France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters (review)

What kinds of encounters occur or can occur within the leaden contexts of history and language that circumscribe relations between France and the Maghreb? When even the names we use (Arabs, Berbers, 'pieds-noirs', 'harkis') are already overdetermined by the broader cultural narratives that circulate and discriminate, how can new subject positions emerge? In response, Rosello offers the fruitful notion of a 'performative encounter'. The idea adapts J. L. Austin's notion of the performative power of words that was critiqued and reworked by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. Rosello broadens the notion to describe recent attempts to unsettle past contexts and to transform how we think of cultural encounters. Rosello, nodding towards Lyotard, argues that a performative encounter occurs when an unknown protocol replaces older scripts. Defined thus, the task that Rosello sets herself is an ambitious one. What does it mean to say that through such encounters, a 'new subject-position, a new language and a new type of engagement' enter the world of familiar perceptions? The value of the statement is commensurate with the risks involved in making it and the horizons that Rosello establishes. Her close readings refuse to follow older protocols even as they draw upon them in imagining new combinations that would allow for transactions between logos and pathos, history and fiction. Her readings — astute, elegant and careful — bespeak and delineate the silences of past and present encounters through an analysis of a variety of cultural materials, mainly Algerian. Her arguments are lucid and unrushed. They are intelligently informed by theory (Derrida, in particular) and the insights are the richer for it. Rosello, for example, assesses whether the notion of hybridity can be taken as a solution to old hostilities and argues that the unceasing negotiations of cohabitation cannot be short-circuited by terms that suggest easy closure. Not that every encounter is one of tension. Her reading of Fouad Laroui's novel Méfiezvous des parachutistes notes that recent Maghrebi writing manifests a less agonized engagement with French and can offer humorous accounts of linguistic encounters in a language that Rosello describes in terms of 'langualization', a Maghrebi version of 'creolization'. This reflection is pursued within Rosello's treatment of different forms of silence that can only be rendered by drawing from the protocols of different genres such as history, fiction and autobiography, as she demonstrates in readings of works such as Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia and Mehdi Lallaoui's La Colline aux oliviers. Throughout this book, Rosello's analyses privilege conversations with the dead across time, and between peoples across the space of the Mediterranean, as a means of understanding the ghosts of past narratives and tactically reconfiguring them. The result is not necessarily reconciliation, though that is not excluded, but a fresh, sustained consciousness of what's at stake in performative encounters. Rosello's achievement is not only a stimulating model of analysis and close reading that will quickly become a point of reference for scholars in the area, it is also a timely example of critical thought's encounter with the aftermath of imperial strategies.