Hybrid Anxieties

Queering the French-Algerian War and Its Postcolonial Legacies

C.L. Quinan

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496206817
• eBook ISBN: 9781496223593
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

Situated at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial studies, Hybrid Anxieties analyzes the intertwined and composite aspects of identities and textual forms in the wake of the French-Algerian War (1954–1962). C. L. Quinan argues that the war precipitated a dynamic in which a contestation of hegemonic masculinity occurred alongside a production of queer modes of subjectivity, embodiment, and memory that subvert norms. Innovations in literature and cinema were also directly impacted by the long and difficult process of decolonization, as the war provoked a rethinking of politics and aesthetics. The novels, films, and poetry analyzed in Hybrid Anxieties trace this imbrication of content and form, demonstrating how a postwar fracturing had both salutary and injurious effects, not only on bodies and psyches but also on artistic forms. Adopting a queer postcolonial perspective, Hybrid Anxieties adds a new impulse to the question of how to rethink hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality, thereby opening up new spaces for considering the redemptive and productive possibilities of negotiating life in a postcolonial context. Without losing sight of the trauma of this particularly violent chapter in history, Hybrid Anxieties proposes a new kind of hybridity that, however anxious and anticipatory, emphasizes the productive forces of a queer desire to deconstruct teleological relationships between past, present, and future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Framing Queer Postcolonial Interventions after the War
• Part 1: Masculinity and Memory
• 1. Haunted Masculinity and the Wounds of War: Alain Resnais’s Muriel and Laurent Mauvignier’s The Wound
• 2. “You’ll Never Give Me a Bad Conscience!”: Masculinity and Postcolonial Guilt in Caché
• Part 2: Queering Postcolonial Legacies
• 3. Eros and Eden: Pierre Guyotat and Queer Pleasures
• 4. Queer Palimpsests and October 17, 1961: Memory Politics in Leïla Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red
• 5. Queering Identity, Embracing In-Betweenness: Disidentification and Re-membering in Nina Bouraoui’s Tomboy
• Conclusion: Queer Postcolonial Entanglements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index