Remembering the Colonial Past in Algerian Literature.

This article examines the ways in which past colonial figures, who emerged against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century conquest of North Africa, still resonate and are celebrated in contemporary Algerian Francophone and Arabophone literatures. It questions the wider implications of these celebrations for post-colonial societies, and in particular the place of nostalgia and the wish to distinguish between the iniquities of colonialism as a system on the one hand, and the fortuitous but productive encounters involving those who challenged it from within, on the other. By contextualising the contemporary productions of Malika Mokeddem and Said Khatibi, this article demonstrates how these authors celebrate the many ways in which the non-conformist colonial figure of Isabelle Eberhardt sought freedom and rebelled against power tropes – particularly through the recourse to male disguise, whilst simultaneously appropriating and domesticating the Sahara Desert, its cultures and its populations. This article also examines how Yasmina Khadra celebrates French authors like Roger Frison-Roche and prominent colonial figures such as Charles de Foucauld. These literary works appear as significant examples of memory across different cultural settings, informing the challenge to, and inheritance of, the colonial tropes. Unexpectedly, figures such as that of Eberhardt appear, in the eyes of Algerian authors, as valid examples to emulate, in order to celebrate, reach, or at least imagine, emancipation in the aftermath of Algerian independence. This ultimately reveals hitherto ignored continuity between the colonial past and the postcolonial present that has nurtured the emergence of hybrid identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]