Browsing by Author "Chouiten, Lynda"

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Challenging Post 9/11 Stereotypes In Lorraine Adams' Harbor (2004)
(Université Benyoucef Benkhedda d'Alger, 2020) Bendjaballah, Keltoum; Chouiten, Lynda
Post 9/11 American fiction is highly characterized by Orientalist stereotyping which is most apparent in key American novels of that period. Although Islam and Muslims have often been viewed in stereotypical ways by Western literature, it seems that the 9/11 events have strengthened the old Orientalist discourse. In the light of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article seeks to elaborate on the positive image of the Muslim characters in Lorraine Adams’ Harbor (2004). By referring to key novels in post 9/11 American fiction such as John Updike’s Terrorist, Don Delillo’s Falling Man and Sherry Jones’ A Jewel of Medina, we would like to demonstrate that Lorraine Adams’ Harbor opposes the demonization of Muslims extensively set in the Western imagination in the aftermath of 9/11
Colonial conflict in maupassant's mes voyages en Algerie
(San Diego State University, 2019) Chouiten, Lynda
This article examines Guy de Maupassant’s stance regarding the colonial conflict that marked nineteenth-century Algeria, as voiced in his Mes Voyages en Algérie. Drawing on the analyses of Frantz Fanon, Edward Saïd, and Ranajit Guha among others, it argues that notwithstanding his denunciation of colonial malpractice, the writer reveals an insidious support for the French occupation by deploying a set of colonial rhetorical strategies. These include the de-politicization of native revolts, an Orientalist representation of the colonized as primitive, immoral, and therefore colonizable, and a tendency to classify the Algerians along ethnic/religious lines. In opposing Muslims to Jews and Berbers to Arabs, the chronicles perpetuate the divide-and-rule policy which seeks to facilitate the control of colonized territories by weakening their populations
The Educated African and Colonialist Myths in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North
(Nordic Journal of African Studies, University of Copenhagen Centre of African Studies, 2024) Chouiten, Lynda
Through the example of Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1969), this article argues that education as provided by the colonial school system is an “undecidable” (Derrida), at once empowering and disempowering the educated non-Westerner. On the one hand, the knowledge and language appropriated by Mustafa Sa’eed (Salih’s African prodigy) enable him not only to belie, through his own academic success, the derogatory clichés regarding the Black man’s intellectual inferiority, but also to denounce imperialism in the impressive number of books he has written. On the other hand, as a system which perpetuates traditional values and codes of thinking, rather than promoting originality and difference, the (Western) educational machine ensures that its products unconsciously absorb Western ‘truths’ about the passionate nature and sexual appetite of the native races. This article shows that Mustafa Sa’eed reproduces these ‘truths’ both in his lectures and in his lifestyle.
The rhetoric of torture in Henri Alleg’s La Question
(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Chouiten, Lynda
Drawing essentially on David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), this article discusses the discursive mechanisms that accompany the practice of torture as described in Henri Alleg’s La Question (1958). Examining the relation between these mechanisms and the broader discourses of colonialism and subjection, it shows that the inscription of colonial power on the injured and dehumanised body of the tortured is paralleled by the verbal denigration of these victims, reduced to a state of infantilism or, worse, animality, through verbal reflexes such as animalistic adjectives and tutoiement – a form of speech which consists in the use of the singular form of the second person (you) and which is usually reserved for children and those deemed not worthy of respect. More importantly, it argues that, rejecting both the victim status and the dehumanisation to which his jailers attempt to reduce him, Alleg shapes his own empowering rhetorical strategies, in turn debasing the torturers, ridiculing them, or mocking the colonial myths of chivalry and racial superiority. Instead of the latter, Alleg proposes a discourse of humanism and interracial brotherhood that conquers the violence he endures.