The Algerian writer Tahar Djaout has been celebrated as a martyr for the values of plurality and freedom of expression. He was born in 1954, the year Algeria’s war of independence began, and he was assassinated in 1993, when Islamists began targeting intellectuals in a civil war that would last more than a decade. A French-language writer of Kabyle origin, Djaout is best known outside his native Algeria for his novels and poems. But he was also a prominent journalist for El Moudjahid and Algérie-Actualité before co-founding, a few months before the end of his short life, a journal with the evocative title Ruptures. Much of his writing is a plea for breaking with a past that has been fabricated in the name of the nation’s unity but which excludes rather than unites its citizens. At the time he was struck down, he had just published an essay in Ruptures about Algeria’s need to move forward. He characterized the country as being comprised of two opposing groups, “the family who progresses and the family who regresses.” In this paper I will focus on Djaout’s articles that celebrate the works of Algerian visual artists from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Djaout wrote about and collaborated with many artists who left behind patriotic art sanctioned by the State in favor of broader and subtler investigations of identity and creativity. These include Ali Silem, Hamid Tibouchi, Denis Martinez, Mohammed Khadda and M’hamed Issiakhem among others. In the post-independence period many Maghrebi artists explored the use of Arabic calligraphy and other markers of Arabo-Islamic identity in a spirit of reviving precolonial traditions. Other artists began experimenting with Tifinagh signs and various Amazigh (Berber) symbols. Yet Djaout recognized that even these practices could become stale if they were simply used as a shorthand to connotate a monolithic representation of Algerianness. Djaout’s preferred artists were those who freed the signs from their fixed significations and let them stand on their visual qualities. As Michel-George Bernard points out, Djaout praises the artist Mokhtar Djaafer for not being obsessed with identity politics. Djaout writes, “[Djaafer]’s not preoccupied with affirming an identity – no doubt because he doesn’t have an identity problem and he doesn’t see any point in proclaiming the obvious.” Like the other writers discussed in this panel, Djaout pushes art to go beyond the memorialization of a static--and exclusionary--past.