Writing French Algeria (review)

Book Reviews Peter Dunwoodie. Writing French Algeria. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. vi + 334. $80. In Writing French Algeria, Peter Dunwoodie offers a compelling literary history of how Algeria was imagined as a colony by French writers from the invasion of 1830 until the withdrawal of 1962. Limiting his study to a selection of French and French-Algerian writers, Dunwoodie demonstrates the complex ways these writers "attempted to carve out an identifiable, autonomous space" at once affiliated with and different from France. The French discourse on and in colonial Algeria, he argues, was an ambivalent mode of representation that relied on a colonial Manichaeanism in which the indigenous population was either absent or present merely as a signifier of otherness. Dunwoodie begins with an analysis of the orientalist works of French travelers in North Africa—e.g., Théophile Gautier, Eugene Fromentin, and Emile Masqueray—and the exotic and colonialist novels of Pierre Loti and Louis Bertrand. Using die critical insights of Edward Said's Orientalism, Dunwoodie argues cogently that all of diese writings enabled and justified France's colonial project in North Africa by representing the indigenous people as backward and inferior and by constructing Algeria as an "un inscribed earth" in need of Western civilization. In such discourses of exoticism, die European remains either a spectator of oriental otherness (Gautier and Fromentin) or a participant in orientalist, erotic fantasies (Loti), forgetting thus the fact of colonial occupation and die harsh conditions of Algerian reality. In contrast to the orientalist amnesia of these writers, the intellectuals of die Algerianist movement of the 1920s attempted to fashion a French-Algerian identity in their colonial novels. In Chap. 4 Dunwoodie shows that writers such as Robert Randau, Louis Lecoq, and Marius-Ary Leblond posited an aesthetic and political consciousness specific to Algeria, a consciousness at once French and Algerian. Unlike their orientalist precursors, they used culture and geography (as opposed to race) to depict an autonomous community of European settlers in Algeria, with the indigenous people appearing only as servants and laborers. This literature, like that of its orientalist precursor, relied on a binary logic that contrasted the mauvais nature of the Arab with the benevolent character of the French, thus rationalizing the colonial exploitation of the native population. The shift toward less stereotypical representations of Algerians, according to Dunwoodie, occurred with the emergence of the Ecole d'Alger in the early 1930s. He argues mat writers such as Gabriel Audisio, Albeit Camus, and Emmanuel Robles articulated a Mediterranean notion of identity that, unlike the Eurocentric Algerianism of their colonial precursors, was more culturally and geographically inclusive. Although crucial differences exist among diese authors, they all rejected Orientalism's romanticized images of die Algerian and the arrogance of the metropolitan French. Their novels constituted "an explicit counter-discourse" to colonial petty bourgeoisie. Although this literature still remains within a colonial economy, it "seeks to be comprehensive, more complex and more flexible, via a definition grounded in the notion of dualism." Such a "globalizing humanist vision," Dunwoodie argues, failed, however, to correct "the overtly oppressive compartmentalization and dehumanization of colonial power relations" precisely because it ignored what Franz Fanon described as the Manichaeanism of the colonial situation. Despite their failure to imagine a new identity beyond the self/other paradigm of Orientalism, Dunwoodie speculates in his "Epilogue" that die break of these writers with colonial tradition "opened the door to the new writing of the '52 generation." This speculation calls attention to die book's critical lapse, namely a substantial discussion of the works of such distinguished North African authors as Kateb Yacine, Driss Chraïbi, Mohammed Dib, and Mouloud Feraoun. Given the author's postcolonial critique of Orientalism's "monologism" and his historical interest in "the interactive processes operative in a colony" such as Algeria, such a contrapuntal approach would Vol. XLI, No. 4 113 L'Esprit Créateur have yielded not only a more balanced analysis of literary production in the Maghreb, but a more accurate map of the colonial encounter between French settlers and Algerian people. Au Behdad UCLA James LeSueur. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001...