Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature, and the Maghreb (review)

While the central thesis of Fiona Barclay’s study — namely that France remains haunted by its colonial past — is not in itself something new, her monograph nonetheless provides a lucid and timely overview of recent academic debate. With specific reference to Derrida’s seminal text Spectres de Marx (1993), her Introduction contextualizes modes of haunting in relation to what Charles Forsdick has termed France’s ‘postcolonial turn’ (pp. xi–xii). Barclay returns in particular to the symbolic riots of 2005 in order to demonstrate how the spectral presence of France’s ex-colonies — in this case those of the Maghreb region — threatens the putative national unity of the métropole and its concomitant narratives of republicanism and assimilation. She thus self-consciously situates her study within the postcolonial framework set out by French historians Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès in La Colonisation française (Toulouse: Éditions Milan, 2007), although her monograph privileges literature as a site for analysing the latent spectres of French colonialism. If France remains haunted by its colonial past, suggests Barclay, then it is literature, with its foregrounding of instances of aporia, absence, and plurality, that best captures ‘the ambivalence of the ghostly’ (p. xxxvii). Underscoring how scholarship on haunting and literature has typically focused on the experiences of those living in the post-colony, Barclay instead chooses to analyse ‘the function of ghosts within the ex-colonizers’ society’ (p. xxiii). While this approach runs the risk of undermining the author’s own attempts to move beyond ‘the geographic and cultural segregation of metropole and periphery’, the texts selected for analysis ultimately destabilize the notion that France exists independently of its former colonies (p. xiv). Barclay deftly explores moments of haunting as they emerge within the texts of several authors, including J. M. G. Le Clézio, Leïla Sebbar, Didier Daeninckx, Hélène Cixous, and Daniel Prévost, to reveal how the ghostly revenants of the colonial past call for a reconceptualization of the relationship between France and the Maghreb. Given the title of her monograph, Barclay’s textual analysis is at times too focused on Algeria; nonetheless, her close readings are consistently insightful and thought-provoking, tracing haunting across several literary genres including detective fiction and travel writing. Her final chapter, on the autobiographical texts of Nina Bouraoui and Daniel Prévost, for instance, adeptly reveals the potentialities and limitations of Kristeva’s theorization of the abject as a tool for understanding postcolonial French society. Barclay does an excellent job of analysing the nuances of haunting within her chosen corpus, yet she stops short of an explicit engagement with recent theorizations of ghosts, spectres, and phantoms, many of which have been inspired by Derrida’s Spectres de Marx. While such an engagement might have led to a more comprehensive analysis of the vicissitudes of postcolonial haunting, Barclay’s monograph is nonetheless an important contribution to the burgeoning field of francophone postcolonial studies.