At the Intersection of Ecocriticism and the Colonial Maghreb: Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar’s Le chat du rabbin

In the animation of The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux (2011), the speaking feline protagonist translates ideas between species and ethnicities, blurring lines of demarcation between animals and humans, and pointing the viewer in the direction of French ecocritics who exhort us to reinvent these lines (Bailly, Lestel). In examining agency, conditions, the politics of speech, and the gift, this article explores the proliferation of the-hybrid (Latour) that dissolves the limits between subject and object while articulating two fields of study: postcolonial Maghrebi studies and ecocriticism.