Experimental Nations
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A01=Reda Bensmaia
Abdelwahab Meddeb
Albert Memmi
Algeria
Algerian War
Allegory
Alterity
Arabs
Armand Mattelart
Assia Djebar
Author_Reda Bensmaia
Autobiography
Benjamin Stora
Cartography
Category=DSBH
Category=JPFN
Chris Marker
Colonialism
Colonization
Critical Essays (Orwell)
Decolonization
Deleuze and Guattari
Deterritorialization
Dialectic
Dichotomy
Edward Said
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ernest Renan
Ethnoscape
Exclusion
Foreign language
Francophone literature
Frantz Fanon
Homi K. Bhabha
Ideogram
Ideology
Jacques Derrida
Jean Amrouche
Jews
Kateb Yacine
La Nouba
Line of flight
Literature
Maghreb
Metaphor
Methodology
Mise en abyme
Narration
Narrative
Nationality
Obstacle
On the Eve
Paganism
Parody
Philosophy
Pied-Noir
Poetry
Postcolonialism
Reappropriation
Reterritorialization
Rhetoric
Roland Barthes
Romanticism
The Colonizer and the Colonized
The Other Hand
The Practice of Everyday Life
The Various
Thought
Tunisia
Umwelt
Western culture
World literature
World War II
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691089379
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Jean-Paul Sartre's famous question, "For whom do we write?" strikes close to home for francophone writers from the Maghreb. Do these writers address their compatriots, many of whom are illiterate or read no French, or a broader audience beyond Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? In Experimental Nations, Reda Bensmaia argues powerfully against the tendency to view their works not as literary creations worth considering for their innovative style or language but as "ethnographic" texts and to appraise them only against the "French literary canon." He casts fresh light on the original literary strategies many such writers have deployed to reappropriate their cultural heritage and "reconfigure" their nations in the decades since colonialism. Tracing the move from the anticolonial, nationalist, and arabist literature of the early years to the relative cosmopolitanism and diversity of Maghrebi francophone literature today, Bensmaia draws on contemporary literary and postcolonial theory to "deterritorialize" its study.
Whether in Assia Djebar's novels and films, Abdelkebir Khatabi's prose poems or critical essays, or the novels of Nabile Fares, Abdelwahab Meddeb, or Mouloud Feraoun, he raises the veil that hides the intrinsic richness of these artists' works from the eyes of even an attentive audience. Bensmaia shows us how such Maghrebi writers have opened their nations as territories to rediscover and stake out, to invent, while creating a new language. In presenting this masterful account of "virtual" but veritable nations, he sets forth a new and fertile topography for francophone literature.
Reda Bensmaia is University Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of "The Barthes Effect", "The Year of Passages", and a novel entitled "Alger ou la maladie de la memoire".
