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"Yacine, Kateb (1929-1989)"
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Editorial
We are thrilled, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Sartre Studies International, to publish for the first time in English (thanks to Dennis Gilbert’s initiative and perseverance) two interviews on theater given by Sartre to Russia’s oldest continually running theater journal, Teatr, whose first issues date from the 1930s. Six years apart, these two interviews give us the flavor of Sartre addressing a Soviet audience, in early 1956, just before Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and then again in early 1962, as France negotiated its exit out of the disastrous Algerian War. While these interviews intersect at times with remarks made by Sartre in interviews and lectures during the same period in France (the need for theater to become a truly popular forum, the importance of Brecht as a model of politically engaged theater, etc.), the tone of the two interviews (the first in particular) is different, as Sartre seeks to connect with a socialist audience. These interviews also break new ground. Discussing contemporary playwrights, Sartre demonstrates, for example, his familiarity with Kateb Yacine and Algerian theater. More unexpectedly, addressing Russian readers, Sartre offers a much more positive assessment of Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire than he ever formulated in France. In short, beyond their content, these interviews help us appreciate even more the importance of the situation shaping Sartre’s pronouncements at any given moment.
Journal Article
Specters of Nedjma: Shifting Temporalities, Identities, and Itineraries in Kateb Yacine's Nedjma Cycle
Fifty years after the publication of Kateb Yacine's final novel in his Nedjma cycle, Le Polygone étoilé (1966), his iconic character, Nedjma, still resonates with feminist interventions in the project of Algerian decolonization. In this article, I argue against the traditional reading of Nedjma as a symbol of colonial Algeria, looking at her development over the entire course of Kateb's Nedjma cycle from 1948's “Nedjma ou le poème ou le couteau” to his plays (Le Cadavre encerclé [1954] and Les Ancětres redoublent de férocité [1959]) to his novels (Nedjma [1956] and Le Polygone étoilé [1966]). Over the course of her many iterations (and rebirths), she develops greater agency, political consciousness, and becomes increasingly unreadable to the male characters around her. Ultimately, she elides symbolization and embodies a kind of Derridean democratic political potential, radically breaking from the projects of the men around her and embracing a kind of revolutionary everydayness.
Journal Article
Corps Perdu: Une saison au Congo and Aimé Césaire's Theory of Tragedy
This article engages, through a close reading of the play Une saison au Congo, Aimé Césaire's dramatic tragedies. I argue that Césaire did not write tragedies simply to mourn the failure of anticolonialism or to reject teleological accounts of freedom. Rather, through tragedy, Césaire inaugurates a form of philosophical investigation that recovers lost revolutionary figures and forms of resistance as what he called “poetic knowledge.” Dissolving the psychoanalytic divide between mourning and melancholia, Césaire, like Walter Benjamin, conceives of melancholy as a philosophical mood, one that facilitates a descent into loss. It is only such a descent that makes discernible and presentable the point at which the human becomes “veritably cosmic.” Resurrecting the disappeared Patrice Lumumba at this “cosmic” scale, Césaire brings to life the sights and sounds of the play between two decolonizations: one, a legally circumscribed process of national independence and, the other, an artistic critique and practice of resistance.
Journal Article
Colonial madness
Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.
eBook
La Traduction comme Créolisation dans Nedjma de Kateb Yacine
La littérature algérienne francophone prône la pluralité et le métissage. Elle est lieu de contestation, de revalorisation de soi et de quête identitaire par le choix d'écrire dans la langue française qui absorbe d'autres langues vernaculaires ou standards, pour dire la différence, l'angoisse et la complexité d'une existence de l'entre-deux. La traduction y est invoquée de manière consciente ou pas, pour exprimer cette différence à la croisée des langues et des cultures. Le texte algérien francophone devient lieu de créolisation dans la mesure où il est au confluent de rencontres, de relations et d'affronts que l'écrivain tente d'exprimer sous forme de traductions littérales, d'adaptations, d'emprunts, de mélanges de codes et de reformulations, etc. De ce fait, la traduction ravive la mémoire collective, lutte contre l'oubli de l'héritage oral, rapproche les religions, encourage la coexistence et dévoile les conflits.
Journal Article
Poétiques de l’œuvre : la fabrique de l’aube : Césaire et Kateb par Rimbaud
Entreprendre un rapprochement entre Kateb Yacine et Aimé Césaire ne surprendra pas les lecteurs familiers des deux écrivains, dont on a souvent évoqué la similarité des situations d’écriture, des engagements ou de leur usage du genre théâtral et du tragique à l’intérieur de leurs œuvres respectives mais, à ma connaissance, jamais leur proximité purement poétique. Il faut dire cependant qu’à la différence de Césaire, si Kateb se revendique avant tout poète, c’est pour une œuvre principalement narrative et dramatique qu’il est connu et étudié. Mais la poésie antérieure à l’écriture de Nedjma a largement infusé la polymorphie ogresse du roman, tout comme un souffle épique et narratif fait du \"Cahier\" autre chose qu’un long poème. Et cette dramaturgie subtile, c’est une façon de faire advenir l’écriture autour du motif de l’aube, dont le caractère épique vise la fondation et réclame un récit. Je parlerais volontiers, chez ces deux écrivains, d’une véritable histoire de l’aube, à la fois enquête et récit, dont on peut à présent tracer les contours d’une critique.
Journal Article
La force des idées, le pouvoir des mots
Le titre que j’ai retenu part de la formule de Kateb Yacine dans \"Nedjma\" : c’est la première partie de l’énoncé du titre. La seconde partie est portée par la question : comment écrire en période de violence extrême? Le narrateur de Kateb, lycéen âgé de seize ans, participait aux manifestations du 8 mai 1945 à Sétif, qui ont marqué alors la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale et la reprise des revendications nationalistes. Ce qui se passait à Sétif et dans la région Nord-Est de l’Algérie est à mettre en relation avec d’autres événements contemporains : le massacre du camp de Thiaroye au Sénégal en 1944 et les répressions de Madagascar en 1947 qui constituent, avec Sétif, comme une avant- première des luttes de libération et des répressions coloniales. \"Nedjma,\" publié en 1956, commence à s’écrire à ce moment.
Journal Article
Kateb Yacine and the Ruins of the Present
[...]his observation of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, properly understood, fits closely with Kateb's notion of the branching curves of history's plots. [...]many North Africans have seen in Ibn Khaldun's work the basis for an alternative vision of the region that would oppose the Arabo-Islamic cultural politics espoused by its governments; Kateb's later projects certainly included the development of the Amazigh and especially Kabyle cultural identity, in a pluralist Algerian society. [...]the years 1948-1956, in which Kateb composed and edited Nedjma, saw a significant revival of interest in Ibn Khaldun, coincident with the political ferment in Algeria. The viewer cannot easily grasp the city from any single perspective; its \"loops and curves,\" \"escapades,\" and \"stubborn camouflage\" mark its resistance to both penetration and all-encompassing views. [...]its striking orography suggests a Baroque motif, a surface folded onto itself.
Journal Article