity through the stereotypic prism of national
identity. In France, a Muslim is considered primarily to be someone
who traces his native ancestry to the Maghreb; in Britain, a Muslim is
inextricably wedded to a Pakistani national identity; and, in Germany,
Muslim means Turkish. But if the issues at the core of Muslim identity
were actually faith-related, they would ultimately and objectively be
equal all over Europe –which is, of course, far from the reality. In fact,
issues and conflicts stem from antagonistic historical narratives and cul-
tural misunderstandings. By stigmatizing one particular group of citi-
zens – that is, Muslims – European societies cast down their own value
system and turn faith into a common denominator for all of those who
already feel discriminated against and socially ostracized. The dynam-
ics of what one means by the postcolonial condition are thus structured
differently according to national identities, historical nexus (issues re-
garding France and Algeria, the Cold War, France and the European
Union, etc.) as well as by the capacity of citizenship to serve as a new
basis for political power.
This chapter examines how Islam in France has forced a conversation
across cultural and ideological locations, bringing home the impact of
both the postcolonial condition and globalization. In this postcolonial
context, one example that runs across the issues of individual freedoms
and republican principles is the headscarf, something that will be dis-
cussed in detail. Yet the main issue in contemporary France does not
boil down to how to accommodate peoples of radically different ethnic,
cultural, and religious backgrounds. This is less a matter of immigration
from the South to the North than it is of emerging citizens in the West.
The complexity that globalization imposes on the nation’s home poli-
tics works to alter its political arrangements in terms, for example, of
a shift from difference to minority status, and from minority status to
citizenship.4 It is noteworthy that in France, the appeal for forms of
national loyalty – based on universalism – have turned out to be both
contingent and unique, as if nationhood functioned as a substitute for
the nation-state. The French postmodern political formula simultane-
ously operates within civil law and enjoys common acceptance. So it is
not surprising that, as we will see, the debate over the Islamic heads-
carf has transcended the traditional French left–right opposition.5 As
early as the 1990s the polarized structure of identity between a certain
idea of Frenchness and the visibility of French Muslims had slowly shut
down the alternative of mutual recognition within a truly multicultural
France. It is no surprise that victims of racism and discrimination of-
ten talk of a two-tiered citizenship that hems them in and curbs their
rights. The nexus of conflict stands between identity (law) and same-
ness (culture), especially regarding questions related to history and
values. Is it possible at all to be French and Muslim in the twenty-first
century? Is the scapegoating of French Muslims establishing a new na-
tional covenant at a time when the republic has been questioning its
own constitution?6 Too often, matters of social reciprocity and common
interest (social class, public education, housing, etc.) suffer from the di-
visiveness of other identities that have been thrust forward in the pub-
lic sphere and in political counter-discourses in the hope of restoring a
place for kinship – critical secularism being put forward as one of these.
Naturally, this brand of neonationalism, not clearly in the open, feeds
on the gifts of land, memory, and customs that supposedly come with
French citizenship – on all, that is, that is unavailable to immigrants and
their children.
Although recognized by law as French, the children of immigrants
find themselves relegated to the country’s socio-economic backwaters.
It is as though the instrumental principles of law – the jus soli, for exam-
ple – had been subverted by aspects of social recognition that continue,
sometimes after several generations, to construe some French citizens
as immigrés. For them only, citizenship is not a quality but a process. We
touch here on the problematic encounter between liberal humanism –
conceived in terms of individual rights – and the contemporary form
of universalism. As Naomi Schor has observed, “we might speak here
of a ‘spectral universalism,’ the shadow of a formerly vigourous and
dynamic ideology […] now reduced to an empty rhetoric in whose cozy
and familiar terms present-day ideological battles are fought.”7 These

ideological obstacles nonetheless enable a challenging view of identi-
ty, both national and individual. Meanwhile, the slow yet irreversible
integration of European nations has been deflating both the concept
of national sovereignty and the reality of the postcolonial condition,
which defies strict national categorical labels such as French or British.
Nations like Denmark and Italy, for example, have become receptive,
unwittingly or not, to the push and pull of Eurocentrism and globaliza-
tion, which has been brought to a head in the often tortuous relations
these countries have with their own newly arriving Muslim popula-
tions. With this new encounter, the home societies of immigrants be-
come their true and only home, but at the same time, ushered in are new
models of national cultures previously predicated on historical legacies
and ethnically homogeneous populations. It is in this particular context
that France has been reinventing – and reinvesting – its values with
regard both to legitimacy (of institutions, republican laws, etc.) and to
what could be called, for a lack of a better term, national personhood.
Venturing beyond the universal and liberal views that constitute
France’s cherished self-image, it is easy to argue that cultural politics
have reshaped the ethos of the nation and of identity in the twenty-first
century. Domination is no longer a function of colonial power, but a
commodity inherent in sociocultural structures – for example, the idea
that Judeo-Christian culture is self-evident and universal; that neutral,
rational, and objective secular principles are markers of Frenchness;
and that it is acceptable to interfere in the affairs of other nations while
treating one’s own national sovereignty as sacred.8 Regardless of the
increasing social integration and the collective sense of shared values
among all French citizens, difference, discrimination, and even policies
of mass deportation for illegals reveal the cloning of cultural fetishism
in modern French nationhood, with the defensive posturing this en-
tails.9 Citizenship, as France seeks to conceive of it today, defines a pro-
cess of depersonalization for new immigrants,10 along with the abstract
goal of a shared and conformist cultural life, which embodies authority
as a system rather than as a tool for a safe environment.11 The former
Sarkozy government’s decision to embark on a national and highly
public conversation on what French national identity means and en-
tails demonstrated to what extent the legacy of republican citizenship
was open to different interpretations – and, one might add, conflicts.12
In October 2009, the Minister of Immigration and National Identity
launched an electronic forum and held public debates throughout the
country to seek out views on identity contingent on membership in
an entity where history and politics coalesce.13 Side by side during the
debate over national identity, there were constructive reactions against
a new brand of nationalism as well as intensely xenophobic assaults on
(mostly) the place of Islam in France. Once again the Oriental Other (a
fellow citizen, too) was being talked about and theorized in terms of na-
tional loyalty and cultural threat. During this debate, historians, econo-
mists, labour market experts, educators, and religious leaders were left
out of the government undertaking; moreover, the immigration issue
was pushed to centre stage in such a way as to oversimplify the debate
and incite nationalist sectarianism. The message was quite unambigu-
ous: some people may claim to be French, but they are not if they do
not share the same cultural experiences and national memory as the
majority. Sarkozy and his government were caught trying to substitute
republican ideals for nationalistic values, even while claiming that the
undertaking’s purpose was to clarify old debates. Instead of rethinking
history within new parameters, French politicians decided that citizen-
ship needed to embody identity.14 The equation is flawed because the
logic of the state swamps this proposition and leads to the stigmatiza-
tion of a particular group within the French population: Muslims.
Far-right leaders and their conservative representatives in the
Assemblée nationale had once dwelt on the threat allegedly posed by for-
eigners, with their allegedly “skyrocketing birthrate and natural pro-
pensity for crime.”15 Latent Orientalism never positioned itself far from
partisan politics, with leaders suggesting that immigrants had settled
in France in order to benefit from France’s generous welfare system.
Oblique allusions were all it took to keep the old colonial prejudices and
stereotypes alive. In a sense, the shanty towns of the 1950s and 1960s,16
then the suburban ghettos from the 1970s onward, represented one truth
of the Orient, close to home. For Maghrebi immigrants, a taste of French
economic wealth often led to a feeling of absolute nothingness.17 Latent
Orientalism became the point of entry for neocolonial mimetism. Once
the Maghrebi nations had gained independence, the domestic “Arabs”
were looked on with scepticism and hostility. The ideas of “indepen-
dence” and “home” did not square: France was not ready to become a
surrogate nation for something it had created in the first place, even with
social interactions that remained based largely on the same colonial pat-
terns of submission and exploitation. For example, workplace segrega-
tion was all the more striking among the powerful trade unions, which
did not sign up immigrant workers, because they were not French and
because their demographic did not confer any leverage when it came to
negotiating new contracts and reforms. Meanwhile, in French society
at large, immigration was indeed a political topic, and the situation ac-
knowledged the vaunted value of projecting democracy onto peoples
who, in the French psyche, had never been prepared for it.18 There
were very few competing views of nationhood between the French and
Maghrebi immigrants. All of this led to a tense confrontation between
an alien territory (France) and alien citizens (postcolonial foreigners and
their French-born children). And it came as no surprise that after the ter-
rible killings of 13 November 2015 in Paris, one “strategy” of the execu-
tive power to fight terrorism was to revoke citizenship of French-born
Muslim citizens. This move has been condemned as an assault against
the principles of the constitution and equality among citizens.
It is true that the expansion of rights (relating to job legislation, health
care, and education) in France was part of a more sweeping postwar
democratization process. Laws and welfare benefits were applied
equally, but this mostly served the values of the ethnic majority; im-
migrants were expected to enjoy this economic emancipation (and to
pay their taxes) while remaining socially and politically invisible. This
social stage was itself a form of alienation – the subject was captured all
over again, his or her specular image deprived of selfhood. Such a rep-
resentation was so powerful that the children of these people, two or
three generations later, still find themselves entangled in the paradigm
of the immigré. Without reading too much national psychology into it,
note that the past participle of immigré has been operating as a concept
for something: colonial history. This type of denominative and social
formalism enshrined inequalities and discrimination; it also complete-
ly bypassed one striking reality – that immigrants had helped rebuild
France after the Second World War, and that while doing so they were
underpaid and worked and lived in appalling conditions. The former
violence inherent in the relationship between colonizer and colonized
reproduced itself in the form of silent class warfare. In postwar France,
West African and Maghrebi immigrants spurred the economic recov-
ery with both their labour and their consumption. For them, the op-
portunity to leave poverty and minimal economic prospects behind in
the Maghreb or West Africa amounted almost to an answered prayer.
Having come to France, they forgot their resentment and frustration
over colonial rule, or rather they set aside those things for the sake of the
few material comforts they could now enjoy and for the economic op-
portunities the new country might provide their children. Not surpris-
ingly, the cultural mosaic of the former empire found itself reassembled
in France. Between 1962 and 1999, the number of people of Algerian
descent in France grew to 3.4 million, those of Moroccan descent to
1.9 million, and those of Tunisian descent to 800,000.19 Yet the process
of redefining French discourse on national identity would begin in ear-
nest only when the children of immigrants stirred up cultural unease,
not simply because they wanted fair recognition of their rights in the
workplace and in housing, but also because, by speaking up, they were
confronting their parents’ alienation head-on. The first massive show of
visibility was La marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme, held in October
1983, which the mainstream media quickly renamed La marche des Beur.
It started from Marseille in October 1983 with thirty-two people; by
the time it reached Paris, that December, more than 60,000 had joined
it. In the capital, its leaders were hosted by then President François
Mitterrand, who granted immediate documentation and work permits
to illegal workers for a period of ten years. This only demonstrated the
extent to which intégration was tragically mixed up with immigration.
The problem would only get worse.
For the children of the postcolonial condition, intégration assumed
a language of its own. For them, the acquiring of citizenship was part
of their personal story and their ethnic history. This was not something
tied to colonial history; rather, it was an object associated with an un-
stoppable process – indeed, a cleansing process meant to restore the
self-respect that was tragically lacking for the immigrant generation.
This identity shift was set in motion by the parents’ anticipation of
their children being French à part entière. Note that among all immi-
grants, Algerians would be last to apply for French citizenship, out of
respect for their own young homeland and the sacrifices that had been
made during the war of national liberation. Even so, they felt some-
how relieved that their French-born children were automatically and
legally French – something that cancelled out the discomfitting option
of having to seek French citizenship on their own behalf.20 Thus for the
children, speaking up was not a matter of choice. Slowly, as discrimina-
tion against them grew more intense, the immigrants’ children learned
to avoid universalist determinism. Minority discourse was liminal so
long as it retained its cultural heterogeneity. It seems that the parents
had made other choices – for example, giving their children Muslim
first names and participating in Islamic practices such as the Ramadan
fast, when all the while their children were wrestling with the narra-
tive of French citizenship. That narrative, as opposed to the colonial
one (founded on images, exotic affects, fables, reification, nostalgia),
is based on complex discourses (concerning economics, feminism, le-
gal critique, aesthetic expression, civic rights, etc.) that are too often
hampered by a transnational emphasis that generates xenophobia. The

public sphere is unapologetically Judeo-Christian, while private homes
tend to re-create distinct albeit idealized models of the native land the
immigrants left behind. Of course, it may not be possible to study post-
colonial identities in contemporary France without addressing French
analytical categories where – as Halbwachs noted nearly a century ago
– social and individual memory (narrative and trauma for the postcolo-
nial subject) are tied together and make it all the more difficult to assess
an organizing concept.21 So, what is the connection between postcolo-
nial collective memory and historical consciousness when everything
else, including citizenship, is challenged?
For the sake of argument, let us postulate that identity must pass
through a relationship to another being. Actually, this very relationship
accounts for social existence, even in its deepest forms of despair. And
by despair we clearly mean that of the children of immigrants, who are
confronted with the empirical phenomenon of citizenship, along with
the questioning of their Frenchness because, in the eyes of citizens of
French stock, people of the postcolonial condition are never going to be
French enough. It should not be surprising, then, that after the 2005 ur-
ban riots, the people of the suburbs were depicted as culturally and ra-
cially different from the mainstream French, as if politicians on both the
right and the left as well as voices in the media (e.g., Alain Finkielkraut,
Caroline Fourest, Éric Zemmour, and Michel Onfray) were trying to
create an urban apartheid.22 The imperative of social uplift (through
jobs and better housing) was answered with police containment. Oddly
enough, it seems that one “privilege” of universalism for postcolonial
individuals has consisted in renouncing one’s own identity, the with-
ering away of the experience of Otherness. This kind of discontinuity
is fundamentally different from the alienation experienced by their
parents, who never doubted their roots no matter how harsh the colo-
nial condition. A West African or Maghrebi background is no longer a
historical extension of French identity (the old propaganda of France’s
empire); rather, it has become a liability, as if the connection between
personal identity and the national horizon of French continuity has
ceased to function. One permanent manifestation of this cultural entro-
py is police harassment, including identity checks carried out on French
people who are minding their own business, simply because they are
“Arab” or “Black.” The national fear of social disorder at the hands of
a French-yet-foreign body is a remnant of latent Orientalism. It is also a
blatant example of one group of people having to bow to the symbolic
order of another, as if nothing had been learned from the painful history
of relations between France and the Maghreb. French remains the name
of the father figure; the labels “Arab” or “African” fail to apply any
identitarian discourse that would free the postcolonial subjects from
the France’s national imaginary. The subaltern is very much alive in
France, but instead of having to kowtow to the degrading colonial insti-
tutions of old, he is now disciplined by a racialized view of citizenship.
It is only a matter of time before the postcolonial subject experiences a
loss of his other rights. A national non-governmental agency, HALDE
(Haute Autorité de Lutte contre les Discriminations et pour l’Égalité), estab-
lished in 2004 and terminated in 2011, found itself overwhelmed from
the beginning by complaints, 50 per cent of which were associated with
workplace issues or complaints about job applications. In 2008 to 2009
alone, the agency had to double its workforce and personnel so that it
could carry on with its mission.23
A significant aspect of the postcolonial condition appears to be its
antisystemic legitimacy. The general frustration and anger among the
children of immigrants eschews the old left–right opposition. Indeed,
their inability to set forth the range of their concerns (workplace discrim-
ination, political invisibility, cultural alienation, etc.) tends to demon-
strate that nothing fundamentalist sits at the conjecture of citizenship.
Yet, like the people who think they “remember the 1960s” although
they were not there, French citizens of the postcolonial condition refer
to the globalized, Orientalist evolutionary ideology of the backward,
inadequate “Arabs,” those who take their cue from an intégration that
is always on the line. So when French intellectuals openly question
Islam’s compatibility with Western democracy, they are in a round-
about way targeting their fellow French citizens of Maghrebi or black
African background.24 They are an easy target because of the facile cel-
ebration of the primacy of nationhood over citizenship. Unlike in the
United States, in France there is no such concept as “we the people.”
Difference is frowned upon. For the French, the equivalent of “we the
people” is an agonizing transition from modernity to globalization,
one that involves an imbalance of representation. Within this warped
frame, public discourse on Islam contends that the native root of iden-
tity signifies civilizational differences. By outsourcing their ideology
to the global “there,” French ideologues on the left and the right can
pretend that ethnic diversity and nationhood are crossing paths, each
with its own historical baggage. The old colonial discourse, which was
informed by a “mission,” has slipped into a reverse nationalism that
is no longer a path to victory but rather a defensive posture. By the

same token, to speak of internal Orientalism is more relevant than re-
ferring to latent Orientalism; following in Edward Said’s footsteps, the
latent Orientalism argument bears mostly on culturalist debates – de-
bates centred on renewed American influence in the Middle East, the
rise of the Arab bourgeoisie, Muslim women and education, the “Arab
Spring” and Islam, and so on. Internal Orientalism epitomizes matters
of national survival contemporaneous with the shift from the former
colonial periphery. From that perspective, the banlieue, for example,
would be a series of gradations of “domestic Orients.” Couscous has
become a French dish; halal food is available nearly everywhere; Arabic
words have been integrated into the French language;25 transatlantic
hip hop has trumped trans-Mediterranean music (raï, andalus, chaâbi)
but with a banlieue twist; and even suburban ghettos have outpaced the
claims to Frenchness of the Eurocentric community. The spectacle of
political domination is no longer required, or rather it cannot be sus-
tained, because of the fragmentation of vectors (liberal universalism,
belated cosmopolitanism, hardcore secular principles, etc.) that were
once kept together by an active but simpler form of nationalism. This
is why the disputed concept of citizenship has loosened its grip on the
discourse on Otherness. Because the universalist matrix has become so
obsolete, French nationhood manufactures difference within itself in-
stead of beyond its national borders, as it did, for example, from 1870
to 1945, in three wars against the same country, Germany. Yet, there is
no disputing that Germany is now France’s most important economic
partner and strongest political ally within the EU; France’s “enemy” is
now construed as internal, and he holds a French identity card.
Did the postcolonial condition bring about the divorce between re-
publican principles and identity, or did the dialectic of colonial memory
and national essence never validate anything acceptable? Whether in
political philosophy or in postcolonial critique, alterity and otherness
still bear the marks of a colonial imaginary because the last territory
to be colonized by the French empire was France itself. Colonial con-
tamination affected not just the national economy but also the collective
psyche, as we can see today with ethnocentric reactions in represen-
tations of both the State and national history. A scandal that deeply
shocked the French arose when supporters, apparently of Maghreb de-
scent, shouted down “La Marseillaise” during a soccer game in Paris
between France and Algeria in October 2001, and then again during
another game between France and Morocco in November 2007. These
incidents suggested there was a lasting colonial fracture in contempo-

rary France.26 The unruly supporters were trying less to insult France
to its core than to display a manifold allegiance, which was another
way of debunking the idea of political community. Through this disre-
spect of national symbols (the national anthem, the flag), there surfaced
the fantasy of recovering a lapsed identity among citizens caught in
the postcolonial condition. This pairing of the ideas of breaking away
and of quest may hold relevance for contemporary postcolonial cul-
ture. Still, in the case of Beur citizens, it is irrelevant to underscore that
anger at France bespeaks confused loyalties to two or more cultures.
Nations of the Maghreb remain essentially foreign to the children of
immigrants. That is why those lands are so strongly idealized: they are
defence mechanisms for times when identity is threatened at home.
Indeed, the vast majority of Beur have a limited or poor command of
Arabic and a knowledge of Islam that too often does not reach beyond
cultural rituals. Arabic education in the public school system has been
a notable failure. And the Islamic faith has been turned into a cultural
fetish, or more recently into a political one.
The colonial ghost may never be far from an understanding of the
patterns of rebellion, but there is still no obvious genealogy between
the colonial state of silence of the natives and the postcolonial condition
marked by hybridity and its identity as a bridge to power. The meta-
phor of political knowledge (denying visibility behind a screen of ob-
jectivity) has changed with the reality of immigration, especially now
that new French citizens have proved themselves able to move forward
and create a discourse outside the binary, protracted parameters of the
worn-out “West versus the rest” dialectic.27 France is no longer the he-
gemonic power it was before the Second World War, and the political
horizon is not that of self-determination or independence. Everyone
lives on the same soil, under the same republican constitution and civil
laws. But however useful political praxis may be, such a reality is a
tangle of contradictions. For example, whereas citizenship is given,
identity is constituted, meaning that something must be available and
self-understanding must be projected so that eventually, identity can
serve as a tool for emancipation. The children of immigrants refuse to
mend the historical cracks; in this vein, the religious revival among the
youngest generations has provided a screen for unconscious material
associated more with the parents who hid their faith than with the insti-
tutions that attempted to suppress Islam’s visibility on grounds of secu-
larism. This mute subjectivity, the passive labours of the parents, and
the awkward nationality of an independent yet missing native land

reveal the true self-projection of French citizenship against an iden-
tity not fully intelligible.28 The greater the dependence on selfhood,
the bigger the investment in artificial ploys, be they self-destructive
behaviour (e.g., dropping out of school, juvenile delinquency), politi-
cal hip hop songs, or radical Islam. Anger helps keep identity afloat
against the lexical seasickness of ideological stigma. In the particular
case of France, the minority’s anger fosters internal Orientalism, which
feeds a readily available consensus across the political board. More
specifically, the continued demonization of Islam demonstrates that
there is supposedly a non-Western alternative to successful citizenship
and nationhood. A dramatic instance in France has been the “affair” of
the Islamic headscarf.
A haunting question underlying the ban on religious signs in French
public schools was this: Can French people born to Maghrebi parents
play any role in contemporary French society, or must they be the post-
er children for France’s crisis of universalism?29 In the past, Christian
students were never required to choose between visible signs of their
faith and the right to a free public education. In addition, the 2004 law
has undercut the notion that citizens’ rights are upheld by placing more
restrictions on individual freedoms, and this has caused a dangerous
social fracture between “good citizens” and those of Muslim faith. The
law purported to solve social ills by stigmatizing one particular faith.
According to Joan W. Scott, “the headscarf controversy opened a sear-
ing debate about the meaning of French secularism, the limits of reli-
gious toleration, and the founding principles of the republic.”30
This blurring of the boundaries between private and public, secu-
lar and religious, citizens and immigrants, set the stage for an Islam
“problem” and changed the terms of the national conversation: more
than integration, it was France’s civilizing mission that had failed.
Communalism (communautarisme) was blamed on Islam, although it is
obvious to everyone (except those afflicted by cognitive blindness) that
the banlieues are places of economic despair. Sadly enough, most criti-
cism directed at the 2004 law came from outside France,31 even while
the country basked in a kind of self-congratulatory mood reminiscent
of the chest-thumping that attended colonial conquests. A prominent
feature of the naturalization of Islamophobia in France has been the
ongoing cultural and scholarly conversation that seems geared towards
consensus against the right to wear any religious sign; all the while,
everywhere else – especially in North America – rebuke of the French
2004 law has been persistent and informed.32 This baffling infringement
on freedom of religion and freedom of conscience based on liberal hu-
manism had its roots in the old colonial notion that Islam was a threat
to French secular principles and republican order. In 1959, during the
Algerian War of Independence, Frantz Fanon rightly pointed to the ide-
ology behind the so-called liberation of the Muslim woman who was
asked or forced to remove her veil: “The dream of an absolute subjuga-
tion of the Algerian society through its women who leave their veils
behind and are made accomplice of the colonizer has never ceased to
obsess the political leaders of the colonial undertaking.”33
The unveiling of women – by force in colonial Algeria, by law today
– is playing a significant part in efforts to break down a culture deemed
unassimilable. The law became symptomatic of a restorative attempt
at a nostalgia back when identity and gender lines where blurred by
the imperial nation and its narrative, only this time the banlieues are
construed as the new territories that needed to be civilized. While the
unveiling strategy behind the 2004 law was called a “campaign for the
dignity of women,”34 the true goal was to substitute a sacred national
alliance for the slow socio-economic disintegration of the banlieues. In a
context of reductive colonial history, this posturing strikes one as illib-
eral; it suggests a gendered strategy for pacifying the suburbs. Not sur-
prisingly, this sort of internal Orientalism turns the Muslim woman into
a victim – something that harks back to the fantasy of erotic domination
in which the female subject (along with her partner) is always under
control because of patriarchy or male predatory patterns of behaviour.
The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair in the spring of 2011 revealed the
extent to which France had a “problem” with gender equality – indeed,
at the highest level – and it was definitely not because of the actions
of its Muslim citizens. This Islamic explanation bespeaks a crowded
history of incidents between France and Algeria, thick with cultural
complexes, collective amnesia, still unaddressed issues, and an under-
lying ideological violence. The ethnicization of French politics through
a scapegoating of the “Arab” male (construed as an abuser of women)
served to increase the standing of the dominant group. French soci-
ologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas has framed the situation in terms of a
biased French feminism that has managed to elude the ambiguities of
the assimilationist model of the republic as well as the class issues as-
sociated with discrimination.35 This type of “republican feminism” has
come to exist thanks to two foils: the veiled Muslim woman, and the
“violent” young man from the banlieue. The core argument against this
type of French feminism is that it “naturalizes” women through their

femininity. The violence of liberal feminism is based on the ongoing
subordination of those it claims to be helping or even rescuing. For lib-
eral feminists like Elisabeth Badinter, Geneviève Fraisse, Gisèle Halimi,
Elisabeth Roudinesco, and Linda Weil-Curiel, emancipation seems to
go hand in hand with the subordination of the “native” woman. And
this fantasy of the endangered “native” woman has become the spring-
board for a new brand of universalized civilization. This idea is eerily
similar to the old Orientalist fantasy of the female native who resists
the code of Western visibility and desire. No wonder the promise of
intégration is held out to those who choose to spell out their Islamic faith
within a public secular frame. The assimilation discourse seems forever
attached to caricatures of the “Arab” in need of being brought into the
fold of civilization. In this scenario the French feminists and the media
machine (which has been siding with them since the late 1980s) are not
oppressors – who take young girls out of public schools – but civilizers.
In their struggle for cultural and identity references in a world of irre-
versible globalization, one in which secularism appears to be the sole
source of cultural capital, French disciples of entrenched republican
principles have found an organizing theme – a home enemy who sup-
posedly is also an economic burden.36 This form of legal discrimination
(based on a law voted in contravention of the European Convention on
Human Rights)37 has also helped solidify the ground for claims to mor-
al superiority. If the French had a compelling case for Muslim women’s
“liberation,” they could venture into a post-9/11 world by invoking the
democratic benefits of the West while avoiding the 2003–11 American
militaristic adventure in Iraq, as well as deflecting attention from its
own history of domestic discrimination.
Between the first headscarf affair, which came to court in 1989,38 and
the 2004 law banning religious symbols, there had been no fewer than
150 cases nationwide where Muslim female students were barred by
school principals from attending public school because they chose to
exercise their right to dress in garments that expressed their religion
or beliefs. However, as early as 27 November 1989, and then again on
10 July 1995, the Conseil d’État39 ruled that the headscarf was not an os-
tentatious symbol and could not be banned from schools unless it was
being used as a propaganda tool for proselytizing, or unless it compro-
mised health and safety. After institutions stalled on this issue,40 many
media campaigns went into high gear and succeeded in selling French
public opinion on the idea that teenage Muslim girls were actually being
forced to wear the veil and that it was a symbol of female oppression.
Thomas Deltombe’s L’Islam imaginaire offers a groundbreaking analysis
of how the propaganda machine conspired to construe French Mus
lims as a threat, all the way from postulating an “immigration problem”
to preaching a radical approach to laïcité (the French brand of secular-
ism), which was portrayed as a last-ditch defence against an alleged
homegrown invasion.41 Many unsaid things now came to the surface,
as if the dam of colonial denial had burst. From then on, Islamophobia
was more readily permitted in the national conversation. Political and
media discourses were carefully organized to normalize and legitimate
invidious slanders against Muslims and immigrés.42 Muslim French citi-
zens found themselves caught between a patronizing left and a stigma-
tizing right. From the 1990s onward, Islamophobia went from being a
sideshow of the Front National, the far-right party that challenged the
political status quo of the mainstream parties, to being a public rela-
tions pitch representing Muslims as a clear and present danger to na-
tional institutions and to the very soul of the nation. The fact that no
Muslim feminist in France or elsewhere had asked the French to free
Muslim schoolgirls allowed women to call for a one-sided differentia-
tion between “good Muslims” and “fanatics.” Just as in colonial times,
“good Muslims” willingly collaborate with the dominant power, usual-
ly in a show of self-hatred. An unmistakable feature of “good Muslims”
is that they have sold out their received identity, especially with regard
to faith. Not surprisingly, feminist “thinkers” in Muslim culture have
been co-opted to stand at the forefront of postcolonial intégration as well
as of battles over faith in France’s cultural politics. They do the dirty
job of attacking Islam by claiming to do so with an insider’s credibility.
Their commitment can usually be reduced to political ambition, to a
desire to appear in the media and sign book contracts, and sometimes
to a mere willingness to engage in staged exercises in Islam-bashing af-
ter a woman has been victimized in the suburbs. On close examination,
these Muslim “feminists” quickly display a paucity of analytical skills,
as well as very little knowledge of Islamic theology and law and of the
social sciences in the Arab/Muslim world. As if fulfilling a need to vin-
dicate itself, the Islamphobic ideological framework expanded to other
European nations. In the Netherlands there was the case of Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, who made up her own story of victimhood at the hands of Muslim
“fanatics” back in her native Somalia. But when documented facts sur-
faced, they contradicted all her made-up claims. In a matter of weeks,
she was forced to resign from all her elected positions. As a consequence
of the enormity of her deception, her Dutch citizenship was revoked.

It is easy to take issue with Hirsi Ali’s writings, not just because they
are biased and counterfactual, but also because they are grossly under-
theorized, packed with overgeneralizations about the Islamic faith and
its theology, and substandard in terms of elementary geopolitics in the
contemporary Muslim world – not to mention the binary argument that
the West is a utopian land while the rest of the world is enveloped in
barbaric despair. She has since been hired by a Washington-based con-
servative think tank. Self-proclaimed Westernized feminists like these
have invited Europeans and North Americans to identify vicariously
with the condition of Muslim woman from the comfort of their own
homes, although the same people continue to turn a blind eye to the
unbearable suffering of Palestinian women under illegal foreign occu-
pation, and of Iraqi women who have lost their loved ones in the course
of a fabricated war. What is most troubling is not that the former mech-
anisms of domination are being perpetuated, but that they underwrite
so much of the social stigma of postcolonial difference, something that
is sure to summon forth an exile from inside.
It is not surprising that France has many examples of these “house
Muslim” feminists, as well.43 A cross-cultural case is that of Djemila
Benhabib, who was raised in Algeria and who relocated to Canada
from France. She set herself the task of confronting the largest women’s
organization in Quebec44 because of its decision to oppose any ban on
religious signs in public places such as schools, hospitals, and town
halls. In a book with a catchy title, Benhabib has embarked on an exer-
cise in recycled anti-Islam fear-mongering.45 She recounts the horrors
of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, although she left the country
in 1994 with the bulk of the upper-middle-class elite who were able
to afford a way out. Her grasp of the history and concept of Islamic
theology and of the socio-economic status of women in the Maghreb
consists of ill-digested appropriations of the works of more nuanced
and thoughtful Muslim feminists from the Maghreb, such as Fatima
Mernissi, Ghita al-Khayat, and Marnia Lazreg. Like most self-hating
Muslim “intellectuals,” Benhabib gives the impression that women live
under the rule of three or four verses from the Koran. Her argument
is governed by the worn-out Orientalist paradigm of an unchanging
historical context in the Muslim sphere and by an essentialist render-
ing of Islam both as backward and as a permanent threat. Lastly, she
repeats the sensationalist argument of economic oppression, arranged
marriages, genital mutilations, forced prostitution, and honour killings.
Her function, although she may not be aware of this, is to commodify

prevailing clichés while completely missing the truth of a changing
and diverse Islamic world of one-and-a-half billion people. Her book,
and her promotional tours to publicize it, have been quite successful in
France among journalists, academics, and militants of laïcité.
In short, the female French citizen of Muslim faith has become a Trojan
horse whose purpose has been to discipline the male Muslim subject
and to rehabilitate, in a seamless manner, both old and new global ste-
reotypes of Islam. With the spread of Islamophobia in France and the
fundamentalist turn in discourse on laïcité since the mid-1990s, discrim-
ination has found a target; it has become, in a sense, a voluntary ideol-
ogy based on faith distinction. A gap has been exposed among French
citizens, and as a consequence, latent Orientalism has been internalized
and the crudeness of identity politics has been unravelled. For exam-
ple, on the left the French brand of Islam would ideally be secular and
liberal.46 But to practise Islam as a faith is a dangerous choice because
this may lead to a conflation of the public and private spheres – some-
thing that is underscored by the positions of those who declare that the
end of French universalism is near.47 Furthermore, too often the Muslim
postcolonial subject is expected to reform the Islamic faith from within
an analytical framework that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. This
equating of religion and secular philosophy naturalizes the metaphor
of unveiling the nakedness of postcolonial intégration. With such expec-
tations of creating docile Muslims, one can picture the perennial master
who continues to lend credibility to a national project; and for France
this would mean Islam without Muslims, just as there was a French
Algeria without Algerians (only indigènes). It turns out that, in the case
of female Muslim high school students, French sociologists have dem-
onstrated time and time again that the headscarf actually represents a
strong symbol for intégration because the young women have a native
command of the cultural codes and want to stand out and assert their
individual identities, whereas traditional Muslim students, because of
their fear of not fitting in, usually take off their scarves on their own in
order to blend in with non-Muslim peers.48 Against all ideological ex-
pectations, wearing the Islamic headscarf has been evidence of a switch
from tradition to modernity: visibility in a public place is a token of
liberation. Could it be that the much vaunted French social contract has
become moot, perhaps irrelevant? Sociologist Françoise Gaspard asks
this question: “By expelling girls from public schools aren’t we apply-
ing sexist standards because we shatter the balance between boys and
girls when it comes to our educational responsibilities?”49
Said once reminded us that true humanism is sustained by collec-

tive and critical understanding. What has been missing altogether from
the debate is the question of feminism, or more precisely Islamic femi-
nism.50 The latter postulates that faith and individual rights are mutu-
ally inclusive. This brand of feminism also operates on a rejection of
dichotomies: the colonial ideology on the one hand, and a radical take
on Islam on the other.51 In essence, Islamic feminists like Al Akhbar Zila
Mir Hosseini (an Iranian) and Asma Lamrabet (a Moroccan) want to
reclaim a normative reconciliation between Islam and women’s rights
that has been hijacked both by Islamic medieval jurisprudence and by
the colonial narratives of patriarchy and class domination. They advo-
cate a reversal of perspective and a search for the marginal discourse
that would underscore what the hegemonic principles are. The trans-
national story behind the postcolonial condition has affected both the
Islamic periphery and the secular centre. Under the guise of the laicité
discourse, we are witnessing a shift from one controlling power (re-
ligious patriarchy) to another (the State), with the blessing of already
secularized women. Mainstream (i.e., Western) feminists have failed to
question their own premises, or what could be called traditional knowl-
edge of women’s rights, as well as their privileged explanatory power,
which shuts down contradictory discussion. For example, the famous
French psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco stated that a law banning
the Islamic headscarf was as necessary as the law banning incest.52 So
long as Islam is construed as a backward belief system, impervious
to change, as well as a cultural ruse about to morph into a contingent
presence in the French republican space, there can be no genuine, con-
structive dialogue. French feminists remain captive to their narrative of
upward cultural mobility, that is to say of controlling the flow of bour-
geois ideologies. Is it possible that the headscarf issue is all about social
class, with one group (of women) patronizing another one? Removing
the headscarf in the name of (republican) equality has little to do with
equality between men and women. Rather, it is about women only, as
if Muslim schoolgirls were expected to fall from one gender system to
a new one with the blessing of a law and its colonial implication – that
French Muslims are being saved by their French secular sisters!
If this kind of discrimination and cultural blindness continues to pro-
vide grounds for exclusivist political discourse and intellectual postur-
ing, it is equally clear that it has become impossible to separate personal
identity from nationhood in France today. True emancipation can occur
only if the children of immigrants realize that the “French Muslim” is
a construct that serves as an ideology for consensus. But what kind
of consensus? That affirmation of cultural subjectivity relies on a na-

tional essentialist narrative, because citizens, Muslims, and others can
only be what they are. What needs to be derived from the postcolonial
experience can be inserted into French politics as true features of uni-
versalism. In the specific case of the headscarf, the argument points to
the spirit of laïcité that was originally built on respect and neutrality.53
For Aristide Briand, one of the fathers of the 1905 law, laïcité contained
three key principles: freedom of conscience, separation of Church and
State, and equal respect for all faiths.54 Yet the word laïcité, deemed a
neologism, never appeared in the text of the 1905 law and its articles
– an irony that makes current interpretations all the more debatable.
In the early twentieth century in France, 98.5 per cent of people who
claimed a religion were Catholic, 1 per cent were Protestants, and less
than 0.5 per cent were Jewish. The clear target of the 1905 law was the
Catholic Church, which was perceived as obedient to Rome. Not sur-
prisingly, Pope Pius X became one of the harshest critics of the French
law. This historical context highlights the French republican struggle
for legitimacy against political countercurrents, which included the
power of the Catholic Church in public life (especially in education,
civil law, foreign affairs, and matters affecting freedom of the press).
By the same token, the law was supposed to apply equally in France
and in its colonies. Yet a series a decrees in 1907, 1917, 1922, and 1947
confirmed that Muslims in Algeria were to be excluded from the reach
of secular law because Islam was supposedly incompatible with the
republic. To this day, on the French island of Mayotte, which is Muslim,
the 1905 law does not apply.
The concept of laïcité, to say the least, remains open to interpreta-
tion. Briand wanted it that way in order to appease the tensions with-
in French society and seek common ground. The Dreyfus affair had
brought civil life in France to the brink of explosion. The time had
come for a national healing. A favourite word that stuck in the spirit
of the law was neutralité. For example, when the basilica of the Sacré-
Coeur was under construction in Paris (it was completed in 1922), au-
thorized by a vote in the National Assembly in 1873, Briand, in his
capacity as prime minister, decided that Muslims needed their own
place of worship in Paris. Although the idea of a mosque in Paris had
been suggested a long time before,55 it took the deaths of more than
100,000 North African soldiers during the First World War to make
the decision a reality. The site, the old Pitié Hospital, was chosen by
Briand himself. Work began in 1922, and the mosque was completed in
1926. From then on, because the state did not recognize one particular
religion, it could not ignore any. Neutralité was where public order and
freedom of religion met.
If the state has no right to interpret religious symbols and people’s
beliefs, why does the 2004 law do precisely that? Proponents of a ban
on Islamic headscarves in public schools claim that preventing violence
against young women was the motivation behind its enactment, os-
tensibly in order to validate neutralité (i.e., rather than coercion).56 So
the republic, and its principles, are constructed as a lived entity that
guarantees constancy, predictability, and legitimate expectations as
far as the dominant culture is concerned. Contrary to the official man-
tra of laïcité, there is no such thing as ethnic or religious loyalty; what
truly sustains identity is the name-bearing process of citizenship. This
is one reason why Islamophobic discourses and acts are hurtful. It is
not because they promote a degrading view of faith, but because they
reshape citizenship into something that is not meaningful. They break
the symbolic relationship that acknowledges Muslims as French. One
wonders whether the national conversation that began with laïcité is
not encroaching perilously on the territory of égalité.
The old rhetorical strategies aimed at generating a discourse of dif-
ference, immune to axiomatic resistance, are slowly re-entering main-
stream debates over French identity. For example, by making any
association with Islam objectionable, law and ethics have unwittingly
helped rehabilitate essentialist positions. Orientalism is thereby in-
ternalized when it accounts for precisely this kind of construction of
the “Other” French citizen. In a true show of France’s cultural excep-
tionalism, the political theory of secularism and universalism owes a
historical debt to the postcolonial condition. Whether it be the Islamic
headscarf, social segregation in the banlieue, or job discrimination, citi-
zens of the postcolonial state provide a mirror image to their fellow
Frenchmen of the traumatic insufficiencies of national history. What
politics and culture repress is that citizenship is the lived extension of
identity. The ease with which laïcité and égalité feed into historical is-
sues is a consequence of the failure to reimagine nationhood. Whether
or not the fetishized intellectualization of the Muslim Other is complicit
in resurrecting the old Orientalist demons, it seems that France remains
unable to relocate itself on the global multicultural map. It is a sad sign
when the republic aligns itself against identity and freedom because
the work of representation is no longer that of an inadequate Orient but
that of a self-defeating West.
Epilogue: Elusive Convergence?
Historians advise against deconstructing historiography, just as litera-

ture scholars eschew the binarity of history and fiction. Their point is
well taken. But sometimes one needs to keep telling oneself that a co-
gent, valid examination of key concepts and disciplines such as latent
Orientalism and postcolonial studies deserves better than a rehashing of,
for example, the challenges of neo-Marxism, the presumptions of neo-
liberalism, the emphases on anything “post-” and on any new “-ism,”
or the resilience of Othering in a globalized world. Ever since scholars
speculated on the nature of the West/East encounter, more work has
continued to question human behaviour that provides the framework
for very complex issues ranging from, say, cultural empathy to geopoli-
tics. Even if language continues to be invested with the content of ideo-
logical alienation (one recalls the coinage of “enemy combatant” after
9/11, for example), it remains to square the postcolonial reality with
the now long-lasting signifier of Islam on the world scene.
One case in point that offers a lead to a deeper understanding of
how latent Orientalism operates rests in the terrorism representation.
Interestingly enough, terrorism is always constructed in narratives of
self-recognition. First, terrorism happens when the victims hail from
Europe, North America, or Israel. The terrible violence, with mind-
boggling death tolls, in other parts of the world (Chechnya, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, etc.) is normalized to the point
of irrationality. Within the Islamic sphere, terrorism boils down to the
documentary nature of figures (2,000 killed in Pakistan in 2012, 500
killed in Iraq on a monthly basis, a death toll of nearly 300,000 in Syria
as of December 2015), while in the West it stands as a matter of moral
urgency (“Why these abominable acts?”). Second, and in relation to the
Epilogue: Elusive Convergence? 171
first point, terrorists are always non-Westerners; there are defined by

their Oriental ethnic background and faith, or by association when a
“loner” converts to Islam. At the same time, state terrorism (Russia in
Chechnya, the United States in Iraq, Israel in South Lebanon and Gaza,
etc.) is never recognized as such, in the name of self-defence or geopo-
litical interests. Finally, it is necessary to pretend that terrorism came
about through spontaneous generation – an ideological posturing that
betrays a constant revisionist take on history. Yet it is an open secret
that Saddam Hussein and Osama Ben Laden were on the CIA payroll
and that until 1987, Israel provided financial support to Hamas (includ-
ing schools and mosques) in order to undermine Palestinian unity un-
der Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The absolute alterity that terrorism represents
is also an airtight strategy whose purpose is to bring Western nations
together around the idea of civilizational superiority, something that
amounts to a grand exercise in sidetracking both elementary reason-
ing and accountability.1 So, what does “terrorism” teach us about the
seriousness of contemporary Orientalism, or rather the preposter-
ous reiterations that are everywhere present, from Hollywood block-
busters to NATO military interventions in Afghanistan and Libya?
Perhaps that establishing dialogue between facts and politics is not
easy. Circumstances change, and the Arab/Muslim world shares the
blame for dragging its feet on democracy, yet Orientalism’s ascen-
dance expresses itself not in its power to represent – linking humanis-
tic knowledge to fantasy – but rather in an individual who from now
on exists in real time and life. A particular event that epitomizes the
tragic spiralling down within the postcolonial condition, and that is rel-
evant to the general argument of this book, is the crime committed by
Mohamed Merah, a Frenchman born to Algerian parents (as was I), in
Toulouse (my hometown, too), in March 2012. This twenty-three-year-
old man shot dead seven people, including children inside a Jewish
school, in an act that reappropriates the Islam simulacrum of what ji-
had is not and cannot be. Reclaiming the racism and the symbolic vio-
lence of latent Orientalism by redirecting it back onto symbolic victims
(Jews, the military), Merah was able to recast the postcolonial identity
in its most radical signifying system, that is, as “us absolutely versus
them.” Through this horrible crime, France was forced to confront its
own transformation within what could be dubbed transnational ha-
tred. And the contingent materiality of the postcolonial condition has
only taken a more dramatic turn: hundreds of French youth, largely of
Maghrebi descent, have been joining the ranks of the various jihadist
movements in Syria. It is clear now, with blood being shed in all places,
that the French, in particular, can no longer uncritically buy into the es-
sentializing discourse of identity and nationhood vis-à-vis the kind of
“Arabs” they have been trying to make since the colonial era. The hero
or martyr posturing by some of these postcolonial youth is more than
a speech-act à la Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (self-hating
French Muslims passing for warriors like in the time of the Prophet
Muhammad). Violence plays along like some achievement that engages
in a counter-intuitive understanding of world citizenry. In that sense,
those “terrorists” have created their parallel globalized world, or what
Althusser called in his definition of ideology “the imaginary relation-
ship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”2 It is possible
to contend that the postcolonial condition has broken down the realms
of the symbolic (society and its kinship system) and the real (history
itself), where individuals no longer recognize or experience life itself.
My ambition in this book has been to unearth and articulate a nega-
tive aesthetics and an ideology that have been navigating from violence
to reconciliation and back, both in the academic world and between na-
tional cultures, that of France and the Maghreb, for example. A conver-
gence? Not just yet. We first need to recapture a moment of innocence
in the face of centuries of civilizational errancy.
Notes
1 States of Postcolonial Reading
1 “Let us never forget that we have taken over Algeria not by the law of
the jungle, but by the law of civilization.” Vialar, Première letter, 233.
My translation.
2 Bernard Lewis, David Kopf, John MacKenzie, Daniel Varisco, and Robert
Irwin have unapologetically questioned Edward Said’s works at times for
his supposedly polemical pro-Arab stance, his ahistorical approach to cul-
ture, and his crude approach to a rich and diverse field of study, as well as
for claiming that Orientalism boils down to a single systemic discipline.
3 Iqbal Abbas and Ibrahim Pour, eds., The Complete Collection of Twenty
Essays by Qazvini (Teheran: Donya-ye Ketab, 1984), 25. Special thanks to
Hamid Dabashi for the reference in his Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and
Power in Time of Terror (2008), 75.
4 Too often, new methods of studying the Arab/Muslim world are con-
strued as essentially anti-Western and anti-Zionist. We will see in the last
chapter to what extent anti-Muslim policies in France (and throughout
Europe) directed at women who wear the headscarf play into this latent
Orientalist ideology of simple binary thinking, reductive opposition, and
archetypes of representation.
5 Said, Orientalism, 259.
6 Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” New York Review of Books,
24 June 1982.
7 Said, “Afterword” to the 1994 edition of Orientalism, 340.
8 Note that the Tunisian people were proud of their peaceful uprising
against the repressive Ben Ali regime, yet their new leaders called on
French legal scholars to help convene a transitional constituent assembly to
174 Notes to pages 6–9
draft a new constitution (voted on in January 2014) based on the principles

of the French Republic and its universalist premises. Legal scholars such as
Robert Badinter have been troubled by this sort of foreign influence on the
legal framework of a sovereign state, which sheds light on the persisting
non-identity of nation and state in postcolonial countries. No wonder that
in response, the political pendulum swings towards religious extremism.
9 In this regard, scholars such as Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Edward Said, Abdul JanMohamed, Arif Dirlik, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Walter
Mignolo, and Christopher Miller stand out for their thorough questioning
of the Western academic construct and discourse on the postcolonial Other.
10 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning
Technology, 116.
11 Among writers and academics from the Maghreb, Kateb Yacine, Abdelkebir
Khatibi, and Mohammed Arkoun have been the most persuasive at refut-
ing presuppositions be they nationalistic, faith-based, or neocolonial.
12 Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-
colonialism,’” Social Text 31–2 (1992), 86.
13 My reference to “historicism” here clearly follows in the footsteps of
Chakrabarty, who in Provincializing Europe tackles the perception of histor-
ical time as a process of development leading up to Western modernity (74).
14 Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?,” Public Culture 23, no. 1
(2011), 87.
15 For example, an important question to be raised in this regard is: What are
the full intellectual and pedagogical implications of doing Maghrebi stud-
ies with little knowledge of the Arabic language and with no understand-
ing of Islam on the theological or cultural level?
16 It is interesting to note that the French academic tradition (unlike the
Anglo-Saxon one) does not distinguish between humanités and sciences so-
ciales. This raises the problem of how to distinguish between a French cul-
tural institution and the logic of the theories that sustain it.
17 Even Frantz Fanon, who was so important to the development of the post-
colonial critique, misjudged the efficacy of socialist revolution for formerly
colonized peoples. Witness how, from the 1960s to the 1980s, in terms of
economic development as well as democratic expectations, Vietnam and
Algeria both testified to the failure of centralized socialist systems.
18 One of the earliest questions about the recent democratic uprisings
throughout the Maghreb and the Near East related to the place of Islam in
these regions. It would be more sensible to attempt to understand a new
brand of democracy that, for a change, does not serve or protect or further
the interests of foreign nations.
Notes to pages 9–17 175
19 Elie Kedourie, a noted British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent and found-
er of the journal Middle Eastern Studies, advanced defamatory and argu-
ably racist positions vis-à-vis the cultures of the Arab sphere. For example,
in Democracy and Arab Political Culture, she wrote that “there is nothing in
the political traditions of the Arab world – which are the political tradi-
tions of Islam – which might make familiar, or indeed intelligible, the
organizing ideas of constitutional and representative government” (5).
It is not surprising that Kedourie got the attention of both American
neoconservatives and critics of Said’s discourse on latent Orientalism.
20 Indian academics such as Ranajit Guha (in the 1960s) and Sumit Sarkar
(later on) have been at the forefront of the struggle to have the “subaltern”
voice heard, whether the voice be that of a scholar or a peasant.
21 We have seen, for example, how some French citizens of Maghrebi back-
ground claimed a sense of Frenchness superior to that of other “Arabs”
in voting for the far-right candidate in the latest presidential election.
Although precise statistics are difficult to obtain because polls based on
ethnicity are not allowed in France, the forthright and uninhibited nation-
alist positions adopted by some minorities demonstrate how nationalism
proliferates, paradoxically, in the face of growing ethnic heterogeneity
and greater European integration.
22 This is visible in post–Ben Ali Tunisia, where the Islam-based government
of Ennahda (“renaissance” in Arabic) has found itself confronted with the
sometimes violent opposition of the Salafist organizations; meanwhile,
the Westernized and secularized bourgeois class has been trying to figure
out what discourse to apply so as not to appear to be lackeys of France.
23 It is amazing how in the academic circles of France, the postcolonial nation
par excellence, they still wonder aloud about the place and purpose of post-
colonial studies. For example, Hérodote, a French journal of geopolitics,
published a special issue (vol. 120, Spring 2006) on postcolonial studies
that asked one one key question – “Postcolonial studies, what for?” –
along with arguments that postulated about postcolonial discourse being
a historical provocation.
24 Anyone familiar with pan-Arab culture today knows how peoples of the
Near East look down on the cultures of the Maghreb, deeming them too
Gallicized to be genuinely “Arab.” Meanwhile, some French have con-
vinced themselves that their own identity is under siege and have taken
up extremist discourses and stances against their fellow citizens who share
with them the postcolonial condition.
25 France is not the only country that seems to have embarked on a national-
ist political purge. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and the
Netherlands have all held national elections in recent years in which the
far-right parties have achieved big gains. So it is safe to say that issues of
identity and racism actually do not cluster around purely national topoi,
but rather around an exaggerated idea of the importance of the West itself.
26 See, for instance, the remarkable work of Jacques Berque on Orientalism
and North Africa, or President de Gaulle’s insight about the inevitablity
of Algeria’s independence.
27 In Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon addressed
extensively the violence of the colonized on himself, caught between the
demands of the capital and the imperial imagery at the centre.
2 The Orient in Question
1 In his Reflections on Exile (2000), published late in his life, Said seeks out
the agency of the exilic condition while presiding over the autobiographi-
cal voice too often denied to the native.
2 Leyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 45.
3 Varisco, Reading Orientalism, 106. Varisco draws this phrase from Jacques
Waardenburg, an Orientalism scholar whom Said derides in his watershed
esssay of 1979.
4 Jon B. Alterman, “This Revolution Isn’t Being Televised,” New York Times,
30 December 2011, A23. This is the same newspaper that took more than
a year – see the editorial “The Times and Iraq,” New York Times (26 May
2004) – to acknowledge that it had basically misled its readers in its report-
ing of the reasons for going to war with Iraq. The blame for this was laid
on the war-mongering Bush administration, deceptive intelligence agen-
cies, and money-greedy Iraqi defectors and informants, but at no point
did the newspaper’s editors question their own ethical failings in making
sweeping generalizations about the ubiquitous presence of “Arab terror-
ists” in the wake of the attacks of 9/11.
5 Said, Orientalism, 56–7, 68.
6 Foucault comes to mind here with his concept of organization associated
with knowledge, desire, and order. See his Les mots et les choses, 250.
7 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 7.
8 In 1539, Guillaume Postel, at twenty-nine years of age, became the first
French scholar ever to hold a chair in Arabic studies.
9 In Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) and Surveiller et punir (1975), and
even in L’archéologie du savoir (1969), Foucault elaborates on the formation,
accumulation, and preservation of power (institutional and other) as if it
were an enduring universalist subject, while bypassing history and its

multitude of conflicts and acts of resistance.
10 Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 8.
11 Baudet, in Paradise on Earth, 16–17, examines this particular example of the
Western fascination with messianic figures.
12 See Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages. In this study, published before
the advent of postmodern theory, the author analyses the impact of
Western myths and fantasies on the development of geography as a
science and its relationship to contemporary political undertakings.
13 Barry, in “Renaissance Venice and Her ‘Moors’” in Venice and the Islamic
World, 828–1797, 146–73, does a remarkable job of examining the gradual
disappearance of Turkish and Egyptian figures from paintings in Venice
during the Renaissance.
14 Before the age of postmodernism and postcolonial studies, Helen Bacon
showed that the principles of ancient heroism were ascribed evenly by
the Greeks to themselves and to their enemies. See her Barbarians in Greek
Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 12.
16 Greek vase paintings of the fifth century BCE show Priam, the Trojan king,
wearing Persian attire. See Keith De Vries, “The Nearly Other: The Attic
Vision of Phrygians and Lydians,” in Cohen, ed., Not the Classical Ideal.
17 Immanuel Kant, when elaborating on the sublime (transcendent subjectiv-
ity), referred to non-European peoples (mainly Africans) as “degenerate,”
“unnatural,” “monstruous,” “hideous,” “despotic,” “miserable,” “gro-
tesque,” and “stupid.” Kant, Observations, 113.
18 Herder, Reflections, 354.
19 Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? In this lecture at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan
brought together race, religion, language, and geography to define the iden-
tity of a nation. French Republicans failed to perceive the irony of espous-
ing a concept that ran counter to the reality of the colonial enterprise.
21 Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 62.
22 Contrary to common perceptions, most Enlightenment thinkers believed
in God, even if it was only in relation to free will, the soul’s immortality,
or moral principles. What they rejected was the institution of the Church.
In the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant puts faith on
par with knowledge; there is also the fact that, as his correspondence
shows, he revered his deeply pious mother.
23 Renan, however great his academic competence, did not speak Arabic and
was known for his blanket condemnation of Arab cultures as primitive,
sensuous, unimaginative, and so on. Notable as well was his deeply rooted
anti-Semitism, even though he was highly regarded as a Hebrew scholar.
24 Renan, “De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civiliza-
tion,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II.
25 Sir William Jones, in The Sanscrit Language (1786), was the first to point out
similarities in the lexical roots and syntactical structures of Sanskrit, Greek,
and Latin. His discovery took root among German philologists such as
Johann G. Herder and Wilhelm von Humbolt, who injected it into their
Romantic nationalist studies of folklore and their concept of racialized
nations (by contrast, the French and American models of nationhood
were based on a social contract and manifest destiny).
26 Jacques Derrida, borrowing from Hegel, analysed negativity as différance,
something set against deterministic, teleological force. By dismantling the
epistemology of the Orient/Other, Europe was reinventing itself. But as
Derrida suggested, in the process Europe did not gravitate towards a
source where it was capable of thinking. L’écriture et la différence (Writing
and Difference), 82.
28 Tocqueville, Seconde lettre sur l’Algérie, 8, 13, 21.
29 One such French philosopher of “progress” was Nicolas de Condorcet
with his concept of a society perfectible through education and his views
on the intricate relationship between science and consciousness. See his
Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain (1793).
30 The decline of European nations as world powers serves as a clear re-
minder that they achieved their hegemony as a result of specific historical
circumstances, not because of their innate superiority. Yet clearly, Europe
has had a lasting impact on the rest of the world – an impact that has seen
non-Western intellectuals honouring or criticizing Europe’s legacy. A re-
cent example of this has been the debate over merging British and shariah
law (in more than eighty-five councils in 2012) – which would constitute
true hybridity. In that debate, postcolonial scholars have taken the lead.
31 For Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Prosper Mérimée, and Washington
Irving, Spain was Europe’s own site of exoticism, filled with essentialism
but with little historical agency.
32 Blumenbach, De l’unité du genre humain.
33 By Royal Decree, Columbus was to receive a 10 per cent commission on all
the wealth generated by trade and commerce in the new lands. Only after
his dreams of riches faded (he never set foot on the American continent,
and later found himself overtaken by other explorers) did he take up a
spriritual quest and pledge to use whatever wealth he amassed to finance
the “liberation” of Jerusalem from Islam before the second coming of
Christ (see Carol Delaney, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem [New York:
Pree Press, 2011]).
34 Antonio Gramsci seems to have coined the term “subaltern.” See his
“History of the Subaltern Classes: Methodological Criteria,” in Selections
from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). In the 1970s,
Indian historian Ranajit Guha founded Subaltern Studies, a journal for the
study of Indian and Asian historiographies from a Marxist perspective.
More recently, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been the most vocal advo-
cate of the concept – for example, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, a col-
lection of essays published between 1985 and 1995. The subaltern is the
one person who can make possible new cultural practices through, in
particular, “impertinent readings” of Western literary classics (336). More
importantly, for Spivak the subaltern condition is informed by both patri-
archy and imperialism. The female subaltern ends up a displaced figure,
chasing modernization while supposedly being the custodian of tradition.
35 Said underscored this pattern of presence and absence in the Oriental that
helps validate the ideational representation of the Arab and Muslim in la-
tent Orientalism. See Orientalism, 208.
36 Note that the word “Moslim” was coined in English in 1613, while the
word “mussulman” appeared in French in the sixteenth century. Before
this time, Western writers and travellers referred to Muslims in ethnic
terms or with derogatory expressions.
37 In his excellent essay on Bonaparte in Egypt, historian Juan Cole examines
in great detail how the French revolutionary leader attempted to instru-
mentalize Islam in order to establish his legitimacy and subdue local au-
thorities, to no avail. See Napoléon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New
York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2007).
38 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 37.
39 Harkis, Algerians who enlisted in the French army during the Algerian
War of Independence, found it impossible to perceive themselves as pro-
tonational subjects. For them, a French Algeria was the inescapable reality.
40 Henri Pirenne is one of the historians who introduced this idea, especially
in his posthumously published Mahomet et Charlemagne, written in 1936.
Basing his analyses mainly on socio-economic factors, he helped establish
a doctrine grounded in racial and cultural superiority. The concepts of
“dominant” and “subordinate” became the benchmarks in the golden age
of colonialism that was the first half of the twentieth century.
41 The three main causes of the decline of Arab civilization were the reconquis-
ta in Spain (1085–1492); the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258; and,
most importantly, the fact that there there had never been a true scientific
and cultural revolution in the Arab world, but merely a succession of ex-
traordinary people who were not necessarily ethnic Arabs (al-Kindi, al-
Farabi, Ibn Rush, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, Ibn Khaldun, al-Razi, al-Khwarizmi,
al-Idrissi, Ibn al-Haytham, etc.). Those people’s work was forgotten, and
their influence dried up after their deaths or after their patrons stopped
supporting them. The purpose of science in the Arab world was mainly to
understand and answer philosophical questions rather than to master na-
ture or achieve intellectual advancement. Antirationalist posturing came to
dominate intellectual inquiry in all aspects of Arab academic life. Even the
printing press was absent from the Islamic world until its introduction in
the Ottoman Empire in 1727 (267 years after it was introduced in Europe).
42 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 45.
43 In Camus’s unfinished and posthumously published book, Le premier
homme, his narrator describes the effects of the war on the city of Algiers,
yet remains unable to put a name on it.
44 Albert Memmi (Portrait du colonisé) and Raymond Aron (La Tragédie algéri-
enne), each with insights that are different from Sartre’s or Fanon’s histori-
cal materialism, clearly understand how colonialism holds the seeds of its
own end.
45 Edward Said, Robert J.C. Young, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Ranajit Guha, Emily Apter, Christopher L. Miller, Abdul
JanMohamed, Balachandra Rajan, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Ahmed Aijaz, Arif
Dirlik, Charles Forsdick, and many other academics working in North
America, in Europe, and in Morocco, Turkey, India, and Hong Kong, are
on the forefront of the postcolonial critique.
46 Literary characters such as the Moors, El Cid, Caliban, Othello, and the
narrator in Don Quixote, with all their “Arabic” foreignness, define the
figurative image of medieval Spain and of the Italian peninsula during
the Renaissance.
47 Sartre, an intellectual champion of the anticolonial struggle, called this
paradigm l’universel singulier, in Situations, VIII.
48 In the last chapter I will elaborate on this thorny issue, with a discussion
of the place of Islam in France today.
49 Muslim intellectuals (Abdelkarim Murad in Morocco, Messali Hadj in
Algeria, Muhammad Iqbal in India, Sayid Qutb in Egypt, etc.) were trained
in the West or were very familiar with it and saw through the prejudice
and cultural limitations of Western models.
50 Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, 281. My translation.
51 A famous Indian squib about Europeans was: “The whites are overreach-
ing, oversexed, and over here.” The same line was recycled later when
Britain was overrun with American soldiers during the Second World War.
52 In Proust’s Time Remembered, Charlus’s anti-Semitism represents a state of

mind that was less controversial than subversive in prewar France. Ben
Jelloun’s study about Maghreban immigrants in France, La plus haute des
solitudes, underscores the extent to which they are condemned to remain
figurants (extras) in French society.
53 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 37–8.
54 For an introduction to these issues, see Miller, Blank Darkness, 15.
55 Those retaining French as their official language were Morocco, Tunisia,
Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Senegal, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Côte
d’Ivoire, Guinea, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, the Central Africa Republic,
Gabon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, and
Madagascar.
56 Again, the field of subaltern studies makes a strong case for awareness
and resistance in the struggle against colonialism and representation.
57 Derrida, after addressing ideological and cultural subjectivity, using his
concepts of grammatology or différance, ended up writing about his own
subjectivity in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. His main argument is that he
realized that he was a citizen speaking an assumed language living in an
assumed country.
58 Especially during the Song dynasty (tenth to the thirteenth centuries CE),
with the revival of Confucianism and its world view.
59 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1971) pt III, 193.
60 Etienne Balibar examines the predicament of self-referential identity in
thecontext of proclaimed universalism in Masses, Classes, Ideas.
61 In short stories by Prosper Mérimée or in poems by Théophile Gautier,
for example.
62 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, bk 16 (1751). He takes his cues from
European missionary and diplomatic accounts of “East” India and China,
and of the “seraglios” of Algiers.
63 Said’s term; see Orientalism, 205.
64 The great colonial exhibition of 1931 in Paris, under the aegis of the “great-
er France,” underscored in the most cruel fashion what exoticism boiled
down to: the absolute strangeness of the Other.
65 A recent illustration of the legacy of this cultural superiority complex in
relation to the Islamic sphere is provided in Curtis, Orientalism and Islam,
a work in which the author inflicts old clichés on his readers (e.g., “The
Islamic religion with its fatalistic doctrine of predestination and the result-
ing passive nature of the population in Oriental societies,” 305), along
with anti-Said ranting and not-so-hidden Islamophobic attacks, besides
presenting an apology for faulty Orientalism.
66 Two examples cannot be overlooked. Grousset’s Histoire des croisades was

widely used to legitimize culturally the French presence throughout North
Africa, especially in Algeria after the hundredth anniversary of the coun-
try’s colonization. And in Orientalism, Said refers to Norman Daniel’s
The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1975)
as pathbreaking, while not being fully aware of the author’s ideological
goal of belittling Islam.
67 The martyrdom of Hussein (grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) in 680
caused a foundational split between the two visions of Islam. Later on,
after the ninth century, as a result of infighting between regional lordships
and royal dynasties, the religious split between Sunnis and Shias evolved
into an overt political struggle. For example, Harun al-Rashid, the famed
king of The Arabian Nights, was a merciless foe of Shiism.
68 Events related by several Muslim historians and chroniclers, among them
Norman Ya’qubi (?–897), Les Pays, trans. Gaston Wiet (Cairo: Institut
Français d’Archeologie Orientale, 1937), and Norman Ahmad Bin Yahya
Bin Jabir Al Biladuri (?–892), Origins of the Islamic State (Beirut: Khayats,
1966).
69 Francesco Gabrieli, a scholar of Arab culture and Islam, published many
books, including Arab Historians and the Crusades. In these works, the fall
of Jerusalem is described from different angles and by different voices.
All accounts concur regarding the atrocities that took place.
70 The seminal work on Jewish–Arab relations throughout history is Goitein,
A Mediterranean Society. Gotein specifically tackles the fall of Jerusalem to
the Franks in “Contemporary Letters.”
71 Johan Galtung, “On the Dialectic between Crisis and Crisis Perception,” in
Europe at the Crossroads: Agendas of the Crisis, ed. Stefan A. Musto and Carl
F. Pinkele (New York. Praeger, 1985), 11.
72 In defence of Camus’s literary intention, it is fair to add that in Algeria
until the late 1950s, the word “algérien” was the preferred term used to
refer to those of European descent.
73 Both writers saw in the Orient a locus for homoeroticism and a terrain for
projecting the discourse of their own victimhood as social outcasts. While
Gide used the colonies as a mirror to tackle pedophilia head-on, Genet
focused on the plight of the Palestinians and their minority discourse.
74 Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient, 5–6.
75 Before Antoine Galland translated The Arabian Nights from Arabic into
French (published in 1717, two years after his death), he had translated the
Koran (1704).
76 The early 1980s saw a famous dispute at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle between
those who claimed an Orientalist scholarly tradition and those who
wanted to study Arabic and Arab cultures from a new approach free from
the influence of the two academic institutions that had dominated Arab
studies for nearly two centuries: the Institut de Langues Orientales and
the Collège de France. Eventually the École Normale Supérieure estab-
lished its own Department of Arab studies.
3 Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies
1 In the twentieth century, the Arabic word for “Orientalism” was istishraq;
the more recent Arabic word for “Occidentalism” is istighrab, something
that also connotes “to find something puzzling, weird.”
2 Hulme, “Subversive Archipelagos,” 3.
3 In Semites and Anti-Semites, Lewis addresses the political dimension of the
Palestinians’ right to self-determination with unfeigned contempt and
simply considers Arab opposition to Zionism a pathology.
4 One year after the publication of Orientalism, Said wrote The Question
of Palestine, in which he condemned both the incompetence of the
Palestinian leadership and the Israeli and American lock on Palestinian
self-determination and independence. To the chagrin of his academic
opponents, more than thirty years later his argument still holds sway.
5 “I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a dis-
course, as described by him in The Archeology of Knowledge … to identify
Orientalism.” MacKenzie, Orientalism, 3.
6 Arran E. Gare, “Understanding Oriental Cultures,” Philosophy East and
West 45 (1995): 315.
7 In Algeria, Emir Abdel-Qadir led the revolt against the French from 1834
to 1843. In India, the rebellion of the last of the Mughal (Muslim) rulers
took place from 1857 to 1859, first against the East India Company and
then against British rule. In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed him-
self Mahdi (messianic redeemer) of the Islamic faith in a struggle against
the Anglo-Ottoman coalition from 1881 to 1885.
9 Ibid., 203.
10 Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 116ff.
11 First Frantz Fanon, then Homi Bhabha, examined this particular point of
the postcolonial critique. Fanon did so within a revolutionary frame,
Bhabha as a project in postcolonial theory.
12 Jugurtha was a Berber military hero who fought against the Roman invad-
ers of North Africa. Amrouche used his name for a collection of poems in
French published in 1946. He claimed that war and poetry were part of
the Maghrebi identity.
13 For Albert Camus, Algeria symbolized best what the Mediterranean stood
for: a perfect meeting of East and West. See Camus, “La culture indigène,
la nouvelle culture méditerranéenne” (1939) in Essais, 1324–5. Yet both in
the 1930s, when he wrote articles decrying the abject poverty of the Algerian
people, and in the 1950s, during the War of Independence, he remained
unable to condemn the colonial system and its ideology.
15 Spivak, “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia” in In Other Worlds, 108.
16 The 2003 Islamic headscarf affair symbolizes the national unease with the
colonial legacy. In June 2007 the new government, under Nicolas Sarkozy,
created for the first time in modern French history a ministry of “identity.”
In the fall of 2010, after much controversy, that ministry was eliminated.
17 MacKenzie, Orientalism, 210.
18 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the Second and
Third Republics in France strove to maintain a national cultural unity,
mostly based on myths, language, and citizenship. Meanwhile, artists
such as Flaubert, Baudelaire, Manet, and Courbet debunked, each in his
own way, the country’s material and fabricated cultural values.
19 Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2:1557,
quoted in Said, Orientalism, 251.
20 Ibid., 308; author’s emphasis.
21 In the tradition of Montaigne, historicism grounds itself in hermeneutics.
More recently, in North American academia, history as a discipline has
cross-fertilized other sciences since reaching an ethical tipping point in the
1970s regarding the political implications of doing humanities. See for ex-
ample, Stephen Greenblatt, “The Power of Forms,” in David Richter, ed.,
The Critical Tradition (New York: Bedford St Martin’s, 1988).
22 I take this idea from Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures
(London: Verso, 2008). “English will become, in effect, the language in
which the knowledge of ‘Indian Literature’ is produced” (250). In a later
chapter I develop the literary problematics of Maghreb writing in French.
23 Turkish historian Arif Dirlik, in “The Post-Colonial Aura,” condemns both
the mistaken Western practice of keeping politics and culture apart and
Eastern intellectuals generally for selling out and turning into professional
“minority” academics. He elaborates in on this theme in Dirlik, Bahl, and
Gran, History after the Three Worlds.
24 Some the earliest and harshest criticisms of the postcolonial discourse are
found in Ahmad, In Theory; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress:
Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism,’” Social Text 31–2 (1992): 84–98; and
Benita Parry, “The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?,”
Yearbook Of English Studies 27 (1999): 3–21.
25 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 142.

26 Cooper has shown how political forces (including trade unions) within the
colonial métropole, as well as failed assimilation policies and supranational
ideologies, have contributed to the demise of colonialism. See his
Decolonization and African Society.
28 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 125.
29 Hélène Cixous, “Mon algériance,” Les Inrockuptibles 20 (August 1997): 71–
4. James Joyce made this same association with a dead past when writing
about Ireland in Dubliners (1914). Note that Cixous wrote her doctoral dis-
sertation on Joyce’s work and his exile.
30 In her autobiography, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage, Cixous coins a highly
ambivalent word: “inséparabe” (45) – as if she continues to struggle with
an identity that is simultaneously individual (she feels herself to be French-
German, not Algerian), collective (she describes her family life with hardly
a word about her Jewish Arab father), and national.
31 Kwame Anthony Appiah criticized early on the masquerade of the nativist
discourse in Western academia. See his “Out of Africa.”
32 War veterans and faith-based activists were the real opponents of the war
in Iraq.
33 Paul Gilroy drives the point home concerning this new dimension of the
political and cultural commodification of the Other in Against Race.
35 The Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi translated Palestinian poetry from
Arabic into French. But his work was rejected by all of the publishers he
had collaborated with before. The collection was eventually published by
a small, one-man house as La poésie palestinienne contemporaine (Paris:
Éditions du Temps des Cerises, 2002).
36 Several examples come to mind, among them Tahar Ben Jelloun, whose
ready-made Moroccan exoticism is tailored to French readers, and Malika
Mokeddem, who recycles French metaphors of essentialized feminism as
applied to the Arab or Muslim subaltern. Also noteworthy are
Abdelwahab Meddeb and Malek Chebel, who take a supposedly scholarly
anti-Islam stance in order to ingratiate themselves with those French intel-
lectuals who trumpet secular and anti-Arab views, most notably in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks but also in relation to the festering conflict in the
Palestinian occupied territories. Later in this volume we examine why
“house Muslims,” especially in France, should not be taken at face value.
37 The following (among others) concern themselves with hegemonic post
coloniality, the inscriptive power of Western academia, and prevailing
qualifications of Otherness: Ahmad, In Theory; Brennan, At Home in the
World; Mukherjee, “Whose Post-Colonialism”; Neil Larsen, “Imperialism,

Colonialism, Postcolonialism,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed.
Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 23–52; Parry,
“Directions and Dead Ends”; and Mbembe, De la postcolonie.
38 Griffith, “Representation and Production,” 23.
39 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17.
40 “There are institutes, centers, faculties, departments, all devoted to legiti-
mizing and maintaining the authority of a handful of basic, basically un-
changing ideas about Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs.” Said, Orientalism,
302.
41 Witness, for example, the colonial overtones of the French political and
media discourses vis-à-vis the ongoing postcolonial drama in the suburbs,
and the deconstruction of (French) Muslims as the new dangerous social
class. These sociocultural aspects will be fully examined in the final chap-
ter of this volume.
42 This accusation is discussed and debunked by Derrida in Specters of Marx,
82.
43 Pierre Bourdieu coined this term in The Rules of Art, his critique of how art
is consumed in twentieth-century France (336).
44 See Said, Orientalism, 304ff.
45 In Nedjma, Kateb plays with this issue of origin (Berber, Jewish, Arabic),
only to bypass and exhaust the French colonial trauma best visible in the
French language itself.
4 Unfinished (Literary) Business: Orientalism and the Maghreb
1 Postcolonial theory has spawned a multitude of subdisciplines over time.

The point here is to underscore that the postcolonial writer is not simply
commodified within a system of knowledge: he or she is also expected
to assume the weight of a civilization, especially in terms of its history
and language.
2 In Empire, Hardt and Negri bring forward the “liberatory” content of post-
colonial studies. This actually reinforces the paradigm and strategies of
rule (138). It is true that issues of “applicability” and self-reflexivity tend
to trivialize readings, especially in an overloaded lexical field that includes
“imperialism,” “resistance,” “power,” “hegemony,” “margins,” and so on.
For example, how are silenced voices expected to be retrieved and heard
when postcolonial theory engages in self-consolidation?
3 “Disons en bref que, sur ce territoire linguistique de ladite ‘francophonie,’
je me place, moi, sur les frontiers.” Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 27.
My translation.
4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr, emphasizes that sense of “indenture” that culture and
language can force on a historically dominated class of citizens in “‘Writing,’
‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 13;
originally published in Critical Enquiry 12, no. 1 (Fall 1985), 1–20.
5 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 223.
6 In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi argues that hybridity and “in-between-ness”
are valid concepts because these very notions predate French colonialism,
having been equally applicable during the time of the Ottoman and Arab
invasions.
7 In his analysis of the post-Renaissance world system, Marxist historian
Immanuel Wallerstein was the first to address the idea of “border think-
ing” as a system, though not as a theory. See the introduction to his The
Modern World-System.
8 In Heideggerian terminology, the difference between “knowledge” and
“meaning,” although subtle, is best explained not in terms of a quest for
truth but rather as a mode of keeping truth alive, particularly through or-
der (cultural, literary, ideological, faith-based, etc.) See chapter 5 of Being
and Time (Sein und Zeit), in which Heidegger posits that meaning precedes
language because man is himself a sign [Sinn].
9 One illustration is that of the Mutazilis, Muslim theologians of the ninth
and tenth centuries who took Greek philosophy as a starting point for
their speculative works in order to rationalize reality, including that of
God’s injunctions.
10 Said, “Shattered Myths,” 410.
11 “Ma fiction est cette autobiographie qui s’esquisse.” Djebar, L’amour,
la fantasia, 244. My translation.
12 Boudjedra, La Répudiation; L’Insolation; L’Escargot entêté.
13 Note that one fundamental literary, if not philosophical, model for Kateb
was Arthur Rimbaud, who applied all his talent to debunking Western ar-
chetypal discourses. The French poet eventually went into exile for more
than ten years in eastern Africa, where, among many other activities,
he learned and taught Arabic.
14 A highly influential critique of Orientalism is the Egyptian academic Anouar
Abdel-Malek’s “Orientalism in Crisis.” This article, published during the
early postcolonial era, underscored new forces to be reckoned with – nation-
alism and the desire for sovereignty, just as in the case of Kateb’s Algeria.
15 Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” 353.
16 The term “productive matrix” was coined in “The Commitment to Theory,”
an early article by Homi Bhabha in which he heaped praises on the rhetor-
ical force of subaltern literature. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,”
New Formations 5 (1988), 109–21.
17 Edward Said used these words to describe V.S. Naipaul’s work in light of
postcolonial theories. Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World,” 53.
18 The three Goncourt Prize–winning novels are Michel Tournier, La Goutte
d’or (1986); Didier Van Cauwelaert, Un Aller simple (1994); and Jean-
Christophe Rufin, Katiba (2010).
19 Can the endless debates on the “Arab Spring” signify anything other than
the affirmation of the Western metropolis as democratic security in the
same way that a bank customer would view his banking institution as
“secure”?
20 This is exemplified in Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia, a novel in which the
author hides her autobiographical voice behind those of Algerian women
who live through a span of two centuries. Also, the poetry collections of
Abdlelatif Laâbi, about his years in King Hassan II’s prisons, claim to
speak for all Moroccan political prisoners.
21 The rapid rise of francophone studies in North American academia tends
to support the principle of hiring “black” or “Arab” faculty as genuine
representatives, as opposed to all-purpose white professors who have no
real “me” to return to, because they were never displaced in the first place.
22 In Le Passé simple (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), there is a power transfer from
“le seigneur” to Chraïbi. In Les Boucs (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), the last
chapter reveals the hero’s identity, as if to emphasize his tragic fate. In
La Civilization, ma mère! (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), the last chapter is an
eye-opener for the father figure, whose life has become a lie.
23 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 275.
24 In his highly literary Of Grammatology, Derrida rightly underscores the
West’s obsession with a metaphysics of truth and the subsequent disap-
pearing act of the ideas of origin and representation.
25 During the colonial era, Algeria-born Europeans were referred to as pieds-
noirs. Albert Camus probably exemplifies best what Algeria’s future
should have looked like: a commonwealth of cultures and peoples rather
than an independent nation. In the 1980s, another pied-noir writer, Marie
Cardinale, perceived her native land as in a game of absence/presence
but without rethinking the nature of colonialism.
26 “Par l’acquisition du français, il devient possible de composer avec ceux
qui détiennent le pouvoir. Cela procurerait aussi la maîtrise de la technique,
voie d’accès à la reconnaissance et au confort. En tels rouages de symboli-
sation, la séduction était grande.” Meddeb, “Le palimpseste du bilingue,”
128. My translation.
27 Aijaz has written extensively on the linguistic double-bind of the postcolo-
nial author and how literary criticism tends to overlap with neocolonial
ideologies. See his position vis-à-vis American academia in “Jameson’s

Rhetoric of Otherness.’”
28 This is a fundamental notion in Gilroy’s “There Ain’t No Black in the Union
Jack” (see 155 in the reprint edition). In that book, Gilroy examines racial
politics from the perspective of black people in contemporary England.
29 For example, Kateb, Le Polygone étoilé. Kateb gave up his writing career in
the 1970s to become the director of a theatrical company, which staged
plays across Algeria, mostly in Berber and in Arabic dialect. Another ex-
ample is Mammeri, La Colline oubliée. Mammeri also taught Berber and
edited a journal of Berber studies. Yet another example is Farès, Mémoire
de l’absent. A psychoanalyst turned writer, Farès has focused part of his
work on identity difference, with an emphasis on national languages.
30 A term originally from the literary world of Latin America from the 1930s
to the 1970s, which included such figures as Jorge Icaza, Miguel Ángel
Asturias, and José María Arguedas. The artistic intention of indigenism
was to bring to the fore local traditions, dialects, and myths.
31 “C’est que nous sommes seuls vidés contrebattus / au pied du Mur-
murailles des lamentations véridiques / nous encerclant dessus dessous /
avec la marque du désastre.” Laâbi, “Oeil de talisman,” in Le règne de
barbarie, 55. My translation.
33 Khatibi, Amour bilingue, 29. My translation.
34 This has become obvious in the taxonomy of bookstore shelving. In
France, Maghreb literature in French is typically labelled “Middle Eastern
and North African Literature,” while in the Maghreb countries it has yet to
become national literature.
35 “Renouons avec le désert, la montagne, le retrait hors cette histoire dont le
cataclysme final risque de nous surprendre.” Meddeb, Talismano, 189 (page
citation is to the reprint edition). My translation.
36 In Arabic, “Maghreb” means where the sun sets, the Occident.
5 André Gide and Imperial Dystopia
1 By 1900 there were only two independent nations left in Africa: Morocco
and Abyssinia (Liberia being a creation of the United States). These were
the settings for the exotic images depicted in works by artists like
Delacroix; they were also sanctuaries for writers like Rimbaud.
2 Between 1942 and 1944, Algiers was the capital of Free France and Dakar
was the springboard for the Gaullist military reconquest of Metropolitan
France.
3 Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab history, contends that gender

issues (mostly homosexual) are made universal only through epistemic
violence unleashed by a Western elite that purports to defend victims.
The main, and defiant, argument revolves around the reification of the
Arab subject, from the colonial era to the post-industrial age. See Massad,
Desiring Arabs.
4 Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola, among others, all faced the task of mastering the
uncharted waters of political engagement at a time when a burgeoning de-
mocracy was being widely heralded.
5 The abolition of slavery in 1848 was viewed as a giant step towards re-
spect for human rights outside France. Yet although Tocqueville believed
passionately in democracy and abolition, he also called for colonialism
in Algeria.
6 Sociologist Lucien Lévy-Brühl contended that there were irreducible dif-
ferences between the French and the colonized. In this way he exposed the
ethical ambiguity of the colonial entreprise. In Les Fonctions mentales dans
les sociétés inférieures, he called for races and ethnic groups to be ranked
in terms of their capacity for reason and their attachment to “pre-logical”
mysticism.
7 Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier turned to the
Orient (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, even southern Spain) for inspira-
tion for their poetry. Alexandre Dumas in his novella Quinze jours au Sinaï
(1830), based on a trip that his friend Adrien Dauzats took to Egypt, made
a case for reconciling West and East. Flaubert, in his novel L’Éducation sen-
timentale (1869), presents Algeria as an unforgiving place of exile, very
much in the Romantic line. The literary convention of the day posited
that the Orient was enticing and free, as familiar but also threatening.
8 Native Jews from Algeria became French citizens by government decree
in 1870; Muslim Algerians lived under the indigènes status throughout
Algeria’s 132-year colonial period.
9 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975).
10 For instance, in L’Immoraliste, Michel, the main character, lets his wife die
while he is obsessed with a young Arab boy.
11 Gide borrowed the title character from Virgil’s Eclogues. In one of the
eclogues, the protagonist is Amyntas, a black shepherd. Incidently, this is
one of the earliest instances in the Western canon of a celebration of homo-
sexual love.
12 “[…] pas de compromis encore entre les civilisations de l’Orient et la nôtre
qui paraît laide surtout quand elle veut réparer.” Gide, Amyntas, 26 (page
citation is to the reprint edition). My translation.
13 More than half a century earlier, Lamartine’s journey to the Middle East
was all a matter of spiritual syncretism: “Je répondis au gouverneur que,
bien que je fusse né dans une autre religion que la sienne, je n’en adorais
pas moins que lui la souveraine volonté d’Allah.” (I informed the [Ottoman]
governor that, although I was raised in a different religion from his, I did
not worship less than he did himself the supreme will of Allah.)
Lamartine, Souvenirs, 366. My translation.
14 “L’angoisse n’est qu’en nous; ce pays est au contraire très calme; mais cette
question nous étreint: est-ce avant, est-ce après la vie?” Gide, Amyntas, 85.
My translation.
15 “Oh! savoir, quand cette épaisse porte noire, devant cet Arabe, ouvrira,
ce qui l’accueillera, derrière … Je voudrais être cet Arabe, et que ce qui
l’attend m’attendît.” Gide, Amyntas, 111. My translation.
16 “In me division and trouble. But not revolt or ingratitude. Rather anxiety.”
Amrouche, “La culture peut être une mystification.” My translation.
17 “L’étrangeté de l’Européen commence par son exil intérieur.” Kristéva,
Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 42. My translation.
18 In the winter of 1849, a full year before he began writing Madame Bovary,
during his stay in a seedy Cairo hostelry, Flaubert met a French landlord
who went by the name of Monsieur Bouvaret. For accounts of Flaubert’s
homosexual encounters, see his Correspondance, Tome I, 252, 571–3, 604–6.
19 In his novel Histoire d’amour de la rose des sables (1932), Montherlant replac-
es his own “story,” which involved a pre-teenage boy in Algiers, with that
of French military officer and a teenage girl in rural Morocco.
20 “Les Arabes s’accoutument à vous, on leur paraît moins étranger, et leur
habitude, d’abord troublée, se réforme.” Gide, Amyntas, 32. My translation.
21 Gide had married his cousin Madeleine, whom he called “the Orient of his
life.” He never consummated the marriage; however, he had a mistress
and a daughter, Catherine, by that mistress.
22 Gide, Journal 1939–1949, 590–601.
23 One obvious example is Claire Duras’s Ourika (1823). See the remarkable
study “Duras and Her Ourika, ‘The Ultimate House Slave,’” chapter 8
of Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle.
24 The Dreyfus affair fed the argument of what it meant to be French; the
sentence for the officer wrongly accused of high treason was to be jailed
overseas, in French Guiana.
25 “Près de nous, devant la misérable hutte où trois pauvres Arabes s’abritent,
une femme couverte d’une loque safran lave une maigre fillette de cinq ans,
toute nue, debout dans un chaudron noir […] Que celui qui ne connaît pas
ce pays imagine d’abord: rien.” Gide, Amyntas, 58–9. My translation.
26 Ricoeur, Histoire et vérité, 292. My translation.

27 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 198.
28 “J’ai dû m’écarter encore, pour cacher aux autres mes larmes. Dans la piété
de ce peuple vaincu […] dans cette confiance désespérée en autre chose
monte la désolation du désert.” Gide, Amyntas, 142. My translation.
29 “Athman lit comme Bouvard et écrit comme Pécuchet. Il s’instruit de toutes
ses forces et copie n’importe quoi.” Gide, Amyntas, 36. My translation.
30 “Les hôtels sont pleins de voyageurs; mais ils tombent sous les lacs de
guides charlatans, et paient très cher les cérémonies falsifiées qu’on leur
joue.” Gide, Amyntas, 46. My translation.
31 I contend here that Gide is pre-Foucauldian in his dramatic position on sex
and social order. Nearly eighty years later, Foucault wrote: “The notion of
‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical
elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures, and it en-
abled the use of this ficticious unity as a causal principle.” Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, vol. I, 154.
32 One of Césaire’s arguments in Discours sur le colonialisme was that Nazism
was the legacy of “the very humanist, very Christian, and very bourgeois”
nineteenth century.
33 “Le sens moral, peut-être, dis-je, en m’efforçant de sourire – Oh simple-
ment celui de la propriété.” Gide, L’Immoraliste, 111 (page citation is to the
reprint edition). My translation.
34 “J’oubliais ma fatigue et ma gêne. Je marchais dans une sorte d’extase,
d’allegresse silencieuse, d’exaltation des sens et de la chair.” Gide,
L’Immoraliste, 50. My translation.
35 Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 349–50.
36 Edward Said notes the extent to which the French colonial endeavor was
to erase native cultures by claiming that the stated goal for colonialism
was no less than “the biological unity of mankind.” Said, Culture and
Imperialism, 184.
37 “Bachir suivait, bavard; fidèle et souple comme un chien.” Gide,
38 “Je ne reconnais pas les enfants, mais les enfants me reconnaissent.
Prévenus de mon arrivée tous accourent. Est-il possible que ce soient eux!”
Gide, L’Immoraliste, 171–2. My translation.
39 Karl Marx, Collected Works, 12:132.
40 “Je m’assis au premier banc que je trouvai. J’espérai qu’un enfant survien-
drait […] Celui qui vint bientôt ce fut un grand garçon de quatorze ans
[…] pas timide du tout, qui s’offrit de lui-même.” Gide, L’Immoraliste, 44–5.
My translation.
41 “Et je me comparais aux palimpsestes […] Quel était-il ce texte occulté?

Pour le lire ne fallait-il pas tout d’abord effacer les textes récents?” Gide,
42 Recall that Michel’s homoerotic encounters are also construed as a won-
derful opportunity for the children to be exposed to the benefits of
European society. Michel always insists on how generous and benevolent
he is.
43 Derrida, The Monolinguism of the Other, 40.
44 “Marceline est assise à demi sur son lit […] ses draps, ses mains, sa chemise,
sont innondés d’un flot de sang […] Je cherche sur son visage transpirant
une petite place où poser un affreux baiser.” Gide, L’Immoraliste, 178. My
translation.
45 Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and André Gide all helped shape the canon
of colonial literature, with its sense of commitment, its measure of human-
ism, and its complete misunderstanding of native identities and emergent
resistance.
46 “Arrachez-moi d’ici à présent, et donnez-moi des raisons d’être. Moi je ne
sais plus en trouver.” Gide, L’Immoraliste, 180. My translation.
47 Along with his friend Paul Valéry, Gide was at the forefront of the Dreyfus
affair in denouncing both anti-Semitism and nationalism.
48 See Sartre’s introduction to Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized.
6 Fables of Maghreb Nationhood
1 The French Republic immediately embraced ancien régime characters such

as Charlemagne and Joan of Arc, yet it is worth noting that Bastille Day
became the French national holiday only in 1889, as if the nation had
failed to construe itself in what historian Marc Bloch used to call “longue
durée.” No wonder that within such insecure parameters, the colonial em-
pire was recalibrated in terms of the Other’s citizenship and nationhood.
2 Joseph Arthur Gobineau was the most famous proponent of an ideology
based on racial superiority. His Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines became
a bedside book for Nazis in the making. More striking is that during his
three years (1855–8) as a French diplomat for Napoléon III in Persia (re-
named Iran only in 1934), he continued to view the Orient as a fabled land.
Gobineau’s Nouvelles asiatiques is supposedly a tribute to Montesquieu’s
Lettres persanes (1721), but in fact it set out to undermine the Republic’s
democratic achievements.
3 The expression is from Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,”
in Nation and Narration, 1.
4 Morocco’s King Abdel-Rahman did send troups to support the emir, but
after the French navy shelled Tangiers and Essaouira in 1844, he withdrew
all support from his fellow Muslim neighbour.
5 Bernard, L’Algérie, 76. Bernard was a Sorbonne professor who extensively
studied North Africa and its social fabric.
6 It is not that the colonial undertaking was based on the contradictory
premises of spreading French Republican principles while crushing peo-
ples’ right to self-determination; rather, the French political body was un-
able to grasp the limitations of its own imperial ideology enough to
rescind its claims to be an “enlightened” colonial power.
7 Between 1864 and 1895, 4,200 Algerians along with hundreds of Moroc
cans and Tunisians were sentenced to hard labour in New Caledonia.
Ouennaghi, Algériens et Maghrébins en Nouvelle-Calédonie, 81. Sources in
this work are drawn from French colonial archives. Note that the law on
political amnesty of 17 March 1880 did not apply to Algerian prisoners.
8 In the 1930s, fewer than fifty Algerian students were attending universities
in France; in the 1950s, around 400. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contempo-
raine, 537.
9 An early encounter was Bonaparte’s military and scientific expedition to
Egypt (July 1798–June 1801). This first massive French encounter with the
Arab/Muslim world was a precursor to the power play that would be
launched at the Orient in the coming century.
10 The primary purpose of the French colonial school system was to remove
native children from Islamic schools (madrasas). In Algeria, access to edu-
cation in French was limited to the elementary grades; the goal here was
to provide low-skilled manpower for the colonial economy. In 1920, 8 per
cent of native children attended French schools; in 1961, only 15 per cent.
In 1953, three years before independence, 13 per cent of Muslim children
attended school in Morocco, and 11 per cent in Tunisia. These figures do
not reflect the widespread differences between the situations in the cities
and in the countryside, as well as the enormous gender gap.
11 Collot, Les Institutions de l’Algérie, 276.
12 “Destour” was actually borrowed from the Turkish language as a token of
close association with the Young Turks who were fighting Western med-
dling in Turkey’s affairs after the Treaty of Versailles.
13 In his televised speech of 16 September 1959, President de Gaulle used for
the first time in French colonial history the taboo word “self-determination”
in relation to the Algerian people. He told his fellow Frenchmen: “Compte
tenu de toutes les données, algériennes, nationales et internationales, je
considère comme nécessaire que ce recours à l’autodétermination soit, dès
aujourd’hui, proclamé.” Sources Institut National de l’Audiovisuel: http://

www.ina.fr/economie-et-societe/vie-economique/video/CAF88024409/
allocution-radiodiffusee-et-televisee-du-general-de-gaulle.fr.html. The
independence war had been both bloody and costly; furthermore, having
closely followed the end of British rule in India, de Gaulle was an early
adherent of the concept of the clash of civilizations. For him, the Muslim
world was incompatible with French ideals and culture, and the failure of
colonization was proof of this.
14 This idea is thoroughly analysed in Bourdieu and Passeron, La Reproduction
(see page 57), although they apply it to the struggle of the French social
classes, not to the colonial condition.
15 The term “Algérien” was reserved exclusively for Europeans born in
Algeria. Very soon after independence, this overhelming normative value
was shaken off, and Algerians claimed their own right to be a people.
16 The concept of the “third space” has emerged in postcolonial theory. It
relates mainly to the study of the conditions for asymmetrical social and
cultural relations among non-industrialized nations and their peoples in
a globalized world. The prominent scholars in the field include Edward T.
Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Ulrich Beck.
17 “Bientôt vous célébrerez à Paris l’anniversaire du 14 juillet 1789. Nous
sommes avec vous par la pensée car nous sommes de ceux qui se souvien-
nent. Et de tels souvenirs entretiennent notre foi, et justifient notre es-
pérance.” Kessel and Pirelli, Le Peuple algérien et la guerre, 68.
18 For example, while Algeria was exporting grains and other crops to the
French métropole, the natives suffered from famines in 1917 and 1920. In
The Plague (1947), Camus replaced the actual famine in western Algeria
with a plague; thus rats could be blamed instead of colonial institutions.
19 In July 1962, during the referendum on Algerian independence, most
French people knew little about the document’s articles. They seemed
more interested in the Tour de France.
20 Cartier’s L’Algérie sans mensonge was a scathing indictment of the gross
incompetence of colonial institutions, besides being a racist screed on how
Arabs were unassimilable.
21 See Aron, La Tragédie algérienne, a study originally commissioned by the
prime minister at the time, Guy Mollet.
22 A recurrent idea in Aron’s La Tragédie algérienne was that to continue
the war would be more expensive than to pay to resettle the pieds-noirs
in France.
23 “La colonisation est le plus grand fait de l’Histoire. Est-il vrai qu’aujourd’hui
nous célébrions une apothéose qui soit proche d’une décadence? Jamais
chez nous l’élan de la pensée et son jaillissement n’ont été plus puissants
qu’aujourd’hui.” Reynaud, “Discours inaugural,” 27. My translation.
24 This type of ideological proposition had its roots in the nineteenth century
and endured until after the Second World War. See Saint-Germès, Économie
algérienne, 34.
25 Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre.
26 In 1949, in Les conditions de la renaissance, Algerian intellectual Malek
Bennabi coined the concept of “colonisabilité” – that is, Maghrebis had
been colonized as a result of structural weaknesses across their territories
and a loss of social “energy” (in part a consequence of their dogmatic un-
derstanding of Islam). With the end of the Second World War, the time was
ripe for Maghrebis to overcome these cultural weaknesses and to wrench
their identity and nationhood from their own condition.
27 The concepts of environmental determinism and vital space were devel-
oped by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel in the scholarly work Die
Erde und das Leben. Twenty years later, while Germany was reeling from
the aftermath of the First World War, Hitler appropriated this academic
concept as the doctrine of “Lebensraum.”
28 The Marçais brothers, William and Georges (and their sons Jean and
Philippe), were a good example of the tremendous scholarly work carried
on in Algeria and Morocco in the late nineteenth century and into the first
half of the twentieth. But the linguistic and historical disciplines never
progressed beyond their Orientalist origins. As could be anticipated, Arab
history was sublimated by both its theological transcendance and a spiri-
tual language!
29 Films produced during the interwar years must be considered in light of
the aesthetics of Orientalism. Most of these productions were documenta-
ries, whose function was to bring about an intellectual transition from ob-
jects of desire to objects of knowledge. For example, in L’Homme du Niger
(1939), director Jacques de Baroncelli avoided all clichés based on the
physical attributes of the native population; instead he presented a single
African tribe, in today’s Chad, as if it were an overseas “French village.”
30 “Nous vivons les temps où la sauvegarde même de la vie nous impose
d’élargir notre vision au-delà des horizons familiers.” Sarraut, Grandeur
et servitude coloniales, 27. My translation. He was so devoted to his job that
he was twice appointed Minister of the Colonies.
31 In 1930 the budget for the military was slightly more than 2,000 million
French francs; so the exhibition budget amounted to nearly 7 per cent of
the national defence budget.
32 The expansion of the empire worldwide served as proof that France was
not simply a nation but a great nation. The Berlin Conference (1885) had
already underscored this positivist feature by declaring that African peo-

ples could not achieve sovereign status because they were uncivilized
(never mind that it “civilized” nations that would soon begin two world
wars).
33 Note that the doctors at the Algiers psychiatric hospital collaborated with
the French military during the War of National Liberation in order to help
them fathom how Arabs could abandon “laziness and mysticism” for radi-
cal politics and guerilla warfare.
34 The differences in political views within the liberation movement came to
a head with the Melouza massacre of May 1957, when militants of the
Front de Libération Nationale slaughtered three hundred members of the
Mouvement Nationaliste Algérien.
35 For example, the Algerian Communist Party was founded in 1936 in
Algiers by and for Europeans. Camus was a member for a short time in
1936 and 1937 (he was then twenty-three years old). After the war, he de-
nied any association with the Communists so that he could apply for a US
visa.
36 “Istiqlal” means “independence” in Arabic. After 1945 there were several
such political parties throughout the Middle East and as far away as
Indonesia.
37 To this day, it is a duty for Moroccans to consider their king the leader of
the Muslim community and a descendant of the Prophet.
38 After independence was won at a high cost in casualties, the FLN made a
point of calling the dead “martyrs” – a spiritually charged word (shuhada)
in Arabic, even though the political party was very much a socialist one
that was fully supported by the officially atheist Soviet Union.
39 “En Algérie, la société avait reçu plus de coups mortels que la nation, et
cependant c’est cette dernière, et non la société qui devenait le but su-
prême, l’enjeu exclusif. C’était vraiment là une sorte de gageure, de défi,
déterminés d’une manière indirecte par l’attitude de l’ennemi qui niait la
nation puisqu’il n’avait pas de prises sur sa totalité spirituelle, sur les
réserves clandestines de sa recouvrance.” Lacheraf, L’Algérie, 323. My
translation.
40 “Se peut-il que tant qu’il existe des étiquettes, je n’aie pas la mienne?
Quelle est la mienne? Qu’on me dise qui je suis?” Feraoun, Journal 1955–
1962, 70.
7 A View from Diversité: Writing and Nation
1 Articles 110 and 111 of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, signed by

François I in August 1539, decreed French the official language of the state
(rather than Latin or regional languages). Yet until after the First World
War, only half the French used it as their mother tongue.
2 “Les colonies,” “l’empire français,” “la plus grande France,” “la France
d’outre-mer.” France became “l’hexagone” in 1962, after it had ceased to
be a colonial power.
3 On this particular issue, see Hargreaves, “La littérature issue.”
4 The word Beur is used here out of practicality. Unfortunately, the word,
which had been coined by the late 1970s (it first appeared in the
Dictionnaire Le Robert in 1980), has been picked up by the media and the
body politic mostly with derogatory overtones, as a means to stigmatize
people of the suburbs based on their ethnic background, religion, or
economic status.
5 Rosello, Declining the Stereotype, 11.
6 In a now famous – and damning – interview with the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz published on 18 November 2005, Finkielkraut showed his true
xenophobic and basically anti-Republican colours.
7 A striking feature of the suburban riots of November 2005 was that people
burned down their own schools, libraries, police stations, and stores – in-
deed, anything that signified economic inequality and institutional failure.
8 Nine Beur novels were published in 2005, seventeen in 2006, thirteen in
2007.
9 Hargreaves, “Une culture innommable?”
10 Especially in North America, academic conferences on Beur literature
and culture are saturated with an elite discourse that embodies what
could be called strategic essentialism, for it places politics before aesthet-
ics. In American academe, Beur conferences have become feel-good cir-
cuses complete with Western “authorities” and Beur guest stars, who are
disavowed in France by “ordinary” Beur because they cannot speak it
authentically.
11 An example would be the Pasqua Laws (1993–8), which restricted the
French citizenship of children of immigrants until they were sixteen, after
which age they had to make a choice. This was a serious infringement on
the fundamental Republican jus solis; it was also the first legal attack on
postcolonial citizenry.
12 Technically speaking, Laroui is not a Beur. He was born and raised in
Morocco, then migrated to the Netherlands. Somehow he has managed to
ride the wave of Beur hype, especially among French postcolonial studies
scholars in North America.
13 “Arrêtez tout! Je ne veux pas la maltraiter davantage. Qu’ici elle descende
(hors du temps, hors de l’action) avec tous les egards. Je ne parlerai plus
de Mina.” Laroui, De quel amour blessé!, 134. My translation.
14 This literature by women writers (Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Terry

McMillan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and others) tends to tackle issues
pertaining to the subject himself or herself instead of pursuing the broader
collective, militant narratives of male African American authors of the
1960s and 1970s.
15 Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 6.
16 Belghoul, Georgette! An excellent novel (now out of print) that broke away
from the predictable, or complacent, narrative frames of authors such as
Azouz Begag.
17 For example, in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis (the poorest and most
ethnically diverse in France), 30 per cent of people under age twenty-five
are school dropouts; in Paris the number is around 13 per cent. See
Le Monde, 1 March 2011.
18 The next chapter will examine to what extent laïcité in present-day France
has become an exclusive doctrine.
19 “On est de la chair à chômage comme ils étaient de la chair à canon … Et les
cv envoyés par centaines – pour rien! Et les entretiens d’embauche – pour
rien! Et les candidatures spontanées – pour rien! Oualou. Et pire, les stages:
le mensonge, le trucage légal, la parodie d’emploi, n’importe quoi –
Oualouououou!” (Oualou: Arabic word for “nothing.”) Smaïl, Vivre me tue,
69. The author (real name: Jack-Alain Léger) happens to be of 100 per cent
Gallic background. He borrowed the Beur voice and style when it was
trendy and marketable. This exercise in imposture set the tone for the ethnic
mindset and prejudices that haunt “progressive” Parisian publishing salons.
20 For a deeper analysis of world literature in French today, see my article
“Littérature-monde en français.”
21 “En parlant je ne puis jamais gommer, effacer, annuler; tout ce que je puis
faire, c’est dire ‘j’annule, j’efface, je rectifie’, bref de parler encore.” Barthes,
Le Bruissement de la langue, 93. My translation.
22 “J’me suis fait courser par les leurs. Les quoi? Les leurs. Les controleurs,
quoi! Tu comprends pas le français?” Laroui, De quel amour blessé, 87.
My translation.
23 This presumptuous and fossilized view of literature indicates the extent to
which a fringe among the French establishment is unable not only to han-
dle natural literary evolution but also to grasp the sustained momentum
of postcolonial reality.
24 “Vivre – tu verras ma fille – c’est fabriquer de l’oubli et du mensonge.”
Imache, Des nouvelles de Kora, 118. My translation.
25 “J’irai à la gare ferroviaire pour m’engouffrer dans les entrailles de mon R,
mon reu-reu, mon RER. Déguerpir chez mon spy et lui en dire long sur ma
vie.” Djaïdani, Mon nerf, 15. My translation.
26 The next chapter will show how literature has failed and has been re-
placed by music and feature films in order to secure a reliable, genuine
conversation with audiences, beyond the worn-out issue of intégration.
27 “En dehors du lointain Paris–X, autrement dit Nanterre, où j’allais en RER,
toute ma vie jusqu’ici s’est déroulée dans un territoire borné, en gros, par
La Fourche, La Chapelle, La République, La Trinité.” Smaïl, Vivre me tue,
22. My translation.
28 Tadjer, Les ANI du Tassili.
29 Rosello, “The “Beur Nation.”
30 Riffaterre, “On the Complimentarity,” 157.
31 “Si j’écrivais en arabe, il y aurait une espèce de continuité, mais en écriv-
ant en français j’ai l’impression de piétiner sur mon heritage.” Hargreaves,
“An Interview with Farida Belghoul,” 142.
32 For instance, Algiers was French before Nice, and Islam was visible in
France more than a century ago; as for the banlieue, it was a place of soci-
etal “threat” as early as the Industrial Revolution.
33 “Je suis français moi. Je suis dans mon pays. Tu me prends pour un Arabe,
ou quoi?” Charef, Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, 140. My translation.
34 “Les références qui les [Beur authors] règlent appartiennent à la culture
française et sont mises en jeu par la volonté de devenir français.” Lachmet,
“Une composante de l’underground français,” 27. My translation.
35 “C’est en France que j’ai appris à être arabe / C’est en Algérie que j’ai
appris à être immigrée.” Boukhedenna. Journal, 5. My translation.
36 This is known in French as “avoir une gueule d’auteur plutôt que de fait
divers.”
37 See the latest novels by Tassadit Imache, Des nouvelles de Kora; Ahmed
Kalouaz, Avec tes mains; and Rachid Djaïdani, Viscéral.
38 Issaad, L’Enchaînement.
8 The Challenge of Identities and the French Republic
1 “Dans ces conditions, ce n’est pas pêcher par excès de polemique ou de

méchanceté que de voir aussi, dans la soudaine promotion des post-
colonial studies et dans la stigmatization de l’arriération française, des
choses comme une stratégie de niche de la part de chercheurs en quête
d’une part de marché académique; une forme de coquetterie à mi-chemin
du snobisme américanophile et du masochisme hexagonal.” Bayart,
“En finir avec les études postcoloniales.”
2 In the twenty-first century, France boasts the largest Muslim, Jewish,
African, and Chinese communities in the European Union. Muslims, mostly
from the Maghreb, West Africa, and more recently Turkey, are 8 per cent
of the 65 million population. There are, of course, immense variations

between nominal Muslims and observant ones.
3 One original position on this question of intellectual usurpation is Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, “Who Claims Alterity?”
4 To a lesser degree, such a shift occurred between the second half of the
nineteenth century and the First World War, when the French Republic
turned its peasants into citizens, mainly by eradicating regional cultures.
5 In the second volume of the political memoirs of Jacques Chirac, the
Conservative former president pays tribute to François Hollande, then
head of the Socialist Party, for his unconditional support of the law ban-
ning religious symbols in French public schools, passed in March 2004.
Chirac, Le Temps presidential, 603.
6 The leftist leaders Ségolène Royal, Arnaud Montebourg, Vincent Peillon,
and Jean-Luc Mélenchon put the founding of a new Sixth Republic on
their agendas and platforms during the presidential campaign of 2012.
7 Schor, “The Crisis of French Universalism,” 48.
8 One recent glaring example was France’s military intervention in Mali in
January 2013 to save the African nation’s “democratic institutions”; yet at
the same time, France shrugged at a new Amnesty International report on
bias and discrimination against French Muslims.
9 The goal set by the Minister of Immigration and National Identity in 2009
was to deport at least 29,000 illegal or undocumented people, some of
them travellers transiting to other European destinations (source: www
.franceinfo.fr, 14 December 2009). The cost to French taxpayers was be-
tween 15,000 and 20,000 euros per person deported.
10 Although immigration to France officially stopped in 1974, people are still
migrating there, be they non-EU students, highly qualified guest workers,
refugees, or those entering the country under the family reunification
laws. Illegal immigration from western Africa and Southeast Asia remains
important and constant, although reliable statistics do not exist.
11 Since 2001, applicants for passports and cartes d’identité have been required
to demonstrate their French citizenship, often through a court certificate.
12 The “conversation on national identity” (October 2009–February 2010)
that former president Nicolas Sarkozy expected ended in a political fiasco;
from the start, it was deemed unhealthy in a democracy that boasted of
being a land of immigrants. The government’s proposals were eventually
buried in a parliamentary commission.
13 This was a highly controversial endeavour, but it also proved to be a very
successful one for far-right supporters. Let us remember that the only time
in France’s history when there was an actual Ministry of National Identity
was during the Vichy regime.
14 Although the decision was made by a conservative government, the left-

wing opposition proved unable or unwilling to ward off the threat of
xenophobic radicalization. After three months, the debate died down be-
cause of the people’s strong reactions and a grossly incompetent minister,
Eric Besson, who made matters worse every time he tried to salvage his
pet project.
15 In the 1980s, the Front National, the French far-right party, included in its
platform the idea that “foreigners” were the root cause of unemployment
because they were taking jobs away from the “real” French.
16 In 1968, around 30,000 people, originally from Portugal and North Africa,
were living in the two largest slums outside Paris, in the east in Champigny
and in the west in Nanterre. See Granotier, Les Travailleurs immigrés en
France.
17 Novels of this period, by Maghrebi or French authors, all share that sense
of existential inadequacy and metropolitan racism mimicking colonial
rule, in the chosen context of immigration. See, for instance, Chraïbi’s
Les Boucs (1955); Etcherelli, Élise ou la vraie vie (1967); and Boudjedra,
Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975).
18 One argument often made by European people born in French Algeria
is that along with independence came chaos, and that “Arabs could not
manage without us, and are stuck with themselves.” Many websites make
nostalgic, derogatory claims of this sort; others (e.g, www.alger-roi.fr)
spread outrageous sentiments about France’s so-called extraordinary
achievements in Algeria. Not surprisingly, these same European people,
who bizarrely insist they are Algerians, tend to align with the far right.
19 According to the French social and economic (statistical and database)
institute: www.insee.fr.
20 Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad pointed to this cultural and politi-
cal paradox in the immigrant community in France in La Double Absence,
352.
21 Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Basically, for this French soci-
ologist, what the individual remembers is determined by group associa-
tion: workplace, family, religious values, sports clubs, and so on. For him,
the subjective mind is actually structured by social arrangements.
22 The events were read through the lens of the Palestinian intifada, the Iraqi
insurgency, or a new clash of civilizations, when actually, the fundamental
identifier of this urban rage was a complete lack of any organizing leader-
ship and stated agenda.
23 See one recent annual report: www.halde.fr/Publication-du-rapport-
annuel-2009.html. During his last year in office, Sarkozy had the HALDE
phased out.
24 Alain Finkielkraut especially likes to rehash his argument about humanism

having ended when postcolonial immigration began in earnest after 1960.
In Qu’est-ce que la France?, he embarks on a series of dialogues with fellow
intellectuals, during which he denounces an education system that has
failed to turn students into French citizens, or to preserve “humanités,” as
well as muticulturalism, which he sees as a threat to French universalism.
25 Note that besides Classical Arabic words (algèbre, ambre, douanes, hasard,
sucre, etc.) that entered European languages as early as the Middle Ages,
new words have entered the French language with the advent of the post-
colonial condition: baraka (luck), chouïa (a little bit), flouze (money/dough),
kifkif (the same), toubib (physician), kiffer (to like a lot), and so on. This sort
of linguistic diglossia underscores power subdivisions within contempo-
rary French popular culture. One last group is words associated with Islam:
(charia (canonical law), émir (community leader), zakat (alms giving), halal
(pure/licit), ramadan (month of fasting), and so forth; all of these have kept
their high cultural register but remain open to misinterpretation. Among
many recent studies, see Guemriche, Dictionnaire; and Walter, Arabesques.
26 The expression “colonial fracture” comes from the seminal work by
French historians Bancel, Blanchard, and Lemaire, La Fracture coloniale.
27 “The West is attempting, and will continue to attempt, to sustain its pre-
eminent position and defend its interests by defining its interest as the
interests of the world community.” Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations,
184. Everything else that resists the West’s influence is prone to “indi-
genization” (pp. 99ff.), a paradigm shift leading to regression.
28 One favourite offhand formula by the “Beur” to depict their personal
situation is: “Être assis le cul entre deux chaises” (To be sitting between
two chairs).
29 The law of 15 March 2004 (Article L141-5-1 of the Education Code) bans
all ostentatious religious signs from public schools. It was passed with
494 votes in favour, 36 against, and 31 abstentions. Unquestionably, those
numbers reflect a nation that feels itself under siege. In its tradition of cozy-
ing up to the political powers-that-be, the Grande Mosquée de Paris, one of
the leading Islamic authorities in France, asked Muslim students to go to
school without wearing any visible signs of their faith. For the record, the
law was denounced by the Pope and by Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel
Peace Prize winner, a noted militant for women’s rights in her country.
30 Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 90–1.
31 One example is a political science scholar at the University of Toronto who
explained how a law that forbids people from acting in accordance with
their religious duties and freedom of conscience jeopardizes France’s
democratic tradition. Carens, “Démocratie, multiculturalisme et hijab.”
32 A few authors in France, largely because they are biased or have been
misinformed, support a prohibition on religious signs. See, for example,
Djavann, Bas les voiles; Djitli and Troubac, Lettre ouverte à ma fille; Fourest,
La Tentation obscurantiste; and Dubreuil, Sous le voile. Then there are au-
thors who either examine the issue on rational grounds or support the
right to wear religious symbols in public. See McGoldrick. Human Rights
and Religion; Gole, The Forbidden Modern; Joppke, The Veil; Scott. The Politics
of the Veil; Nordmann, ed., Le Foulard islamique en questions; and Bowen,
Can Islam Be French?
33 “Le rêve d’une totale domestication de la société algérienne à l’aide des
femmes dévoilées et complices de l’occupant, n’a pas cessé de hanter les
responsables politiques de la colonisation.” Fanon, L’An V de la révolution
algérienne, 20. My translation.
34 This was one of the core claims of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (literally, “Neither
Whores nor Submissive”), an organization founded out of the blue in
March 2003, with the blessing of the government, at a time when the
Islamic head scarf was being hotly debated. Despite wide access to the
mainstream media and the support of political leaders, the organization
has failed to gain any credibility on the ground. Yet its political umbrella
and financial sponsors have overshadowed genuine feminist and social
action. In just its first year, the organization received 300,000 euros in
funding from the government, while other grassroots associations, long
established in the banlieues, were financially struggling.
35 Guénif-Souilamas and Macé, Les Féministes et le garçon arabe.
36 In 2010, the unemployment rate for people under thirty who live in some
of the working-class banlieues north and east of Paris, as well as in Lyon,
Marseille, Toulouse, and Lille, was 43 per cent (the national rate hovers
at 10 per cent). This amounts to a Third World situation at the doors of
wealthy European cities. The Observatoire National des Zones Urbaines, a
national agency that gathers statistics on suburban areas, in 2010 reported
that 50 per cent of the people in some working-class banlieues were living
below the national poverty line, which stood at 8,700 euros/year per per-
son. The national average was 7 per cent. Before joining any serious debate
about secularism in France, remember that joblessness and economic decay
are now the greatest obstacles to social integration. Visit http://www
.statistiques-locales.insee.fr and http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/
rapports-publics/084000718/. The information also appeared in Le Monde,
on 15 December 2010.
37 France became a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights
on 4 November 1950. Article 9–1 of the convention states: “Everyone has
the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right in-
cludes freedom to change one’s religion or belief, and freedom either alone
or in community with others, in private or in public to manifest one’s reli-
gion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice, and observance.” Article 9–2
continues by stating that limitations can be applied in cases when: “[limi-
tations] prescribed by law, are necessary in a democratic society, in the in-
terest of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals,
or the protection of the rights and freedom of others.” Visit http://
conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/QueVoulezVous.asp?NT=
005&CL=ENG. This language raises the following questions: How do
French Muslim students who wear head scarves and who seek a French
education deserve these limitations? Why are they deemed a threat to
French democracy?
38 The first three notable cases were in September 1989, six months into the
Rushdie affair and just before the fall of the Berlin Wall (November), two
events that brought political Islam to the forefront just as twentieth-
century Western ideologies were coming to an end.
39 This is the highest administrative court in the nation, yet its rulings do not
have the force of law.
40 Lower courts across the country ruled in every single case brought before
them that students were allowed to wear their scarves in school. Only a
bill passed into law by the National Assembly in March 2004 was able to
overturn those rulings.
41 Deltombe, L’Islam imaginaire, shows how ingredients taken from world
events (in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan) from the
1980s to the early twenty-first century were conveniently added to the
national anti-Islamic propaganda mix.
42 Magazine covers showed women completely veiled (Afghan style) and
the French flag in the background with a question mark regarding the
future of the republic. News shows presented riots in the French suburbs
and the war in Iraq back to back. Politicians willingly praised secular, as-
similated immigrés and blamed the rest, who were portrayed as represent-
ing a national threat. Political discourse often used coded expressions to
refer to that “other” France. At times, blatantly derogatory language was
used when referring to people in the banlieues. The frenzy has continued
unabated, yet there has been no legal prosecution of the people guilty of
this race-baiting.
43 The expression “house Muslims” derives from “house Negroes,” the
slaves who worked in close contact with the plantation masters, in their
homes. They enjoyed basic material comforts and sometimes received an
elementary education, eventually becoming condescending to the “field

Negroes.” This same psychological kowtowing to the West and eagerness
to receive approval and validation can be seen among house Muslims
today.
44 It is called the Fédération des Femmes du Québec; 90 per cent of its members
are Catholic.
45 Benhabib, La Vie à contre-Coran. There is play on the words “contre-courant/
contre-Coran,” to go against the tide. This would lead readers to believe
she is a genuine advocate for freedom, even though everything about her
argument smacks of neoconservatism and anti-Islamic prejudice.
46 This has been the main position of the Socialist Party, as well as a key
political line among most Maghrebi intellectuals who live in France (e.g.,
Abdelwahab Meddeb, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Malek Chebel), who tend to
miss the neocolonial fault line of the assimilationist discourse.
47 Elizabeth Badinter, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Alain Finkielkraut have
been at the forefront of this discourse. The real nature of their semiotic and
political manoeuvres is easily exposed. See, for example, the seminal essay
by Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism.
48 Françoise Gaspard argues that France resorts to flawed science and histori-
cal discourse in order to mask its own insecurities and to stigmatize every-
one who seems to enjoy a secure, stable identity. Based on surveys and
investigations in the banlieues, her work reveals that researchers had never
in their investigations run into supporters of radical Islam or associations
based on it. Gaspard, Le Foulard et la République.
49 “Exclure les filles de l’école publique n’est-ce pas adopter une mesure de
nature sexiste puisqu’elle conduit à romper l’égalité entre les garcons et les
filles face à l’obligation scolaire?” Gaspard, Le Foulard et la République, 210.
My translation.
50 The word féminisme was coined in 1881 by the French women’s rights
activist Hubertine Auclert in her monthly review La Citoyenne. She also
travelled to Algeria (1888–92) and wrote a collection of articles, Les femmes
arabes, in which she advocated in the strongest terms equality of rights for
colonized women and mandatory access to free education.
51 There are many scholars of Islamic feminism, in the West as well as in
countries from the Maghreb and all the way to Pakistan, who hold a vari-
ety of viewpoints on the issues. For example, Algerian sociologist Marnia
Lazreg acknowledges the hegemonic tendencies rooted in Western aca-
deme that bear on Muslim woman as a subject of discourse, while still
questioning the assumptions of Islam as culture. Her Questioning the Veil is
an interesting case study, although predicated on the debatable premise
that the veil is “an issue” to begin with. Margo Badran, a true scholar
of Islamic feminism, draws on the politics of control and liberation by
Muslims themselves, who borrow from their own scholarly legacy to re-
buke imported Western hegemonic ideas on the position of women. Her
groundbreaking work was Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the
Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
52 Roudinesco, La laicité à l’école, 2:53.
53 In 1905 the word laïcité itself was fairly recent; it was coined only in 1871
(in the French newspaper La Patrie) and made it into the Dictionnaire
Larousse in 1873.
54 Note that the law on the separation of Church and State was modified
nine times between 1905 and 2005, mostly so as to meet the standards of
international treaties and conventions, but also to fine-tune details regard-
ing the salaries of religious leaders and rents of state-run places of worship.
55 In 1895 the Comité de l’Afrique française began to collect funds to build a
mosque in Paris, a project that gathered momentum after the tremendous
sacrifices of the French Colonial Army during the First World War.
56 See Patrick Weil, who was originally against any ban, then changed his ar-
gument in view of social violence in the banlieues wrongly associated with
radical Islam. In his “Lever le voile,” he strongly advocates a ban on
Islamic symbols, more in an effort to reconcile France with itself than to
uphold Muslim citizens’ rights. Historian Gérard Noiriel, in A quoi sert
l’identité nationale?, acknowledges that the secular arguments are dated
and that both the Islamic faith and postcolonial identity have been exploit-
ed within the shifting paradigms of national identity. Sociologist Vincent
Geisser, in La Nouvelle Islamophobie, examines the mechanisms of exclusion
and hatred towards Islam in France by pointing to academics and journal-
ists who, in his view, have opened the way for politicians to implement
anti-Muslim policies.
Epilogue: Elusive Convergence?
1 In the winter of 2011, the world witnessed how “our good friends,”
Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, became overnight pariah
dictators.
2 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin
and Philosophy,” 162.
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Index
Abdelkader, Emir, 42, 108, 112 alienation, 20, 31, 38, 40, 43, 46, 85,
Adorno, Theodor W., 20 92, 103, 105, 113, 116, 136, 139, 148,
Aeschylus, 25 155–8, 170
aesthetics, 5, 6, 17, 32, 53, 60–1, 69–70, Americas, 27, 28, 33, 36, 49, 91
72, 74–5, 79, 82, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, Amrouche, Jean, 43, 57, 94, 183n12,
101, 106, 123, 128–9, 132, 135, 136, 191n16
141, 142, 156, 172, 196n29, 198n10 Anderson, Benedict, 143
Africa, 27, 33, 44, 46, 47, 63, 65–6, Appadurai, Arjun, 71
68, 72, 90–2, 95, 100, 113, 116, 155, Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 12, 185n31
157–8, 177n17, 181n55, 187n13, Apter, Emily, 21, 180n45
189n1, 196n29, 197n32, 199n14, Arab Human Development Reports,
200n2, 201n8, 201n10. See also 9
Maghreb; North Africa Arab Spring, 5, 22, 159, 188n19
Ahmad, Aijaz, 55–6, 184n22 assimilation, 13, 25, 38, 44, 46, 64, 88,
Algeria, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 32, 34, 35, 91, 93, 97, 102, 110, 112, 116, 120,
38, 42–4, 49, 52, 56–9, 61, 64–6, 70, 127, 129, 131, 138, 147, 151, 162,
73–6, 78, 80, 82, 84–7, 90, 92–101, 163, 185n26, 205n42, 206n46
104–5, 107–15, 117–19, 121–3, 137, authenticity, 19, 26, 31, 33, 38, 43,
141, 146, 147, 151, 155, 156, 159, 46, 47, 85, 100, 115, 122, 131, 144,
162, 165, 166, 168, 171, 173n1, 198n10
174n17, 176n26, 179n39, 180n49,
182n66, 182n72, 183n7, 184n13, Badinter, Élisabeth, 163, 206n47
187n14, 188n25, 189n29, 190n5, Bahrain, 9
190n7, 190n8, 194n7, 194n8, Balandier, George, 11
194n10, 194n13, 195n15, 195n18, banlieue, 127–8, 130–3, 135–6, 140–8,
195n19, 196n28, 197n35, 202n18, 159, 161–2, 169, 200n32, 204n34,
205n41, 206n50 204n36, 205n42, 206n48, 207n56
222 Index
Barthes, Roland, 76, 92, 131, 135 citizenship, 4, 8, 13, 15–18, 20, 40,
Baubérot, Jean, 8 110–12, 127, 139, 143–5, 151–61,
Bayart, Jean-François, 11, 150 165, 169, 184n18, 193n1, 198n11,
Beauvoir, Simone de, 45 201n11
Begag, Azouz, 135, 199n16 Cixous, Hélène, 30, 64–5, 185n29
Belghoul, Farida, 132, 136, 143, 199n16 Claudel, Paul, 30
Ben Jalloun, Tahar, 46, 76, 83, 181n52, Cole, Juan, 66, 179n37
185n36, 206n46 colonialism, 7, 10, 18, 22–30, 37–49,
Benhabib, Djemila, 20, 165, 206n45 51, 57, 59–60, 65, 73, 86, 90, 99,
Benmansour, Latifah, 80 101–10, 114, 118, 123, 143, 179n40,
Berque, Jacques, 37, 176n26 180n44, 181n56, 185n26, 187n6,
Beur literature, 18, 30, 125, 127–49, 190n5, 192n36
156, 160, 198n4, 198n8, 198n10, colonization, 27, 28, 42, 66, 73, 84, 90,
198n12, 199n19, 200n34, 203n28 109, 115–18, 138, 182n66, 195n13
Beur writers, 30, 127, 130–49 Communism, Communists, 95, 113,
Bhabha, Homi K., 12, 72, 180n45, 115, 116, 119, 131, 197n35
183n11, 187n16, 193n3, 195n16 Conrad, Joseph, 42, 71, 97, 193n45
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 34, 39, 179n37, counter-hegemony, 24
194n9 crisis, 30, 37, 52, 58, 62, 66, 144, 161
Bouazar, Dounia, 8 Crusades, 22, 24, 33, 42, 44, 50
Boudjedra, Rachid, 69–70, 78
Boukhedenna, Sakinna, 146 Dabashi, Hamid, 12, 173n3
Bouraoui, Nina, 147 decolonization, 47, 49, 80, 123
Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 64, 186n43, deconstruction, 3, 5, 30, 53, 55, 61, 64,
195n14 65, 75, 78, 111, 122, 127, 136, 139,
170, 186n41
Camus, Albert, 43, 52, 58, 87, 92, 94, Deleuze, Gilles, 11
101, 112, 180n43, 182n72, 184n13, Derrida, Jacques, 3, 64, 65, 103,
188n25, 195n18, 197n35 178n26, 186n42, 188n24
capitalism, 10, 25, 27, 30, 39, 41, 52, diaspora, 8, 17, 63, 68, 80, 116
58, 60, 79, 119, 120, 133 Dib, Mohammed, 75, 82
Cartier, Raymond, 113, 195n20 différence, 61–2, 68, 70, 139, 151
Césaire, Aimé, 11, 111, 192n32 Dirlik, Arif, 12, 79, 174n8, 180n45,
Charef, Mehdi, 135, 143 184n23
Chateaubriand, 81, 90 discrimination, 57, 133, 134, 148,
Chraïbi, Driss, 81, 188n22, 202n17 151–6, 158, 162–3, 166–7, 169, 201n8
Christianity, 21, 23–7, 29, 33, 36, 38, Djaïdani, Rachid, 135, 138, 200n37
40–2, 45, 49–52, 56, 69, 86, 93, 97, Djaout, Tahar, 85
106, 125, 128, 161, 192n32. See also Djebar, Assia, 65, 70, 73, 75, 77, 80,
Judeo-Christian 188n20
Index 223
Eastern, 47, 48, 54, 55, 68, 94, 184n23 Flaubert, Gustav, 81, 95, 184n18,
Egypt, 9, 22, 34, 39, 54, 91, 95, 179n37, 190n7, 191n18
180n49, 190n7, 194n9, 270n1 Foucault, Michel, 4, 6, 14, 20, 23,
empire, 21, 28, 33, 39, 51, 59, 63, 69, 78, 55, 56, 84, 176n6, 176n9, 183n5,
94, 99–100, 107, 111, 113, 117, 118, 192n31
127, 155, 157, 159, 193n1, 196n32 France, 4–9, 13; and citizenship, 13,
Enlightenment, 4, 9, 10, 16, 26, 29, 32, 18; and colonialism, 10; exception-
41, 47, 48, 51, 106, 127, 166, 177n22 alism, 16; and Islam, 13, 19; and
essentialism, 7, 23, 39, 45, 81, 104, the Maghreb, 7–9, 11, 13–16, 18,
114, 121, 122, 131, 138, 165, 168, 21, 32, 51–2, 55, 128, 130–1, 134–6,
169, 178n31, 198n10 140, 154–8, 172, 175n21, 181n52;
Eurocentrism, 11, 21, 87, 153, 159 politics of, 17; and postcolonial-
Europe, 23–5, 27, 30–2, 36–7, 41–2, 44, ism, 11, 13, 17, 40
47–52, 55–6, 58, 67, 73, 76, 79, 118, francophone literature, 4, 7, 58, 71,
125–6, 151, 173n4, 178n26, 178n30 74–5, 78, 79, 84, 122–4, 136, 145
exhibitions, 41, 90, 115–19, 122, francophone writers, 10, 85, 123
181n64, 196n31 francophonie, 60, 61, 73, 76
exile, 12, 14, 20, 64, 75, 78, 79, 81, Freud, Sigmund, 46
82, 85–7, 94, 109, 120, 148, 165, Front National, 17, 164, 202n15
185n29, 187n13, 190n7
Gaillard, François, 8
fable, 60, 69, 106–24, 156, 193n2 Galtung, Johan, 52
faith, 12, 15, 19, 27, 37, 39–41, 43, Gare, Arran, 56
46, 54, 57, 97, 108, 111, 113, 115, Gautier, Théophile, 81, 178n31,
120, 151, 160–1, 163–7, 169, 171, 181n61, 190n7
174n11, 177n22, 183n7, 185n32, Genet, Jean, 52, 90, 182n73
187n8, 207n56 Gide, André, 18, 42, 52, 89–105,
Fanon, Frantz, 6, 11, 20, 39, 44, 66, 68, 182n73, 190n11, 191n21, 192n31,
162, 172, 174n17, 176n27, 180n44, 193n45, 193n47
183n11, 204n33 Gilroy, Paul, 23, 185n33, 189n28
Farès, Nabile, 85, 189n29 Glissant, Édouard, 11
Fassin, Eric, 8 globalization, 10, 20, 21, 37, 94, 113,
feminism, 7, 11, 18–19, 38, 45, 64, 138, 141, 151–3, 158, 163, 170, 172
65, 80, 90, 150, 156, 162–5, 167, Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 193n2
185n36, 204n34, 206–7n51, 206n50 Griffith, Gareth, 68
fetishism, 10, 18, 27, 40, 42, 65, 69, Guénif-Souilamas, Nacira, 8, 162
80, 96, 104, 107, 121, 127, 134, 137,
138, 153, 160, 169 Hargreaves, Alec, 127, 129
Finkielkraut, Alain, 128, 157, 198n6, headscarf, 13, 16, 19, 151–2, 161, 163,
203n24, 206n47 166–9, 173n4, 184n16
224 Index
hegemony, 6, 10, 17, 22, 26, 27, 35–7, identity politics, 7, 127, 135, 151, 166
46, 49, 50, 55, 63, 64, 71, 76, 80, 81, ideology, 4–17, 20, 24, 27–30, 32, 36,
85, 86, 92, 103, 108, 114, 138, 150, 39–43, 45–6, 48–9, 51, 54, 56, 58–9,
160, 167, 178n30, 185n37, 186n2, 61–2, 65, 68–9, 71–5, 78–81, 85–8,
206n51, 207n51 90, 92, 95–100, 107–13, 117, 122,
Heidegger, Martin, 6, 76, 187n8 123, 143, 153, 158, 162, 166–7, 172,
Herder, Johann G., 26, 178n25 173n4, 184n13, 185n26, 189n27,
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 164–5 193n2, 194n6, 205n38
historicism, 6, 7, 12, 17, 23, 32–3, 55, Imache, Tassadit, 136, 137
61, 64, 75, 89, 111, 128, 174n13, immigration, 5, 11, 15, 38, 44, 58, 68,
184n21 126, 129, 131, 138, 144, 149, 151,
Ho Chi Minh, 111, 115 154–6, 160, 164, 201n10, 202n17,
Hourani, Albert, 24 203n24
humanism, 4–6, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 33, independence, 10, 18, 35, 36, 40, 43,
35, 41, 51–3, 55, 57, 58, 61, 66, 78, 47, 63, 66, 79, 86–7, 106, 110, 111,
80, 84, 87, 102, 114, 116, 120–2, 134, 113–17, 120–2, 126, 154, 160, 162,
152, 162, 167, 171, 192n32, 193n45, 176n26, 183n4, 195n19, 197n36,
203n24 202n18; Algerian War of, 11, 43,
hybridity, 6, 10, 61, 66, 68, 76, 80, 94, 162, 179n39, 184n13, 195n13
113, 160, 178n30, 187n6 India, 20, 27, 30, 34–6, 56, 64, 67, 101,
111, 128, 179n34, 180n45, 180n49,
identity, 6, 8, 10–11, 13, 16–19, 27, 30, 180n51, 181n62, 183n7, 195n13
39–40, 43, 46–7, 52, 60–8, 73–4, 78, Indochina, 35, 113, 115
80–5, 90, 91, 94, 101, 104, 107–8, informants, native, 3, 7, 10, 21, 67
112–13, 118, 122–31, 143, 157–64, integration/intégration, 5, 11, 38, 51,
167, 169, 171–2, 176n25, 181n60, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135, 144, 148,
185n30, 189n29, 206n48; Algerian, 150, 153, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164,
49; Arab, 54; Berber, 85, 112; in 166, 175n21, 200n26, 204n36
Beur literature, 129–41, 144–9, Iraq, 6, 14, 66, 163, 165, 170–1, 176n4,
188n22; cultural, 34; European, 185n32, 202n22, 205n41, 205n42
31–2, 44, 50; faith-based, 151–2; Irwin, Robert, 9, 173n2
French postcolonial, 18, 38, 59, Islam, 5, 9, 11–16, 19, 21–2, 24, 36,
129, 150–7, 169, 175n24, 184n16, 38–9, 44, 49–52, 56, 64, 65, 67,
201n12, 201n13, 207n56; gender, 80, 83–4, 86, 94, 109, 119–20, 133,
83; and language, 30, 60–1, 123, 144, 150–1, 154, 158–71, 174n15,
144; Maghrebi, 85, 121, 183n12, 174n18, 175n19, 175n22, 178n33,
196n26; national, 30, 40, 57–9, 179n37, 182n66, 182n67, 185n36,
61, 75, 121, 125–6, 134, 144, 151, 186n40, 196n26, 200n32, 203n25,
177n19; Orientalist, 53; postcolo- 205n38, 206n48, 206n51, 207n56;
nial, 59 in France, 4, 19, 83–4, 150–69
Index 225
the Islamic Other, 7, 13, 23 144–6, 151, 160, 165, 171, 174n18,
Issaad, Ramdane, 147 175n24, 189n36, 196n26 (see also
Beur literature); and France, 7–9,
Jameson, Fredric, 71–2, 97, 100 11, 13–16, 18, 21, 32, 51–2, 55, 128,
Judeo-Christian, 15, 23, 32, 39–41, 130–1, 134–6, 140, 154–8, 172,
153, 157 175n21, 181n52; Maghrebi writers
and Maghrebi literature, 7, 14,
Kabbani, Rana, 52 15, 58, 60–1, 63, 68–89, 122–4, 142,
Kant, Immanuel, 26, 64, 92, 177n17, 184n22, 189n34, 202n17; nation-
177n22 hood, 106–24; and Orientialism,
Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed, 5 7, 47, 57–9, 71–89
Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 12, 65, 78, 79, Mammeri, Mouloud, 85, 189n29
87, 174n11, 180n45, 187n6, 195n16 Marçais brothers, 37, 196n28
knowledge, 3–11, 13, 19, 23, 28–30, Marxism, 9, 44, 55, 57, 58, 63, 64, 75,
32–3, 38–9, 49, 52, 54–6, 58, 61, 64, 90, 106, 116, 119, 128, 132, 170,
70, 76–9, 82–3, 85, 90, 91, 99, 100, 179n34, 187n7
107, 117, 143, 146, 160, 167, 171, Massignon, Louis, 30, 37
176n6, 177n22, 186n1, 187n8, 196n29 Mbembe, Achille, 8
McClintock, Anne, 7
Laâbi, Abdellatif, 75, 86, 185n35, Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 84, 88, 185n36,
188n20 206n46
Lacheraf, Mostefa, 122 Mediterranean, 5–6, 16, 17, 23, 33, 42,
Laforest, Edmond, 74 43, 58, 141, 159, 184n13
laïcité, 13, 40, 164, 166–9, 199n18, Mellah, Fawzi, 84
207n53 Memmi, Albert, 11, 57, 74, 180n44
Laronde, Michel, 127 métissage, 61, 80
Laroui, Fouad, 130, 135, 198n12 métropole, metropolis, metropolitan,
Lazreg, Marnia, 165, 206n51 43, 58–9, 63, 66, 69, 79–80, 90,
legacy, 5, 9, 10, 13–15, 22, 26, 39, 44, 50, 95, 100, 111–12, 114, 118, 185n26,
58, 74, 81, 89, 124, 153, 166, 178n30, 188n19, 189n2, 195n18, 202n17
181n65, 184n16, 192n32, 207n51 Miller, Christopher, 29, 174n9, 180n45
Lewis, Bernard, 4, 5, 55, 183n3 mimesis, 18, 124, 144
Libya, 9, 171 Mimouni, Rachid, 75, 84
literature. See Beur literature; Beur minority, 7, 55, 59, 62–4, 67, 68, 74,
writers; francophone literature; 85, 114, 126, 137, 147, 152, 156, 161,
francophone writers; writer 182n73, 184n23
mission civilisatrice, 26, 59, 113, 125
Mackenzie, John, 59, 173n2 modernity, 13, 27, 28, 32, 39, 42, 46,
Maghreb, ix, 4, 5, 7–9, 13–14, 18, 49, 72, 81, 82, 97, 106, 117, 120, 122,
23, 28, 35, 36, 40, 49, 63, 65, 137, 158, 166, 174n13
226 Index
Mokeddem, Malika, 65, 73, 80, 185n36 Persia, 31, 36, 193n2
Montesquieu, 31, 48, 56, 181n62, 193n2 pied-noir, 43, 84, 188n25
Morocco, 18, 74, 83, 86, 101, 112, postcolonial studies, ix, 4, 6–21; and
121–2, 137, 159, 180n45, 180n49, Orientalism, 54–70
181n55, 189n1, 191n19, 194n4, postcolonial theory, 6, 10, 62–72, 144,
194n10, 196n28, 198n12 151, 183n11, 186n1, 186n2, 195n16
Morrison, Toni, 68, 199n14 postcolonialism, 4–18, 20–1, 66; and
Müller, Friedrich Maximillian, 30 culture, 21; and Orientalism, 9, 14
Prester John, 24–5
nationhood, 9, 10, 15, 17, 18, 38, 47, progress, 29, 32, 35, 41, 45, 110, 178n29
49, 79, 85, 87, 94, 106–25, 139, 148, Proust, Marcel, 46, 73, 96, 134, 181n52
152–5, 158–9, 161, 167, 169, 172,
178n25, 193n1, 196n26 Qazvini, Allamah, 3
native, 5, 6, 11–12, 16, 30, 35, 39, Qutb, Sayid, 14, 180n49
80, 83, 109, 123, 158, 163, 176n1,
193n45 Rabelais, François, 49, 125
native informants, 3, 7, 10, 21, 67 racism, 18, 20, 32, 34, 48, 59, 60, 135,
nativism, 10 136, 152, 156, 171, 176n25, 195n20,
neocolonialism, 7, 9, 77 202n17
Nérval, Gerard de, 81, 190n7 reason, 25, 26, 29, 32–3, 39, 43, 51, 63,
North Africa, 37, 42, 56, 57, 66, 68, 64, 190n6
77, 85, 91–6, 98–9, 107–10, 112–14, Renaissance, 23, 28, 32, 48, 175n22,
119–22, 126, 145, 168, 176n26, 177n13, 180n46
182n66, 183n12, 194n5, 202n16. Renan, Ernest, 27, 29, 30, 177n19,
See also Maghreb 177n23
representation, 4–5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15,
Orient, the, 4, 8, 12, 18, 20–61, 64, 67, 17–19, 21, 23–4, 27, 31–6, 39–40,
69, 87, 89, 91–6, 103–4, 106, 154, 42–7, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 68,
178n26, 182n73, 186n40, 190n7, 69, 74, 76–9, 84, 86, 88–90, 92–3,
193n2, 194n9 95, 106, 108, 110–11, 119, 126, 128,
Orientalism, 3–19; conceptions of, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137, 139, 145,
8; and postcolonialism, postcolo- 155, 158, 159, 169, 170, 173n4,
nial studies, 9, 20–2, 54–70; and 179n35, 181n56, 188n24
violence, 18, 19, 40, 171 resistance, 5, 7, 12, 13, 19, 23, 28,
Otherness, 3, 7, 10, 12–17, 20, 25–32, 36, 47, 57–9, 62, 68, 78, 107, 108,
45, 52, 57, 75, 79, 87, 90, 93, 108, 110–12, 117, 119, 124, 128, 136,
121, 134, 136, 144, 150, 157, 159, 144, 147, 150, 169, 177n9, 181n56,
185n37; the Islamic Other, 7, 13, 23 186n2, 193n45
Ottoman Empire, 23, 34–6, 42, Riffaterre, Michael, 142
180n41, 190n7 Rodinson, Maxime, 37
Index 227
Rosello, Mireille, 127, 142 186n41, 198n4, 198n7, 204n36,

Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 163, 167 205n42. See also banlieue
Rufin, Jean-Christophe, 81, 188n18 Syria, 9, 14, 33, 35, 54, 120, 170, 172
Rushdie, Salman, 64, 67, 205n38
Tadjer, Akli, 141
Said, Edward, 3–5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, third space, 10, 111, 195n16
19–23, 25, 28, 30–2, 39, 42, 44, 53–8, Tlili, Mustapha, 82
60, 62, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 76, 80, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 32, 190n5
83–4, 86–7, 89, 106, 159, 167, 173n2, Tournier, Michel, 81, 188n18
174n9, 175n19, 176n1, 176n3, Tunisia, 5, 9, 18, 61, 74, 76, 84, 86,
179n35, 180n45, 181n63, 181n65, 92, 95, 99, 110, 121–2, 156, 173n8,
182n66, 183n4, 188n17, 192n36 175n22, 181n55, 194n10, 207n1
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 153, 154, 184n16,
201n12, 202n23 Valéry, Paul, 60, 193n47
Sarraut, Albert, 118, 196n30 Van Cauwelaert, Didier, 81, 188n18
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 77, 104, 116, 180n44, Varisco, Daniel M., 21–2, 173n2,
180n47, 193n48 176n3
Schor, Naomi, 152 violence, 18–19, 39–40, 42, 44, 49,
secular, secularism, 6, 16, 26, 67, 56–7, 60, 66, 104, 105, 127, 128,
129, 134, 144, 150, 152–3, 159–69, 134, 136, 141, 146, 155, 162–3, 169,
185n36, 204n36, 205n42, 207n56. 170, 172, 175n22, 176n27, 190n3,
See also laïcité 207n56
Serhane, Abdelhak, 82 Voltaire, 12, 31, 56, 190n4
slavery, 23, 26, 28–9, 33–4, 40, 47, 51,
190n5, 205n43 Western academe, academics,
sovereign subject, 4, 7, 10, 26, 30, 55 academy, 10, 29, 55, 62, 63, 68,
sovereignty, 24, 27, 108, 114, 123, 126, 69, 151, 174n9, 185n31, 185n37,
153, 174n8, 187n14 206n51
Spain, 27, 33, 125, 178n31, 179n41, Western humanities, 12, 73, 76–8, 82
180n46, 190n7 Western self, 6, 15, 31
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 12, 58, writer, 52, 61, 72, 75, 81, 83–4, 88,
63, 64, 174n9, 179n34, 180n45, 201n3 132, 136, 186n1. See also Beur
subaltern, 28, 33, 36–7, 63, 67, 70, 76, writers
85, 109, 115, 123, 143, 158, 175n20,
179n34, 185n36, 187n16 Yacine, Kateb, 43, 78–9, 85, 174n11,
subaltern studies, 17, 20, 181n56 186n45, 187n13, 187n14, 189n29
suburbs, 11, 15, 38, 128, 130–1, 139,
144, 150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 164, Zola, Émile, 96, 134, 190n4

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POSTCOLONIAL COUNTERPOINT

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

ISBN 978-1-4426-4891-3 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-

University of Toronto Romance Series

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Laroussi, Farid, author

(University of Toronto romance series)

1. French literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. French

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

Funded by the Financé par le

1 States of Postcolonial Reading 3

2 The Orient in Question 20

3 Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies 54

4 Unfinished (Literary) Business: Orientalism and the Maghreb 71

5 André Gide and Imperial Dystopia 89

6 Fables of Maghreb Nationhood 106

7 A View from Diversité: Writing and Nation 125

8 The Challenge of Identities and the French Republic 150

Epilogue: Elusive Convergence? 170

the University of Toronto Press. Institutional support came from the

Another book on Orientalism cannot reasonably expect a warm recep-

which has been catastrophic for emerging minorities, especially those

Mediterranean Sea, it is often assumed that both universal and relative

of an academic world that is too busy coining “theory,” on the one

There seem to be at least three ways of conceiving the term “Ori­

of postcolonial studies, although it will neither secure nor consolidate

Colonial occupation differed in its forms across continents and over

current postcolonial condition does not provide a coherent amalgam

Exceptions abound among scholars outside France, whose works have

with Orientalism in Hollywood movies, yet it continues to operate as

my argument, sustains a critique of French and Western postmodernity.

– to represent the Other; it has been an attempt at full disclosure of the

where communication actually occurs and develops. My personal re-

It is not just that millions of postcolonial citizens live in contempo-

As it turns out, the narrative discourse on citizenship is sustained by a

Muslim women. I examine the tensions between universal principles

‘means.’”3 But whether or not the limits of a longue durée genealogy of

Orient into a perception that largely fails to question Western sources,

formulated as text rather than textualized, as began to happen in Europe

It was no coincidence that between Prester John’s kingdom and

This pattern of tethering one’s cultural perspective to one’s own

place in history. Orientalism operated along this chain of substitutions

themselves. But of course the ideological performance of silencing the

Throughout the prolonged contact between Europe and the rest of

institutions, demonstrating that there have always been alternatives to

generate real economic benefits.33 On his third journey, Columbus even

where politicians and the media conflate issues suchas immigration,

the collective experience of groups (Western colonial enterprises, sci-

between the borrowers and the borrowed-from. A striking example

– in paintings, or during the colonial exhibitions, for instance – he is

political spheres, viewed from afar, point less to a legacy of anti-Islam

metaphor to direct designation, the Arab/Muslim figure became for-

full historicity than in a figurative extension. This acknowledgment

on speculation and short on fact. This reality eventually cohered into

Oriental source needs to be cancelled out. This literary illustration re-

contemporary France remains very much the Other, while a Korean or

My aim in this chapter is to pursue my conversation with Orientalism

There seem to be at least three ways of conceiving the term “Ori