L’écriture dystopique boudjedrienne à l’aune de la théorie postcoloniale

Cet article porte sur le rapport entre l’écriture dystopique de Rachid Boudjedra et la théorie postcoloniale dans son roman L’Escargot entêté. Cette œuvre fait partie de la littérature algérienne postcoloniale et se trouve, par conséquent, être l’emblème d’une esthétique hybride. L’hybridité dont use l’auteur, et qui n’est autre qu’un concept utopique de la théorie postcoloniale, finit par se briser dans le texte, générant par là une écriture dystopique. Pour ce faire, l’écrivain mélange les genres réaliste et fantastique, puis y crée une scission pour perpétuer l’image de la dystopie. Il utilise des informations erronées pour créer des fissures dans l’intertextualité du roman, en faisant imploser l’hybridité de l’écriture de l’intérieur. Enfin, il tente de libérer la littérature algérienne qu’il veut séparer de la littérature française, créant une brèche entre « la périphérie » et « le centre ».

Literary and political strategies in a literary field: The case of Tahar Ouettar

This article aims to show the relationship writers have with politics, especially in historical circumstances where the literary field enjoys little autonomy. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I use the notion of strategy as a middle point between deterministic and ‘rational choice’ explanations of political stances. For writers, politics can be the continuation of literature by other means. The case under study is the shift of Algerian writer Tahar Ouettar from the left to supporting Islamists during the 1990s civil war. I argue that an explanation of this shift should not rely solely on social provenance, or on opportunism, but rather on his ‘strategic’ attempt to regain a central position in the Algerian literary field. In a civil war context where all literary acts are perceived as political, it was his competition with other main writers such as Rachid Boudjedra, who happened to be anti-Islamist, that led him to support the opposite side. Beyond just the writer’s relative position in the Algerian literary field, the specific structuring of the field (bilingual and transnational) also helps to understand the strategies developed by this writer.

On Islands and Deserts

This article argues for the necessity for world literature and postcolonial studies to examine both global hierarchies of literary legitimacy and those local practices which might challenge them, and give perspectives for other significant geographies. To do so, it focuses on the bilingual and transnational Algerian literary field; this requires different levels of interconnected analysis, namely of the two linguistic subfields, the intermediary level of national literary field and the two Francophone and Arabophone transnational literary fields. Trajectories and literary works of three very different yet linked writers, Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Djaout and Tahar Ouettar, are examined in turn. The article traces both the global and linguistic inequalities to which they were subjected as well as their practices in order to argue that they reveal unexpected vectors of circulation between spaces and languages. Finally, this piece explores how and why each writer reinvents a world within their desert novels, that is, by narrating wanderings in the desert that are also explorations of national identity.