Morceau’s Novel, a Counter-Investigation and Rewriting of the Colonial Text

Abstract

In one of the definitions provided by Douglas Robinson, postcolonial theory refers to the study of the former colonies of Europe and how they responded to the colonial cultural heritage, resisted it, adapted to it, or even overcome it. When we return to the study of the French colonial legacy in Algeria, we will be content with studying the novel to examine how it interacts with this legacy, and how it represents the colonizer and the ego after independence, adopting in that a cultural approach to a novel that is in “opposition”, as the Arabic translation called it, to the stranger novel.  The novel, in part of it, is a counter writing to the colonial text, in which the narrator intends to prove the Arab personalities which were absent from the previous text, and to give them a name and a family, confirming the Algerian identity in contrast to the identity of the colonizer, but, in another section, it reproduces the colonial discourse where it portrays the Algerians in the form of lazy, anarchists, and saboteurs.