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.

A recipient of Western literary awards, such as the French “Prix Goncourt” and the British “International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award,” Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun has become a prominent figure in Maghrebi letters and beyond. His early novels "L'Enfant de sable" (1985; The Sand Child, 1987) and "La Nuit sacrée" (1987; The Sacred Night, 1989), for instance, have been translated into several languages, granting Ben Jelloun entry into the sphere of World Literature. It is worthwhile noting that, in these two novels, Ben Jelloun seeks entry into the World Literature canon by focusing predominantly on themes pertaining to aspects of Moroccan culture and imaginary either inside Morocco or in the diaspora, whereas in his later work—for example, his novel "Partir" (2006; Leaving Tangier, 2009) and his play "Beckett et Genet, un thé à Tanger" (2010; Beckett and Genet, a tea in Tangier)—one notices a tendency to go beyond this “Moroccan” framework and to include Euro-American figures, both real and fictitious. This explicit move to “world” or “globalize” Maghrebi Literature via the inclusion of, or allusion to, such well-known Western figures as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Paul Bowles raises questions regarding Ben Jelloun’s motifs, on the one hand, and the Euro-American colonial presence in the Maghreb (particularly in Tangier, Morocco), on the other. Taking cues from postcolonial critique, the paper argues that capitalizing on these famous Western figures in Maghrebi literature is not only an easy way to attract Western readership and thus maximize book sales, but is also a suspect practice that intentionally or unintentionally romanticizes the Euro-American colonial enterprise in the Maghreb. This argument is even more poignant when viewed through the lens of Ben Jelloun’s own complicated relationship with his home-country of Morocco. I situate Ben Jelloun within a group of postcolonial Francophone Maghrebi writers who display an ambiguous relationship with their countries of origin—one that is anything but “cozy”—in favor of the metropole (France). The picture becomes more problematic when considering the fact that Ben Jelloun’s work is penned in French, a choice that could be seen as either neocolonial and maintaining the French colonial legacy in the Maghreb at worst or courting Western publishers and boosting sales at best. This paper interrogates the oeuvre and literary trajectory of Ben Jelloun and attempts to unsettle the place the Moroccan writer occupies in the Francophone and World literary canons.

This paper examines questions of migration, and particularly postmemory borrowed from renowned scholar Marianne Hirsch, in relation to the narrative and visual medium of the Franco-Maghrebi graphic novel. From multiple vantage points—either from the so-called Beur, pied noir, Harki or the migrant in transit—this paper draws from works such as Laurent Maffre’s 'Demain Demain' (2012) concerning North African life in the bidonvilles of Nanterre during the 1960s, Jacques Ferrandez’s multi-volume 'Carnets d’Orient' or Olivia Burton and Mahi Grand-Steinkis’s 'L’Algérie c’est beau comme l’Amérique' (2015) exploration of intergenerational postmemories of pied noir descendants, or Aurel’s 'Clandestino' (2014) detailing the secret but treacherous contemporary Mediterranean migrations of North African exiles, or harragas, fleeing to Europe. Together, these works problematize and reframe the issue of positionality vis-à-vis memory, revealing the fraught and fractured qualities of postmemory. This paper charts the kaleidoscopic, and often contested, visual and spatial terrains of postcoloniality and identity in the medium of the graphic novel. In doing so, this paper addresses several interrelated questions: What role does draftsmanship, illustration, or the “graphic,” serve in narration or in the personal and socio-cultural operations of memory? Formally, how does the relation of text and image complicate our hermeneutics of historical understanding, cultural amnesia, and remembrance? Where, if anywhere, is the place of humor in the face of the trauma of colonialism and persistent struggles of decolonization? What is the position of the graphic novel in a Francophone or Arabic literary canon? Germane to issues of translation, legibility, and reception, by unpacking various scenes and vignettes, this paper will articulate how these works create specific audience networks that bond and share similar postmemories of colonization, migration and decolonization. Moreover, how these particular graphic novels operate in France and across the Maghreb will be subsequently analyzed. Through an examination of artistic and literary conventions, citations, and tropes, this paper investigates how visual narratives and imagined communities are mutually constitutive by way of the graphic novel.

In his films, the Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche consistently interrogates issues affecting marginal communities in France and contemporary French society, often through an appropriation of French cultural symbols. Critics have noted that Kechiche’s earlier films La Faute à Voltaire and L’Esquive draw on established texts of the French literary canon as a manner of subverting traditional narratives in French, whereas his most recent film La Vie d’Adèle derives inspiration from the popular realm of graphic novels. Kechiche’s film is inspired by Julie Maroh’s Le Bleu est une couleur chaude, which tells the story of a homosexual coming-of-age within a matrix of familial, societal, and personal rejection. Even though the film still resembles the original source, Kechiche takes many authorial liberties – changing the names of characters, departing from the original narrative structure, etc. – in order to make the work his own, to reflect his engaged political agenda. The film can thus be seen as a departure from Kechiche’s usual questioning of Maghrebi integration and inclusion in France by focusing on the current perceptions of the LGBT community in France. La Vie d’Adèle’s release coincided with the ultra-rightwing anti-gay marriage protests by the Manif pour tous. Arguing for a return to French traditions such as republicanism, a respect for normative gender roles, and family life, the Manif pour tous struck a chord with the vast Muslim community in France as a way to integrate and assimilate to traditional French society. Not only can the Manif pour tous be seen as a conduit through which rightwing French Catholics can achieve relative harmony with the Muslim community in spite of religious differences, but it also reveals the complex nature of integration and inclusion in contemporary France. Through an analysis of La Vie d’Adèle and the social trends surrounding the LGBT and the Muslim communities in France I demonstrate that Abdellatif Kechiche alters Maroh’s original narrative in order to question intersecting forms of exclusion in French society grounded in both xenophobia and homophobia.