Elissa Rhais: Scandals, Impostures, Who Owns the Story?

The issues of who owns a text and who has a right to be called an author are passionately re-examined whenever a writer's textual practices or public performance of identity are suddenly exposed as deceptive. And when the scandal is generated around a colonial subject (in this case Elissa Rhaïs, either the first Algerian Muslim writer or an impostor), the question of authenticity becomes indistinguishable from the definition of who is a French or francophone author. This article studies simultaneously, as narratives, the work that came out under the name of Elissa Rhaïs and the "scandal," that is, the published fictional and critical texts that sought to prove or disprove that she was the author of her novels. The multilayered textual structure thus created redraws boundaries around gender, exoticism, ethnicity, and colonialism, and constructs a grammar of literary legitimacy about what it means to tell and own a tale.