Lexington Books
Pages: 178
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-8186-8 • Hardback • January 2021 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-4985-8187-5 • eBook • January 2021 • $90.00 • (£69.00) (coming soon)
Joseph Ford is lecturer in French studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing the Black Decade
Chapter 1: Rethinking Testimonial Literature in Rachid Mimouni, Assia Djebar and Maïssa Bey
Chapter 2: Exploring Complicity in Salim Bachi
Chapter 3: Beyond a Grotesque Aesthetics of the Black Decade in Habib Ayyoub
Chapter 4: Specters of the Black Decade in Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête
Chapter 5: Deconstructing Oppositional Criticism in Mustapha Benfodil’s Archéologie du chaos [amoureux]
Conclusion: Beyond the Language of Crisis and Conflict
Bibliography
About the Author
Writing the Black Decade is a lively and incisive analysis of francophone literature focused on Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s. Ford’s approach is refreshing and original in that it both offers nuanced analysis of a range of important works not generally well-known to anglophone audiences and probes the effects of the media debates to which they have given rise. While attentive to the subtleties of the works under scrutiny, Ford astutely points out the ways in which literature too can contribute to the binary and conflictual structures they set out to criticise. This study makes a highly significant intervention at once into the study of Algerian literature and into debates on the politics of literary criticism.
— Jane Hiddleston, Professor of Literatures in French, University of Oxford
This welcome book is a prompt to think more deeply and with greater nuance about literary representations of Algeria’s ‘Black Decade’. Ford asks a fundamental question about how to understand literature in a time of conflict and he responds with an assured and necessary corrective to the celebration of literature as a form of emancipation. Deftly, and through a range of compelling readings, Ford argues that much Algerian literature written in French distorted or obscured the messy realities that were at play. And yet Ford refuses a simple binary concluding that while literary works in Algeria have been shaped by their material conditions of production and reception, they have also contributed to shaping ideas that circulate within Algeria and its broader transnational public sphere. Ford makes a fresh contribution to an important debate and his book will be a key reference for scholars working on Francophone Algerian literature since 1988.
— Patrick Crowley, Head of School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University College Cork