This book demonstrates how both postcolonial France and the Maghreb cultural identity, and memory are structured in large part through a dialogue with colonial history that impedes a confrontation with contemporary issues important to the present and future of those geographical territories. Cultural Memory and Colonial Haunting between France and the Maghreb represents a comprehensive and cohesive collection of scholarly chapters owing to the breadth and depth of knowledge regarding not only colonial and postcolonial vestiges and on-going relations between France and the Maghreb, but rather all aspects of the Francophone world, as well as mainstream, French contemporary literary studies and theory and the New Europe. Furthermore, this work is an important and refreshing contribution to the field of postcolonial Francophone studies as they relate to contemporary French society and popular culture. Readers will be equally impressed by the cogency and perspicacity of the author's many insightful observations and arguments, which will be of great interest to both specialists of French and Francophone cultural and literary studies. by a top-notch researcher and communicator who knows how to adeptly get his point across both clearly and effectively. The author is equally adept at drawing upon and incorporating into his research a body of critical and theoretical works to make his arguments that much more convincing and well grounded. As this study shows, the author has an excellent grasp of the crucial, cultural, historical, socio-political and literary themes and issues confronting both French and Francophone studies with respect to postcolonial discourse affecting cultural memories of the colonizer/colonized in both space and time. To the author's credit, this study poses some crucial questions and offers some possible, new theoretical and practical avenues to explore or investigate with regard to the dialectic of the Other, such as how the colonized can come to grasp with and fully define his or her own individual identity through the distorted mirror or prism of the collective and necessarily painful colonial experience. the complexities and problematics, the historical and cultural underpinnings, associated with the notion of occulted memories and, more importantly, the evolutive process or mechanism of forging identities. Drawing from the work of historian Pierre Nora, the author convincingly shows how France and the Maghreb are haunted by past, present and future memories or complexes, by colonial lieux de memoire or sites of memory, which perpetuate a polemical, mythical discourse and dialectic owing principally to an obsessive memorialization of colonial history. Such identifications with the colonial ultimately represent an overly deterministic, distorted, nostalgic collective vantage point. The author draws upon Michel Foucault's theory of synchronic anchoring, among other theorists and writers, to make a very compelling argument to account both historically and culturally for these memory and identity distortions or shifts. Possibly one of the most important contributions this book makes is its lucid and illuminating discussion of the pervasive use of haunting as a theoretical metaphor. Bhabha, Ian Chambers, Anne McClintock, and Robert Young, Michael O'Riley points to how these theorists' work can be read as a haunting identification with French colonial history This unique interpretation of Anglophone postcolonial theory provides a highly original and important contribution to Francophone postcolonial studies, but it also demonstrates how theories of postcolonial intervention are frequently formulated through the idea of an affective, haunting colonial aura. O'Riley argues that the theoretical and cultural tropes of haunting so widely employed as a lens through which postcolonial culture identifies with colonial history create an impasse of postcolonial identification. Haunted by the images and memories of colonial history, postcolonial culture forges of the colonial experience a mythical and unique point of identification that precludes identification with contemporary issues of a postcolonial nature such as globalization. common to postcolonial theory is frequently vitiated by the haunting, singular, and quasi-mythical place that colonial history occupies within it. Michael O'Riley's identification of the role that French colonial history places within these dynamics of postcolonial theory is significant and will be of great interest to scholars of the postcolonial. O'Riley's analyses and conclusions stress the need and urgency, as suggested in the works of authors of Maghrebian descent, such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Leila Sebbar, Assia Djebar, and Azouz Begag, to surpass or transgress this overly static and confining dialectic to create what the author calls the emergence of a nuanced form of postcolonial memory which would, correspondingly, lead to renewed, healthier or more constructive and dynamic perspectives and understandings between former colonizer and colonized. examines how postcolonial figures demonstrate in different ways the obstacles and potential solutions to the imprisonment that colonial sites of memory often present to contemporary relations within and between France and the Maghreb. In other words, even though the author acknowledges that the road is laden with obstacles and pitfalls associated with recalling the past and looking to the future on the part of both French and Maghrebians, he makes the point that these surrogate memories are yet only beginning to be (re)written and their entire significance and impact to be understood and appreciated.

This book examines the way in which France has failed to come to terms with the end of its empire, and is now haunted by the legacy of its colonial relationship with North Africa. It examines the form assumed by the ghosts of the past in fiction from a range of genres (travel writing, detective fiction, life writing, historical fiction, women's writing) produced within metropolitan France, and assesses whether moments of haunting may in fact open up possibilities for a renewed relational structure of cultural memory. By viewing metropolitan France through the prism of its relationship with its former colonies in North Africa, the book maps the complexities of contemporary France, demonstrating an emerging postcoloniality within France itself.

Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization: Assia Djebar's New Novels treats one of the central problems within the current geo-political conflict between Islam and the West: how the memory of imperialism fuels fundamentalist claims to territory and creates a paradigm of victimization through which martyrdom and terrorism prevail. Through an examination of the most recent works by the award-winning Algerian author Assia Djebar, this book considers how the culture of victimization prevails in postcolonial thought and practice, not only in the West but in formerly colonized territories as well. It examines the work of important postcolonial critics, such as Achille Mbembe and others, in dialogue with the works of Djebar, one of the most popular international postcolonial authors treating these questions from within the contemporary framework. Both in theory and in practice, this book reveals how pervasive haunting and victimization are in the wake of September 11th and provides an alternative way of responding to them. It demonstrates how Djebar's reticence to explore the details of colonialism marks an important shift in postcolonial literature and criticism and an important attempt to address the dynamics of victimization. Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization will be a great resource to all those interested in the question of Islam and the West as well as to a wide array of readers in the fields of literary and postcolonial studies.

Films such as The Battle of Algiers, Days of Glory, Caché, and recent works by Maghrebien filmmakers all exemplify, in different ways, how this focus on victimization can become a problematic perspective - one in fact seeking to occupy ideological territory. Their return of colonial history to our contemporary context, although frequently problematic, enables us to see how victimization is very much about territory - cultural, spatial, and ideological - and how resistance to new forms of imperialist warfare and terror today must be located outside these haunting images from colonial history. Although such images of victimization ultimately only return as spectacular acts that draw our attention away from the cyclical contest over territory that they embody, those images nonetheless have the last word."--BOOK JACKET.

Proving it is not just what we say but how we say it, Moine (French, Millersville U., Pennsylvania) proposes a model of discourse where discourse markers play a fundamental role in providing structure. Using pragmatic language analysis pioneered by sociologists such as Goffman and Gumperz and sociolinguists such as Labov and Jefferson, Moine builds