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Maghrebi Studies often struggles to situate cultural production from North Africa. Some scholars advocate a Mediterranean approach, while others reposition the field along an East-West axis. Novels like Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête1 have once again foregrounded the colonial legacy, while at the same time, pop culture has taken a transnational turn. Eager to replace the nation as the primary referent, new approaches honor the multidirectional flow of texts and have recast Maghrebi cultural production as fluid. This paper proposes an interpretive frame constructed around postcolonial affinity, linking cultural production from North Africa to other postcolonial spaces. Specifically, it considers the role that Irish literature has played in post-independence Algeria. While previous studies have compared the political tactics used by anti-colonial forces in both contexts, I consider the reception and adaptation of Irish literature in modern Algeria. Joyce's Ulysses was a model for Salim Bachi's Le Chien d'Ulysse (2001); Beckett continues to be performed in Algeria; and Irish literary figures appear in novels by authors like Mustapha Benfodil. I look at how Irish texts have been reformulated by Algerians and propose a new way of thinking about intertextuality across national and linguistic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a recent novel that, at its center, is propelled by a need to understand the past, silence, and death. Boualem Sansal's 2008 novel entitled Le Village de l'Allemand ou le journal des frères Schiller presents a multifaceted narrative that ultimately revolves around the well-hidden past of the Schiller family patriarch. Because the Schiller patriarch never shared his Nazi involvement with his sons, their identities are unfinished from the start. In counterpoint to Marianne Hirsch's exploration of what she has called “postmemory”—a process through which the second generation after a traumatic event is affected by it as a result of the first generation sharing personal memories and stories—I argue that this novel enacts what I term “deferred postmemory.” Rather than learning about their father's traumatic history from his own memories and stories, Rachel and Malrich discover this dark period in their father's past as adults through stumbling upon his personal war archive and later by retracing his movements from Nazi Germany to colonial Algeria. These remnants of their deceased father as well as Rachel's journal provide Malrich with the tools to understand their father's past and the significance of his father's life and death in shaping his own hybrid identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]