Research trip to the BNF (Paris) and ANOM (Aix-en-Provence)

During my time as a France-Stanford Center Visiting Junior Scholar, I will conduct research for my book addressing the ways in which French-language Algerian literature penned by authors of Muslim and Jewish background has, since its beginnings in the late-19th/early-20th century, undermined dominant cultural, national, and religious narratives of intractable conflict between Jews and Muslims. At the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, I will research how colonial-era texts by Algerian authors of Jewish and Muslim background evince complex, interrelated cultural dynamics being navigated by Muslim and Jewish populations subjected by force to French colonialism. At the Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, I will investigate how, following Algerian independence from France in 1962 and the subsequent theorization of the difference between French and Francophone literatures, literary scholars addressed the unique situation of Algerian Jews. Native North Africans who were naturalized French citizens by decree in 1870, Algerian Jews occupy a liminal status between Algerian Muslim colonized subjects and French colonialists of European background. I seek to elucidate the extent to which commonly-accepted narratives of Muslim-Jewish conflict obscure the far more complex relationship between these groups as reflected in the writings of Algerians of Muslim and Jewish heritage.