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Reviewed by:
  • Azouz Begag: ’Le Gone du Chaâba’. Étude critique by Pierre-Louis Fort
  • Alec G. Hargreaves
Azouz Begag: ’Le Gone du Chaâba’. Étude critique. Par Pierre-Louis Fort. (Entre les lignes: littératures Sud.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. 109 pp.

Since its publication in 1986 Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba has established itself as one of the most widely taught literary texts dealing with issues relating to postcolonial minorities in France. Pierre-Louis Fort’s study is designed to serve the student market associated with this field. A pedagogical work of this nature is not necessarily an easy genre in which to excel. On the one hand, the essential needs to be said without any appearance of merely stating the obvious. On the other hand, it is important to help readers who are relatively new to the study of literature to extend their understanding of the text by introducing them to appropriate interpretative and theoretical approaches without pushing the boundaries too far. Fort generally succeeds quite well in striking a successful balance. He is particularly effective in setting out the context of the narrative, at the levels both of diegesis (the story of the young Azouz growing up in the sixties) and of conception and execution (the writing, publication, and reception of the text in the eighties). Fort also gives a helpful account of the notion of ‘Beur literature’, which Le Gone du Chaâba has generally been held to exemplify. It is nevertheless a pity that nothing is said about the relevance or relative merits of concepts such as ‘francophone’ or ‘postcolonial’ literatures. This is all the more regrettable in that Fort’s study is published as part of a collection entitled ‘Entre les lignes: littératures Sud’, the purpose of which is defined on the back cover as to ‘faire découvrir et étudier les œuvres des grands auteurs francophones du Sud’. As is apparent from the list of other authors studied in this collection, all of whom were born in and write principally about former French colonies, the words ‘francophone’ and ‘Sud’ frame the writers concerned in contradistinction to those associated with a separate space in the North posited as ‘français’, namely the Hexagon. As a native and citizen of France, which stands at the centre of his œuvre, Begag cannot reasonably be classified as an ‘auteur francophone du Sud’. This misclassification is not the fault of Fort, who correctly shows that, as protagonist, narrator, and author, Begag is profoundly French, albeit, of course, in specific ways that reflect his social and cultural background as the son of Algerian immigrant parents. The problem lies, rather, in the distinction between ‘French’ and ‘francophone’, which, as generally operationalized in France, cannot handle adequately the hybridity of cultural actors such as Begag, who straddle and/or transcend that divide. In contrast with France, where the tendency has been to separate the study of phenomena categorized as either ‘French’ or ‘francophone’, in the anglophone world it is more common to operate under the banner of ‘French and francophone studies’, understood in an inclusive and non-hierarchical fashion. The awkwardness of Begag’s position in relation to the series title under which this study appears illustrates the need for French academic publishing to move towards more supple modes of categorization. [End Page 572]

Alec G. Hargreaves
Florida State University
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