Mustapha Hamil  (University of West Georgia)
Postcolonial Theory and North African Literature: Limitations and Horizons of Application

In the wake of postcolonial cultural and literary studies, critics and readers of North African literature in French are now turning to postcolonial theory. No one will deny the need of such an intellectual project in North African Francophone studies so long as the production and rhetoric of its discourse originate in the historic and cultural situation of the region itself rather than in an epistemology invented in a foreign space and discipline. It is to be recognized that until recently there has been virtually no sustained interaction between postcolonial theory and North African studies. While the study of both colonial and postcolonial Anglophone texts has been greatly informed by postcolonial theory, which has developed in parallel as an autonomous sub-field of contemporary theory, there has until recently been a marked resistance to reading Francophone writing in conjunction with the texts and concepts that have constituted the theoretical background of postcolonial theory in English and Anglophone studies, namely Said, Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, and Lacan.

Despite the early success of postcolonial theory in English and Anglophone studies, one should not brush aside its ideological and theoretical limitations. A literary theory, one must concede, draws upon the material conditions and immediate socio-political structures and concerns of the literature it intends to examine. In the following paper I will address two points. 1.) I shall examine whether postcolonial criticism offers the analytical tools and matrices suitable for the study of North African literature, inside North Africa, in France, and elsewhere. 2.) I will argue for a re-reading of Abdelkebir Khatibi's Maghreb Pluriel (1983) as a theoretical manifesto for a homegrown postcolonial theory. My focus here will be on his idea of 'double critique' as a hermeneutic of suspicion of both Western and Arab-Islamic notions of identity and selfhood. My objective is to show how the basis of Khatibi's thought precedes much of what postcolonial theory today has to offer. My hope is to re-position the theoretical frame of North African studies towards a more comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.