DECOLONIZING MEMORY
Algeria &
the Politics of Testimony
Duke University Press, June 2021
Winner of the 2022 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
Winner of the 2022-2023 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research in the Humanities
“Decolonizing Memory is a remarkable account of literature as a form of witnessing and the aesthetic as the primary register for imagining the unthinkable. Presented with elegance and a keen attention to language, the book locates Algeria at the center of the traumas of the twentieth century and demonstrates how literature could push back against the politics of silence promoted by the state. This is postcolonial scholarship at its best—theoretically sophisticated and historically grounded.”
— Simon Gikandi, Princeton University
Read the MLA prize press release here.
Listen to me tell the story about the book’s cover here.
Read an interview in the Yale News here.
Read the introduction here.
Order the book here.
Signs in the Desert : Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara (under contract with University of Chicago Press) *click image to read more*
"Forget Decolonizing: Atomic visions from the radioactive Sahara" (Representations, Spring 2023)
"Radiant Matter : Technologies of Light & the Long Shadow of French Nuclear Imperialism" (Representations, Fall 2022)
"African Novels, African Nationalisms", in Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, eds. Jeanne-Marie Jackson & Cajetan Iheka (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
"Memory & Literature : Roundtable," Cathy Caruth, Stef Craps, Marianne Hirsch, Jill Jarvis & Ann Rigney, in The Palgrave Companion to Memory & Literature (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming)
"National Epic : Algeria // Mechakra's shattered forms," in National Epics, ed. by David Wallace (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) *click image to read more*
"Desert Futures Collective : Beginnings," with Brahim El Guabli & Francisco Robles, in Deserts are not empty, ed. Samia Henni (Columbia University Press, 2022)
"Timbuktu, Sonic Map of Desert Futures", in Sounds Senses (Liverpool University Press, 2021) *click image to read more*
"Subterranean Musics : Reading Samira Negrouche" (Yale French Studies, 2020) *click image for PDF*
"Am I not one of the disappeared?" (Public Books, 2019) *click image to read*
"Lines of Flight : Laredj and Djaout Beyond the Fiction of Terror" (Expressions maghrébines, 2018) *click image for PDF*
"Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics," with Brahim El Guabli (Journal of North African Studies, 2018) *click image for PDF*
"Inheriting Assia Djebar," with Anjuli Gunaratne (PMLA, 2016) *click image for PDF*
"Remnants of Muslims : Reading Agamben's Silence" (New Literary History, winner of the Ralph Cohen Prize, 2016) *click image for PDF*