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Using, as a point of reference, Albert Memmi's well-known description of the colonial situation as envisaged in 1957, I address the postcolonial treatment of Albert Camus. While criticisms of his writings on Algeria have been frequent, my argument is that an overly politicized reading of his work, especially his Algerian Chronicles, leaves aside, avoids, or misinterprets important and still-relevant ethical messages concerning violence, terrorism, and repression. In my rereading of Camus's truce appeals, I propose seeing Camus outside the colonizer-colonized dichotomy, as a person, above all, engaged in seeking the possibility of dialogue among the French, Arabs, and Berbers. While Camus's political vision, as has already been demonstrated, lacks sympathy for the insurgents' will for total independence from France, it contains a serious proposition to apply moral limits to the means of the struggle, consistent with Camus's philosophical deliberations from The Rebel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I take the belated and confused response to Edward Said’sOrientalism(1978) as due not only to the pretentious “verbosity” of the first translation, but also to objective circumstances of a political and ideological nature. Frantz Fanon, for instance, made a significant belated presence in the 1960s through translation and ultimate appeal to the rising critique of the national elite thereafter. Gramsci was already known among the Left. Not so is the case withOrientalism. The confusion surrounding the term, the distrust of the West, and the affiliation of prominent Arabists and Orientalists in Arabic language societies in Damascus and Cairo and their significant contributions to the study of Arabic added another dimension to a blurred picture. As noticed by some scholars, the much deferred application of Said’s contrapuntal cultural criticism rather than his postcolonial drive, speaks of a different politics. Largely but not solely indebted to Marxist theory, this liberatory politics in gender, race and class, and the significant interest in social equality, justice and political/economic and cultural liberation, take a number of directions that surpass and also obfuscate postcolonial experimentations and their parlance. To demonstrate the efficacy of this massive engagement in the devaluation of postcolonial discourse, I use among others three early texts of the 1930s that put us face to face with a postcolonial consciousness that not only exposes colonialism and the cultural dependency of the elite, and sets the ground for political awareness, but also brings forth the issues of biopolitics and the implications of subalternity along a number of axes. This line of thought is predicated on a cultural and ideological script that had already taken root in urban centres since the early twentieth century. Although the Cold War situation and the enforced assimilation of the Left into statist national blocs or confederations or the denial and prosecution of opposition intensified a polarized polemic against the “West”, there was already that script that was given legitimacy and power in national democratic writings. Hence, whatever is subsumed under the rubric of the “postcolonial” sounds like “carrying dates to Hajar” (ka-nāqil tamrin 'ilā Hajar). Put together in a genealogical map, these early engagements, including the forceful critique of the “West” and its body of representations, gain further solidification that derails and incapacitates the “postcolonial” as a viable category of analysis and application in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]