Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Transcolonial Maghreb offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years. Arguing that Palestine has become the figure par excellence of the colonial in the purportedly postcolonial present, the book reframes the field of Maghrebi studies to account for transversal political and aesthetic exchanges across North Africa and the Middle East. Olivia C. Harrison examines and contextualizes writings by the likes of Abdellatif Laâbi, Kateb Yacine, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Albert Memmi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, and Edmond El Maleh, covering a wide range of materials that are, for the most part, unavailable in English translation: popular theater, literary magazines, television series, feminist texts, novels, essays, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and pamphlets written in the three main languages of the Maghreb—Arabic, French, and Berber. The result has wide implications for the study of transcolonial relations across the Global South. Introduction : Palestine as metaphor -- Souffles-Anfas : Palestine and the decolonization of culture -- Transcolonial hospitality : Kateb Yacine's experiments in popular theater -- The transcolonial exotic : allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Algerian trilogy -- Portrait of an Arab Jew : Albert Memmi and the politics of indigeneity -- Abrahamic tongues : Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida -- Edmond Amran el Maleh and the cause of the other -- Epilogue : Palestine and the Syrian intifada Arguing that Palestine has come to signify the colonial, broadly conceived, in the decolonizing world, this book offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years.