Reda Bensmaia. Experimental Nations; or, the Invention of the Maghreb.

Accad, Evelyne

Reda Bensmaia, Experimental Nations; or, The Invention of the Maghreb. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2003. xii + 215 pages $55 ($19.95 paper). ISBN 0-691-08936-1 (08937-X paper)

THIS CRITICAL ANALYSES by Reda Bensmaia, one of today's excellent scholars of Maghrebian literature, focuses on work by several francophone North African authors and filmmakers: Salut cousin, a film by Merzak Allaouache; Un Passager de l'Occident and L'Etal perdu, by Nabile Farbs; L'lnvention du desert, by Tahar Djaout; La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, a film by Assia Djebar; Amour bilingue, by Abdelkebir Khatibi; and Le fils du pauvre, by Mouloud Feraoun. it is around these central, most important works, from Bensmaia'a point of view, that Maghrebian francophone literature engages us and the world. The works constantly take us to other literary critical as well as creative writings. References abound, and the volume is a must for the teacher and student of North African literature.

The critical essays assembled in Experimental Nations lay out the history of Maghrebian literature's construction as well as the intellectual journey of an Algerian American university intellectual who, progressively, becomes conscious of the importance of postcolonial writers: "This literature has become an indispensable tool for the elaboration--or perlaboration and anamnesis of something that was believed lost for good: the idiosyncratic nature of indigenous cultures."

Bensmaia's criticism differs radically from so many studies of francophone literature that reduce the works to anthropological or cultural documents. His book aims at shedding light on the "literary strategies" of Maghrebian writers in order to appropriate anew their cultural heritage, to elaborate a style, to reconstruct a story, a territory, a community: "Under today's postmodern conditions, it is not geographical or even political boundaries that determine identities, but rather a plan of consistency that goes beyond the traditional idea of nation and deter mines its new transcendental configuration. And it is in this sense that I use the term experimental nation."

Each piece chosen by Bensamaia is decoded not according to a preexisting critical system but through a "particular critical protocol," which the analyst constructs while observing the specific organization or "sign clusters" proper to each author. Thus, in the study devoted to Assia Djebar's La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, a film reputed to be difficult, Bensmaia shows that the absence of narrative, of action, of subject, of principal character, of continuity in time and space--a kind of generalized disjunction--far from presenting an obstacle to the understanding of the film, is its main key: beyond the questions relative to meaning or purpose, the film unveils the senses. This choice from the author determines the aesthetic of the film ("An Aesthetic of the Fragment").

Experimental Nations is a profound, innovative reflection that marks a new step in the critical approach of francophone postcolonial literature.

Evelyne Accad

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign