Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations: The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb (Interventions)

Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations examines the social and cultural aspects of the political violence that underpinned the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the multi-layered postcolonial realities that ensued. This book explores the reality of the lives of North African migrants in postcolonial France, with a particular focus on their access to political entitlements such as citizenship and rights. This reality is complicated even further by complex practices of memory undertaken by Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who negotiate, in their writings, between the violent memory of the French colonial project in the Maghreb, and the contemporary conundrums of postcolonial migration. The book pursues thus the politics of (post)colonial memory by tracing its representations in literary, political, and visual narratives belonging to various Franco-Maghrebian intellectuals, who see themselves as living and writing between France and the Maghreb. By adopting a postcolonial perspective, a perspective quite marginal in International Relations, the book investigates a different international relations, which emerges via narratives of migration. A postcolonial standpoint is instrumental in understanding the relations between class, gender, and race, which interrogate and reflect more generally on the shared (post)colonial violence between North Africa and France, and on the politics of mediating violence through complex practices of memory. Table of Contents 1. IR and the world: the politics of encounters The politics of encounters and translocal webs of relations Literary narratives in the Franco-Maghrebian encounter Meeting the Franco-Maghrebian intellectual Memory and authenticity 2. The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, post-structuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory Rethinking theory, nativizing discipline(s): disturbing the margins in Robert Young’s White Mythologies and Postcolonialism – An Historical Introduction Colonial desire and the politics of Algerian intractability: Derrida, Cixous and Lyotard The (im)possibilities of theoretical miscegenation: what is at stake in associating post-structuralism and postcoloniality in International Relations? Relations? 3. Exilé and immigré: the politics of exile and diaspora in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland The politics of language in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland Flirting with hybridity and transnational citizenship The diasporic intellectual and her others 4. Where have all the natives gone? Spectral presences and authenticity in photographic and literary narratives Where have all the natives gone? The (in)authentic native woman in the colonial harem The ‘native’ as spectral presence in photography and literary narratives 5. The Franco-Maghrebian borderland as cinematic space: Memory, trauma and authenticity Tropes of memory Locating the new Europe and the Franco-Maghrebian borderland: the colonial past in the postcolonial present The politics of authenticity 6. Fanon, Camus and colonial difference: possibilities and limits for decolonial thought and action Politics in exile: between strangeness and alienation Irreconcilable visions of (post)colonial futures: Camus, Fanon and the Algerian War Colonial difference and the decolonial promise: possibilities and limits 7. Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: postcolonial hybridity and beyond Migration in International Relations: moving beyond or around the state? Postcolonial strangers: Maghrébins, immigrés and beurs – who is the real indigène? 8. Diasporic identifications, translocal webs and International Relations IR and the problem of colonial difference The Maghreb: ‘the difference that cannot be told’? On the lures of diaspora and transnationalism Transgressing International Relations: Concluding remarks Bibliography Index This book examines the political and social effects of the legacy of French colonialism in the Maghreb and their endurance in the postcolonial present.