Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria

Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses underscores the relationship between literature, history and politics. The comparative historical-cultural analysis of the works of Albert Camus, Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib provide not only interesting perspective from which to re-evaluate Camus' fiction, but also an extremely valuable insight into the colonial history and politics of Algeria. The author examines the ideological parameters - colonial history, French assimilationist practices, politics of citizenship, etc. - that provide a generative context for the birth of Algerian Literature in French. The work's strength and contribution to scholarship, particularly, to the growing field of post-colonial cultural critique, lie in its attempt to read the fictions of Camus from the perspective of North African literary tradition as opposed to a French literary tradition. It brings his writings into a mutual dialogic interrogation with those of Indigenous North African writers, whose fictions articulate a state of cultural heterogeneity at the very moment when they confront the problem of Western - particularly French - hegemony. This book is of interest to scholars and graduate students of French literature, Francophone African literature, and Cultural Studies.