Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition(New Horizons in Contemporary Writing)

About the Book

‘Focusing on francophone writing from North Africa as it has developed since the 1980s, Writing After Postcolonialism explores the extent to which the notion of ‘postcolonialism’ is still resonant for literary writers a generation or more after independence, and examines the troubled status of literature in society and politics during this period. Whilst analysing the ways in which writers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have reacted to political unrest and social dissatisfaction, Jane Hiddleston offers a compelling reflection on literature’s ability to interrogate the postcolonial nation as well as on its own uncertain role in the current context. The book sets out both to situate the recent generation of francophone writers in North Africa in relation to contemporary politics, to postcolonial theory, and evolving notions of ‘world literature, and to probe the ways in which a new and highly sophisticated set of writers reflect on the very notion of ‘the literary’ during this period of transition.’

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter One: Postcolonialism, World Literature, and the Thousand and One Nights

Chapter Two: Why Write? Literature According to its Authors

Chapter Three: Writing for Others: The Public Writer and the Ghost Writer

Chapter Four: Rewriting the Past: Literature and History

Chapter Five: Creating Reality: Literature and Life

Chapter Six: Writing between Languages: Literature as Translation

Chapter Seven: Francophone Letters: Literature as Encounter

Chapter Eight: The Power of Reading: Living with/through Books

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Jane Hiddleston is Fellow and Tutor in French at Exeter College, University of Oxford, UK. Her previous books include Understanding Postcolonialism (2009) and Postructuralism and Postcoloniality (2010).

Review :
An erudite, broad-ranging and historically grounded book. Its illuminating textual analyses are interwoven with sustained theoretical reflection. Hiddleston clarifies the status and function of literature during the transitional cultural moments that can inspire creative engagements with politics. She renews our understanding of the unsettling consequences of aesthetic experimentation. The book will become an indispensable resource for the study of North African writing. In her new book, Jane Hiddleston analyses North African literary production in French since the 1980s. She draws on a remarkably rich corpus of material, and seeks to understand the privileged status of reading and writing in countries struggling to achieve stability after the end of colonialism. The volume explores the extent to which writing from the Maghreb operates as a zone of translation and experimentation. It is essential reading for all those interested in postcolonial literatures in French – but also for students and scholars working on postcoloniality and creativity more generally. Written with assured clarity, Hiddleston offers intellectually rigorous readings of some of the greatest francophone novels to have emerged from post-independence North Africa. Writing After Postcolonialism makes a very real contribution to our understanding of francophone literature from this region and in doing so compels us to reflect on the categories of postcolonialism and of world literature and our neglect of non-European literary traditions such as that of the Thousand and One Nights The study is well researched and extremely readable. Although some familiarity with Francophone North African literature would be helpful, all scholars working in fields related to postcolonial or Francophone literature should find this text a fruitful read. Summing Up: Recommended. Hiddleston’s work offers a comprehensive survey of North Africa’s ongoing socio-political factional struggles, as well as of the literary cultures and status of French in literary production in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia which will be of great interest both to the general reader and to scholars researching postcolonial writing. […] This impressively erudite work, which marshals an array of different theoretical approaches to elucidate its textual readings and draws out numerous insightful parallels between writers, foregrounds the creative fluidity, the singularity of every reader’s encounter with the textual object.