On Islands and Deserts Algerian Appropriations of the World - Chapitre d’ouvrage - 2025

This essay revolves around three post-colonial Algerian novelists : the bilingual Rachid Boudjedra, the Arabophone Tahar Ouettar, and the Francophone Tahar Djaout. These writers embody the plurilingualism of the Algerian literary field, and although they are usually studied separately, like self-contained islands, they were actually good mutual acquaintances in Algiers. While the unequal structure of the literary world impacts peripheral writers, I argue, they appropriate the world through the lens of their own significant geographies, which are here studied at regional and local scales. I demonstrate that literary forms that could be said to be directly imported from Paris are in fact sometimes mediated by their circulation in the Arab world, and they are always used in very specific ways within the competitive literary field. With two consequences. First, they become not just slogans of “modernity” but genuine literary practices enabling the writers to subvert local hierarchies. Second, the linguistic inequalities structuring relations between the writers of the same field may be alleviated and give way to a surprising circulation, in particular from the Arabophone to the Francophone side of the field. Finally, I argue that these writers appropriate the world in their own desert novels by defining their own transnational audiences, and challenge Algerian national identity by inscribing it in a transnational geography.