Publication date:
30 June 2011Length of book:
196 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
239x166mm7x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739145036
This book examines the way in which France has failed to come to terms with the end of its empire, and is now haunted by the legacy of its colonial relationship with North Africa. It examines the form assumed by the ghosts of the past in fiction from a range of genres (travel writing, detective fiction, life writing, historical fiction, women's writing) produced within metropolitan France, and assesses whether moments of haunting may in fact open up possibilities for a renewed relational structure of cultural memory. By viewing metropolitan France through the prism of its relationship with its former colonies in North Africa, the book maps the complexities of contemporary France, demonstrating an emerging postcoloniality within France itself.
If, since the publication of Derrida's Spectres de Marx in 1993, metaphors of haunting and spectrality have become abundant in both literary criticism and postcolonial theory, Barclay's book artfully redeploys such figures in her examination of France's memory of the colonial past. Drawing on a range of texts, each illustrating a differently 'haunted' relationship between French cultural consciousness and the legacy of colonialism in the Maghreb, the work puts forward the challenging thesis that France has still not come to terms with its colonial losses. Moreover, not only does this elegant study shed new light on the representation of the cultural memory of the colonised Maghreb, but it also argues that literature itself retains a particular and privileged function in its illumination of the return of the repressed. Literary works themselves are shown to present their readers with an otherness that forces them to engage with the ghosts of memory.