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Even as postcolonial criticism attempts to intervene, revising colonial and orientalist histories, it remains haunted by colonial-era orientalist impulses. This essay examines the problematic in the context of Franco-- Algerian cultures through the work of two Francophone writers, Azouz Begag and Leila Sebbar.
In that double-figure which haunted the moment of the enlightenment in its relation to the otherness of the Other, you can see the historical formation of the time-lag of modernity.
-Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Can there ever be anything other than a distorting and manipulating orientalism, trading nostalgically on its own past, perhaps, but mortally wounded by the very deconstructive instruments that it has helped to forge. -J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment
In an essay on Algeria found at the end of a recent issue of Le Nouvel Observateur bearing the title "La France, c'est l'Algerie," Bernard Frank laments the impossiblities of a dispassionate French interest in Algeria in the postcolonial era, an interest that would be somehow untainted by the specters of French orientalist and colonial history. Evoking the recent history of Algerian immigration and the suspect nature of postcolonial French desire for cultural exchange with Algeria, Frank expresses the wish of many French to visit the former colony: "Pas en conquerants, pas en civilateurs, pas en touristes, pas en medecins sans frontiers I ..] pour le plaisir. [...] Je n'ai jamais ete de ma vie en Algerie. J'aimerais bien enfin y aller. Sans idee derriere la tete. [.. ] C'etait, parait-il, si beau l'Algerie. C'est curieux, on en parle toujours au passe. Ou comme s'il s'agissait d'un fait divers" (66). Referring to the phantom heritage of the colonial era accompanied by what Edward Said terms an underlying "imaginative geography," those orientalist impulses that generated phantasmic images and desires of Algeria, Frank's observations on the predicament of contemporary Franco-Algerian relations point, in many ways, to dilemmas one finds in many of the attempts of those working in the field of postcolonial studies to approach the "Orient" and, in particular, Algeria, innocuously and with contemporaneity (Reflections 199).
As an oppositional practice seeking to unveil the repressed histories of colonialism and to return them to the realm of postcolonial consciousness, postcolonial studies performs a belated exercise of recovery that presents knowledge...