Demythologizing National Identity : A Post-colonial Literary Interrogation of the Nation in Algerian and South African Literature

Ghorab, Abdelbaqi and Baker, Charlotte and Grass, Delphine (2024) Demythologizing National Identity : A Post-colonial Literary Interrogation of the Nation in Algerian and South African Literature. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study investigates the rupture between the post-colonial process of self-identification and the nation’s generated image of totality in Algeria and South Africa. Through a comparative examination of a selection of Algerian and South African post-colonial novels, this study puts the notion of national identity and its surrounding misconceptions into question by highlighting the flaws that reside within the process of identity formation on a national scale. First, I explore the unreliability of national memory as a form of collective memory through John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013). Second, I analyse the notion of the contemporary other, as a phenomenological point of differentiation, and its effect on the formation of the national other under colonial conditions in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Yasmina Khadra’s Ce que le jour doit à la nuit (2010). Third, I accentuate the distortion that the Algerian Black Decade and the South African Apartheid have exerted on the national other, as a point of similarity, in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990) and Yasmina Khadra’s À quoi rêvent les loups (1999). The focus of my analysis is to demonstrate how literature is an effective means of inspecting nationess and interrogating national identity. By arguing for the nation as an artefact of imagination and by examining the nation’s relation with the constructed perception of time, this thesis establishes, on the one hand, the detachment of nationess from the linear spectrum of history. On the other hand, it demonstrates the unescapable result of the reification of national identity as a homogenous image of totality; thus, contradicting the flexible nature of identity as a socially constructed notion. This dissertation stresses literature’s capability of creating a bridge that connects the artefact of nation to the linear spectrum of history, hence granting a point of access to an imagined, yet, functioning sociological organism, operating within a nation. This analytical bridge allows the examination of nationess and national identity from key points in Algerian and South African history. By doing so, I argue that a proper examination of the concept of national identity would be hindered without the resort to literature.