Writing Postcolonial France

Fiona Barclay is lecturer in the school of languages, cultures, and religions at the University of Stirling.

If, since the publication of Derrida's Spectres de Marx in 1993, metaphors of haunting and spectrality have become abundant in both literary criticism and postcolonial theory, Barclay's book artfully redeploys such figures in her examination of France's memory of the colonial past. Drawing on a range of texts, each illustrating a differently 'haunted' relationship between French cultural consciousness and the legacy of colonialism in the Maghreb, the work puts forward the challenging thesis that France has still not come to terms with its colonial losses. Moreover, not only does this elegant study shed new light on the representation of the cultural memory of the colonised Maghreb, but it also argues that literature itself retains a particular and privileged function in its illumination of the return of the repressed. Literary works themselves are shown to present their readers with an otherness that forces them to engage with the ghosts of memory.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 Chapter 1: The Return of the Colonial in Le Clézio, Bona and SebbarChapter 3 Chapter 2: 17 October 1961: Haunting in Kettane, Sebbar, Maspero and DaeninckxChapter 4 Chapter 3: Writing from Algeria: Haunted Narratives in Cardinal and CixousChapter 5 Chapter 4: Abjection: The Stranger Within in Prévost and BouraouiChapter 6 Afterword