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  • Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan and Algerian Literatures by Erin Twohig
  • Jocelyn A. Frelier
Twohig, Erin. Contesting the Classroom: Reimagining Education in Moroccan and Algerian Literatures. Liverpool UP, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78962-021-4. Pp. 192.

Twohig's book begins with excerpts of two widely-read North African books (one Moroccan and one Algerian) in which the child or adolescent protagonist notes the tension surrounding their education. As Twohig points out, the end of the colonial era in Morocco and Algeria left educators, authors, and policy-makers with an unanswered question: "Who would write a new national literature after independence—and in what language?" (1). The remainder of Twohig's book is dedicated to understanding the paradox in which literature that critiques the exclusionary practices of traditional education also relies on the classroom for dissemination. "The classroom," Twohig writes, is "both a fictional space of contestation and a concrete site of canon formation and literary influence" in Moroccan and Algerian literature since independence (3). To make sense of this enigma, Twohig has chosen to break up her book into five chapters that each take up different pivotal moments in the shift from a colonial education system to a postcolonial one. For example, the first chapter examines literary representations of the first days in school after independence. Twohig shows how novels that are set in this period highlight an educational irony—the governments of these newly independent countries issued cultural mandates that schools would erase colonial influence from their curricula while cultural products studied in these classrooms suggested colonial history be reconciled. In her second chapter, Twohig pivots toward the political impulse to Arabize North Africa. Critical to the arguments of this chapter is the notion that Morocco and Algeria are not and never have been monocultural spaces. Thus, a sharp turn toward Modern Standard Arabic represented a second wave of colonialism for many Moroccan and/or Algerian pupils. The theoretical thrust of this chapter lies in Twohig's analysis of Arab forms of "new colonialism" in a postcolonial [End Page 260] world as well as the limits of colonialism as metaphor when contemplating these scenarios. In chapter 3, Twohig focuses on Algeria and on the period of violence in the 1990s now known as the Black Decade. This chapter analyzes literary form and style to remark on the representation of violence through fractured narrative. The authors in this chapter "ask important questions about the ethics of treating human suffering as something that can be learned and understood pedagogically" (22). Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated solely to education in Morocco and to a particular question: do classrooms allow space for minority voices? The chapters split the work of two generations of authors and reach two different sets of conclusions. Where chapter 4 shows how authors Leila Abouzeid and Brick Oussaïd might reply "yes," chapter 5 complements this answer with a "no" from Mohamed Nedali and Yacine Adnan. To conclude, Twohig assembles a series of events, studies, and non-literary cultural products to ask questions about the future of literature and education in these environments. Having fleshed out some of the intricacies, Twohig concludes that "literature [is] one of the most powerful forms of commentary on, and intervention in, educational debates" (153).

Jocelyn A. Frelier
Texas A&M University, College Station
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