The novel’s collusion with imperialism may explain why its twentieth-century life on (and beyond) the African continent has been so vexed, and also helps to account for the ambivalent yet enduring appeal of canonical Euro-American literary figures such as Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles. The critical success of Kamel Daoud’s Goncourt-prize-nominated novel Meursault, contre-enquête (2013)—which rewrites Albert Camus’s L’étranger—suggests that reterritorializing canonical forms and figures may indeed be a condition of transnational literary success (and political controversy) for Maghrebi novelists. However, my reading of Daoud questions an interpretive framework that casts such intertextuality as ‘writing back’ to a European center, and also complicates marketability questions with political and aesthetic ones. In her objection to Fredric Jameson and Franco Moretti’s formulations of ‘world’ literature, Eileen Julien argues that African literary texts become ‘worldly’ to the degree that they appeal to transnational readers by intertextual design. That is, those African texts that win prizes, launch into transnational markets, and enter canonizing institutions are characterized by ‘extroverted’ intertextual relation to hegemonic discourses and canonical figures. Mersault, contre-enquête certainly illustrates this point, yet Julien continues : intertextuality is not as a natural or inevitable effect but rather a rhetorical strategy “through which the writer attempts to resolve aesthetic and social questions,” to “endow events with meaning, in other words, to rewrite history” (667, 669). My reading of Daoud’s text takes seriously its title: this fiction claims to stage a trial for unresolved colonial crimes, taking Camus to task for his blindness to ‘Arab’ humanity and transforming Mersault’s anonymous murder victim into an absent character whose brother offers testimony in his place. Drawing upon recent work by Ariella Azoulay concerning the aesthetics of ‘potential history,’ my reading of Daoud considers what it might mean for a fiction to do justice in the absence of juridical process and institutional redress. Ethical and political reflection on the great post-Holocaust trials of the twentieth century has produced contemporary definitions of testimony and its relation to justice and history (and a body of scholarship on testimony and trauma). Mersault, contre-enquête is a literary intervention in the production of Franco-Algerian history that suggests that these definitions and relations be revised in light of those trials that might or should have taken place, but did not, constructing memory as a court in which restaging potential history presents new ways to figure justice.