Francophone Writing in Transition: 1900–1945 (review)

This book breaks new ground by extending and nuancing our understanding of the colonial history of Algeria in the first half of the twentieth century. It focusses on the writing in French of the interstitial group of Algerian évolués who set themselves apart from the large body of uneducated colonisés while pursuing an ambiguous dialogue with colonial culture and rule. The fruits of rigorous and extensive research, the book builds its corpus from a study of Francophone newspapers, essays and, centrally, the dozen known novels authored by évolués in the period. Central to Peter Dunwoodie's robust thesis is the demonstration that this cultural production failed to deliver the reproduction of Frenchness that trium-phalist colonial voices craved and that post-independence Algerian leaders later found tactical advantage in denouncing. If assimilationist culture never meant easy, one-way traffic, Dunwoodie teases out the nagging doubts that troubled its most diehard French Algerian exponents. Louis Bertrand's jaundiced view of cultural contact in 1930 is typical: 'N'y a-t-il lieu de craindre que … l'Européen et le Français fassent les frais de la fusion et que, bien loin d'européaniser l'Africain, ce ne soit l'Afrique qui nous africanise?' (p. 167). Francophone Writing in Transition generates a historically grounded account of the complex workings of cultural negotiation engaged in by the évolués. It recreates the conditions of possibility which facilitated the progressivism of a figure such as Ismael Hamet who, in a work entitled Les Musulmans français du Nord de l'Afrique in 1906, asserted that the process of assimilation was inexorable. At the same time, Dunwoodie explores the albeit modest forms of cultural deviance and autonomy that helped shape autochthonous self-representation in twentieth-century Algeria. He draws out telling examples of the ideological tensions and manoeuvres that characterized both European and Algerian positions: the tactic adopted by the Young Algerians of juxtaposing their mythological appeal to the principles of 1789 with French colonial abuses; the sleight of hand whereby the European 'Algerianists', untroubled by the discrimination against women enshrined in the Napoleonic Code, depicted the Muslim woman as the victim of Islamic masculinism; or the effect of cultural screening and containment practised by French writers who prefaced the novels of the évolués they sponsored. In a probing chapter on the 'Politics of the Peritext', Dunwoodie shows how the préfaciers often peddled cultural self-congratulation of the most caricatural kind ('devenir plus Français c'est devenir plus homme', we read in the French-authored preface to Chukri Khodja's novel Mamoun. L'Ebauche d'un ideal of 1928 [p. 93]). But for the évolués of the inter-war years, the devenir that came with French schooling spawned a mixed response of complicity and resistance and drew them into an inchoate questioning of the colonial polity itself. Francophone Writing in Transition, which includes a set of valuable appendices offering historical, biographical and textual glosses, will be eagerly welcomed by historians and literary and cultural analysts as a complex case study of the effects of colonial mimicry, identification and rivalry.