Clandestine Emigration as Twenty-First Century Meme in the Roman Maghrébin.

Abdelkebir Khatibi asserted in his 1968Le Roman maghrébinthat the Algerian War of Independence occupied the imagination of mid-twentieth-century writers and encapsulated an era; this essay argues that the twenty-first century lightning rod for theroman maghrébinis clandestine emigration—l'hrig,or “burning.” This “soft war” that is both the legacy of colonialism and a byproduct of globalization is becoming as imaginatively all-encompassing to North African writers today as the Algerian war was to writers of that era. This essay briefly touches upon six texts to demonstrate that authors concentrate on humanizing the individualharragas(“burners” or clandestine emigrants) both to bear witness to and to challenge globalization's false rhetoric of free circulation as well as the inhuman indifference of North African states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]