Edwige Tamalet Talbayev  (UC San Diego)
L'Ecole d'Alger in the 1930s: Transnational Identification and the Case for a Mediterranean Poétique de la Relation.

This paper aims to reconfigure and reassess the writings and political stances of the key writers of L’Ecole d’Alger (Albert Camus, Emmanuel Roblès, Gabriel Audisio…) in the light of recent theoretical debates in the field of postcolonial studies. In an era of celebration of globalization studies, critics have been calling into question the adequacy of theoretical approaches considering postcolonial spaces only through a one-to-one relation to the metropole. L’Ecole d’Alger was a literary movement that emerged in the Algerian capital as a humanistic response to racialized discourses of modernity that were mobilized in the colonies to facilitate the growing institutionalization of the French colonial presence. The main contributors to this movement coalesced around the figure of Edmond Charlot, the founder of the Editions Charlot, whose collection "Méditerranéennes" through its focus on the celebration of (pan-) Mediterranean culture served as a locus of dialogue for a nexus of authors with otherwise quite diverse interests.

This paper will attempt to counter the dominant framing of the literary and theoretical production of L’Ecole d’Alger in terms of its failure to distance itself from myths of French and North African latinité which advocated the long-standing and beneficial character of the French colonial presence in North Africa. I will focus on the transnational alternate forms of historical and cultural affiliation and Mediterranean margin-to-margin circuits of production in which L’Ecole d’Alger engaged, thus bringing to light the new theoretical perspectives that such practices call for. The use of the Mediterranean as a unifying trope downplays race and religious differences to the benefit of a common geographically-based identity both cosmopolitan in nature and generative of a regional awareness which goes against the grain of dominant French nationalist discourses in the 1930s. The predication of Mediterranean identity in the notion of Greek spontaneous creativity as embodied by the figure of Odysseus the wanderer resists appropriation by colonial discourses of modernity resting on the supremacy of reason, as L’Ecole d’Alger lays claim to a modernity that emphasizes the sensuous perception. As descendents of immigrants from various locations in the Mediterranean (including the South of France, a marginal space within the metropole), the writers of L’Ecole d’Alger occupy a unique positionality which enables them to open new spaces for identification. Indeed, in the late 1930s, these writers adopted anti-fascist political stances, and articulated a limited critique of colonial practices. As well, they included in their circle non-European writers, such as Mouloud Feraoun, who will later play a crucial role in the development of a national postcolonial literature, a stand which stakes out a position of independence regarding colonizer/colonized polarities.

These writers’ cultural affiliations, political stances, and literary practices thus spell out a transnational position which calls for the elaboration of new areas of study- here, the Mediterranean, to be considered in their own right. Attention to regional spaces would constructively displace current models of representation where the theoretical existence of the marginal space is but a by-product of its necessary relation to the metropole. The recognition of margin-to-margin self-sufficient relations leaves room for relational theories, or théories de la Relation, in keeping with Glissant’s paradigm. It is incidentally interesting to see that mentions of the Mediterranean as a theoretical foil to the Caribbean are integrated into Glissant scheme, thereby showing how in a decentered vision of cultural globalization relational theory from the margins can indeed provide viable alternative frameworks.