Contested Borders

Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb

William J. Spurlin

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9798881865573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through examining new representations of same-sex desire emerging in recent francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in North Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses specifically how Franco-Maghrebi writers Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri, and Nina Bouraoui foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories and cultures. By writing in French, Spurlin demonstrates that the writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser but inflecting a European language with discursive turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experiences of gender and sexual alterity—a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contested Borders
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Sexual/Textual Crossings: Towards New Representations of Sexual Dissidence in the Maghreb
• Chapter 2: Historical Antecedents: Imperial Crossings and Same-Sex Desire between Men in North Africa
• Chapter 3: Disruption, Fragmentation and Alternative Sites of Memory: Gender and Sexual Dissidence as Forms of Decolonisation in Francophone Post-Independence Literature in the Maghreb
• Chapter 4: New Translations of Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire through (Re)negotiating Gender/Sexual Borders: Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa
• Chapter 5: Nina Bouraoui: Further Translations of Sexual Alterity through Embodiment and Intersectional Crossings of Identic, Geopolitical, Temporal and Generic Borders
• Chapter 6: Migration and/as Translation: Cultural Mediation and Negotiation as Ongoing Struggles for the Decolonisation of Queer Desire
• References
• Index
• About the Author