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On May 26, 1993, the Algerian novelist and poet Tahar Djaout was gunned down in an attack attributed to Islamist extremists. An outspoken critic of the extremism roiling his nation, Djaout, in his death, became a powerful symbol for the “murder of Algerian culture,” as scores of journalists, writers, and scholars were targeted in a swelling wave of violence. The author of twelve books of fiction and poetry, Djaout was murdered at a critical point in his career, just as his literary voice was maturing. His death was a great loss not only for Algeria and for Francophone literature but also for world literature. Rage at the news of his slaying was explosive but did nothing to quell the incr...
"The Last Summer of Reason," found among assassinated Algerian writer Tahar Djaout's papers after his death, tells the elegant, haunting story of a bookseller's fight against radical fundamentalism. This brief, intense novel is a powerful and timely indictment of terror and closed-mindedness throughout the world, and a fitting final statement from this acclaimed writer and tireless fighter for democracy. Praise for the hardcover edition: "One is reminded of how life-affirming and dangerous literature still can be."-"Minneapolis Star Tribune" "I hope . . . readers find Djaout's little book, even if it is filled with more questions than answers."-"USA Today" "An elegiac ode to literature and a furious protest against intolerance-"The New York Times Book Review"
Fiction. African & African American Studies. "If you speak, you die, and if you remain silent, you die. So, speak and die."--Tahar Djaout Algeria, just after Independence. The inhabitants of a small Kabylian village go in search for the remains of their fighters who, during the war of liberation, fell here, there, and everywhere. They want to bury them a second time, at home, where they belong. Accompanied by a relative, an adolescent joins the "bone seekers" in search of his older brother's remains. It is the first time the boy has left his village, and he will stumble upon a new universe. But why retrieve his brother's bones when he can't even be sure they are really his? Why bury them in the village that his brother hated so much when he was alive? What is the quest for but to reassure the survivors, so they can be rid of their own specters? When the mission is over and he returns to his people with his macabre burden, the journey has transformed him. "A mix of seriousness and irony that sets the tone for a bitter denunciation."--La Dépêche de Kabylie
The renowned author of "The Last Summer of Reason" achieved great acclaim for this elegant, chilling novel, winning FranceUs prestigious Prix Mediterranee in 1991. "The Watchers" is a politically and morally resonant fable of malevolent bureaucracy, thoughtless fundamentalism, and the danger of sacrificing liberty in the name of patriotism.
The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau. Through Epistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A...
To the world they are known as Berbers, but they prefer to call themselves Imazighen, or “free people.” The claim to this unique cultural identity has been felt most acutely in Algeria in the Kabylia region, where an Amazigh consciousness gradually emerged after WWII. This is a valuable model for other Amazigh movements in North Africa, where the existence of an Amazigh language and culture is denied or dismissed in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. By tracing the cultural production of the Kabyle people—their songs, oral traditions, and literature—from the early 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, Fazia Aïtel shows how they have defined their own cultur...
Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.
This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters. Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation. Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breyte...
The Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) has been inhabited for millennia by a heterogeneous populace. However, in the wake of World War II, when independence movements began to gain momentum in these French colonies, the dominant national discourses attempted to define national identities by exclusion. One rallying cry from the 1930s was "Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my fatherland." In this incisive postcolonial study, Jarrod Hayes uses literary analysis to examine how Francophone novelists from the Maghreb engaged in a diametric nation-building project. Their works imagined a diverse nation peopled by those who were excluded by the dominant political discourses, especially those who did not conform to traditional sexual norms. By incorporating representations of marginal sexualities, sexual dissidence, and gender insubordination, Maghrebian novelists imagined an anticolonial struggle that would result in sexual liberation and envisioned nations that could be defined and developed inclusively.
The theme of the 2001 African Literature Association conference, translation encompasses more than the movement of expression from one language to another - it not only includes the translation of one culture to another, but also the translating of the particularities of historical and personal experience into the broader context of humanity. Includes the four addresses given at the conference on this topic by Nadine Gordimer, Assia Djebar, Emmanuel Dongala and Nuruddin Farah.