Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (review)

At a time in the Western academy when a perceptible shift in theoretical emphasis from the postcolonial to the transnational has arisen, Réda Bensmaïa's book Experimental Nations provides a timely scholarly intervention into debates on (trans)national cultural production and consumption as well as on the formation of "geo-linguistic" literary canons. Bensmaïa begins by asking if it is possible to define and describe a Maghrebi national culture, and what this may mean in an age of globalization and post-nationalism. In the broad sweep of his opening arguments in which he invokes the often neglected Tunisian critic, Albert Memmi, and his notion of "linguistic wrenching," Bensmaïa carefully places historical parameters on his discussion, stressing the crucial importance of both French colonization and the war of liberation on the various phases of writing in the Maghreb. The present phase, he suggests, is the "voice of interruption" that exposes not a national canon or an allegorical myth but an "unfinished community" best exemplified in the works of writers such as Nabile Farès, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Hélé Béji (25).

Bensmaïa suggests that Maghrebi literature, like many other so-called postcolonial literatures, has often been critically assessed as anthropological or cultural "case studies" of particular ethnic or national tendencies. The question of literary aesthetics, an element taken for granted by Western literary critics, has been overshadowed by the examination of relationships to the nation that have long been regarded as the determining narratives of postcolonial literature. The long shadow of colonialism has encased writing from the former colonies within a restrictive allegorical envelope exemplified by Fredric Jameson's now (in)famous, but well-meaning, article on third world allegory. While later in the book Bensmaïa does in fact make an attempt to reach a qualified and partial agreement with Jameson's arguments, he is primarily concerned with setting up models that negotiate the relationship between the Maghrebi text and the nation in less reductive terms. He suggests that current models of reading postcolonial texts of the Maghreb continue to revolve around this quasi-allegorical paradigm of reading in which national or ethnic characteristics are reduced to "mere signifiers of other signifiers" (6). Bensmaïa's project here is to emphasise the particular aesthetics or poetics of individual writers and their efforts to reconfigure language, territories, and cultural idioms within the experimental space of the "transnation" (7). His primary concern, then, is to point out the importance of "literary strategies" and to read the work of writers and filmmakers such as Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine, Merzak Allouache, and Abdelkebir Khatibi—both as parts of a "transcendental field where texts come together and intersect" and as individual aesthetic projects—more akin to the Proustian notion of "states of resonance" that have an internal poetics of their own than to the cruder mechanics of national and ethnic affiliations (9). In looking at these fields of literary production, he poses a fundamentally important question when he asks: does a writer belong to a particular nation? And, if so, how can we define nation?

To answer this question, Bensmaïa establishes in the first chapter, "Nations of Writers," a series of carefully structured theoretical coordinates that serve as a map for his later detailed discussions of individual texts from the Maghreb. He considers the problematic of post-war Algeria and the struggle creating "new, collective subjects and the difficulty of locating a public culture in a country torn apart after 135 years of cultural annihilation" (13). Language, he says, is a central concern and he suggests that four distinct linguistic models operate in Algeria that problematize the notion of an audience and a shared set of linguistic and cultural references (16). Far from being a struggle between French and Arabic, Algeria is a polyphonic text of vernacular, mythic, classical, and oral language systems that is not easily translatable as a nation or as a homogenous...