Gens inconnus [Ressource électronique] : political and literary habitations of postcolonial border spaces / Ayse Deniz Temiz

Ph. D. : Comparative literature : Binghamton University : 2008

Bibliogr. p. 283-293

Postcolonial migrants appear in European space as the figure of a paradox, continuously re-insinuating the problem of cultural multiplicity and of political borders between citizens and others. This work is an attempt to reformulate the terms of this encounter as played out in the Algerian-French case, by focusing on two parallel manifestations: the political and the literary. The long-standing state discourse on, and policies for, the "integration" of migrants function by creating anew, rather than eliminating, discrepancies between those it grants a legal status and those it casts as clandestines. However, the logic of representation and recognition that are the main tenets of this discourse and its multiculturalist varieties still prevail in cultural, and more particularly, literary criticism. Turning to the contemporary migrant movements that since the latter half of the 1990s have broken from a multiculturalist politics of recognition, I ask: what may be the possible openings of this shift for the way we think about postcolonial literature? These transnational movements take shape not on the basis of particular identities but rather through collective statements that delineate a community. I discuss this specific articulation of political community through literary performances of "collective assemblages," a term that I borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and elaborate through the works of Jacques Rancière and Mikhail Bakhtin. I find the literary expressions of a synthesis of multiplicity in the works of the Algerian author Assia Djebar. In the texts written during the escalation of civil war in Algeria, Djebar frames the struggle against the official Islamic-Arab culture in the form of a collective assemblage. Particularly in response to the Berber question, Djebar resists the confinement of the Berber movement to the identitarian closure dictated by the confrontation with the state. The genealogies of Berber culture offered in these texts move beyond the assertions of cultural unity to follow the lines of dispersal and bifurcations into other lineages. An originary bilingualism becomes a tool for the genealogy to displace the notion of culture as embodied in a distinct people, and thereby redefine the direction of minority politics both in the postcolonial state and the diaspora