I'm very happy to announce that my new article on Mehdi Charef's Le Harki de Meriem is out at the Journal of Romance Studies. Below is the abstract and the link to the journal.
‘They left their soul on the other side of the Mediterranean’: Rehabilitating Franco-Algerian histories in Mehdi Charef’s Le Harki de Meriem
This article proposes a reading of Mehdi Charef’s Le Harki de Meriem [‘Meriem’s Harki’] (1989) and its 2016 edition that focuses on the text’s discursive and paratextual practices employed to represent Franco-Algerian historical and cultural heritage. This non-linear narrative presents a family saga over the course of the twentieth century, revealing in the process key episodes of the mutual and turbulent history of colonial Algeria and postcolonial France. Through a discussion of passages and editorial work that relate the novel with historical events, I will trace patterns of critique that emphasize their concern with history as a source of knowledge. Such a dialectical analysis will in turn provide a reading paradigm that paves the way into a hybrid France that fragments both the French national grand narrative and Franco-Algerian memory.