UCLA

This dissertation reconceptualizes the place of Jews and Jewishness in French-language North African literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Through both a reconsideration of foundational theoretical texts that sought to distinguish “Francophone” from “French” and historicized close reading of novels from the canonical to the little-known, I explore how Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, Boualem Sansal, and Anouar Benmalek—all Algerian writers of Muslim heritage—have incorporated Jews and Jewishness into their cultural productions, notwithstanding political, popular, and academic discourses that promote a monolithic vision of the nation’s purported cultural and religious homogeneity. My dissertation thus interrogates how postcolonial Algerian authors mobilize Jewishness in their works, what it means for these non-Jewish authors to represent Jewish life, and how these interreligious engagements allow for the articulation of broader cultural and critical concerns.

As a study situated at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies and Jewish Studies, After Colonizer and Colonized offers a corrective to the trend in the academy, whereby historical, political, and disciplinary tensions have tacitly kept these two fields apart. Reconceptualizing the place of Jews and Jewishness in the field of Francophone North African literature forces us to revisit certain underlying assumptions about the relationship between Jewishness and (North African) literature, and about literary labels more broadly. Privileging literary engagements with Jewishness showcases the productive possibilities inherent in challenging the idea that it is solely the author’s religion that makes a text “Jewish literature,” and suggests instead that it is high time to consider the postcolonial as Jewish, and the Jewish as postcolonial.

The “writing out” of Jews and Jewishness from the theoretical framework informing scholarly approaches to postcolonial Algerian literature has created not one, but two critical blind spots in the field of North African letters. To wit, scholars have traditionally 1) overlooked the contributions of Algerian Jewish authors and 2) disregarded the role of Jews and Jewishness in works produced by Algerian authors of Muslim origin. My dissertation, while certainly informed by critical inquiry into the former, is the first rigorous study to directly address the latter.