Eric Touya  (Adelphi University)
Beyond post-colonialism: The trans-cultural vision of Hédi Bouraoui

For the past twenty years, post-colonialism has emerged as a significant field of academic inquiry. As a literary theory and critical approach, it has lead scholars to examine how a given society in Africa, Asia or Latin America, experienced colonialism, and through it, faced the challenges of developing a national identity during and after colonial rule. One of its most striking strategies has been to underline the extent to which the use and interpretation of literature and criticism was central in justifying the colonizer's economic and political domination and in defining through binary oppositions (emotional/rational, inferior/superior) the relationship between the dominated and the dominant. Furthermore, the advocates of post-colonialism also argued that the Western humanistic meta-narratives that had stem from the Enlightenment (equality, rights and liberty) only privileged Western and European norms. Instead of representing universal values, they argued, the humanism of the West had in fact helped legitimize colonialism.

The aim of my presentation will be to examine and challenge, in part, this logic, as I examine the work and thought of Hédi Bouraoui, a poet and critic native of Tunisia now living in Canada. To what extent are the arguments of post-colonialism still valid in a world that witnesses globalization and in which the vast majority of countries have been independent for the past thirty years? How can an historian resolve the tension between the tradition of Western humanism and Western hegemony and oppression? I will seek to answer these questions as I examine Bouraoui's texts and his belief that the argument at hand should no longer be situated in the 19th but the 21st Century.

Closer to a trans-cultural vision of human experience than to a post-colonial one, Bouaroui's apology of difference has called for a harmonious absorption of cultural differences and plurality. In this context, the paper will examine how, through a "nomadic" approach to criticism, theory, literature and culture toward the other, Bouraoui invites us to move from a general problematic (ie. post-colonialism) to an individual and autobiographical one, as he evokes present and future human relations. The concept of "trans-culture" anticipates, from this perspective, a plurality of exchange through human dignity and the collapse of "borders". I would like to investigate the term "trans-culture" as I explore the way by which Bouraoui envisions the themes of "altérité", cultural spaces, inner search and identity. To what extent does this intercultural space foreseen here lead us away from a postcolonial understanding of, and approach to, Francophone literature, culture and History?