At the end of French colonization in Algeria, four categories of people held French citizenship or had strong ties with France: European settlers, Jews, mixed-race individuals, and Harkis. The end of the War of Independence exiled most of them from Algeria, traumatized them in various ways, and transferred many to metropolitan France. Remnants of the Franco-Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities examines the legacies of these transnational identities through narratives that dissent from official histories, both in France and Algeria. This literature takes particular stories of exile and loss and constructs a memory around a Mosaic father figure embodying the native land, Algeria. Mona El Khoury argues that these filiation narratives create a postcolonial archive: a discursive foundation that makes historical minorities visible,while disrupting French and Algerian hegemonies. El Khoury questions the power of literature to repair history while contending that these literary strategies seek to do justice to the dead Algerian father, even as they valorize enduring minority identifications.
Mona El Khoury is assistant professor of French and Francophone literature at Tufts University.
Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: From Primal Scenes to the Other('s) Archive: Mapping the (In)visibility of the Jews in Algeria through Memory. Helene Cixous' Les Reveries de la femme sauvage Chapter 3: The Construction of the "Harkive:" Giving a Voice to the Harki Moze by Zahia Rahmani Chapter 4: The 'Metis' Predicament: Nina Bouraoui's Embodied Memory of the Colonial Split Chapter 5 "Aller Postcolonial - Retour Neocolonial"? The Ambiguous Memorial Reintegration of the Pieds-Noirs in Algeria: Boualem Sansal's L'Enfant fou de l'arbre creux Conclusion: Mosaic fathers and spectral truths Bibliography About the Author
Mona El Khoury's Remnants of the Algerian Rupture: Archiving Postcolonial Minorities is an important new study of four key novels reflecting on the memory and after-effects of the Algerian War of Independence from the perspective of its forgotten minorities. Addressing the ongoing omissions in official memory of the War, El-Khoury convincingly demonstrates how Helene Cixous, Zahia Rahimi, Nina Bouraoui and Boualem Sansal 'archive' the under-represented experiences of Algerian Jews, Harkis, pieds-noirs and people of mixed race in subtle and suggestive literary texts that allow silenced voices to make themselves heard. This is an engaging and illuminating study that fills a significant gap in existing discourses on Algerian memory in France. -- Jane Hiddleston, Professor of Literatures in French, University of Oxford
