(Re)writing home: Repetition and return in pied -noir literature.

This dissertation explores literature from the Pied-Noir community from 1962 to present and examines the written recreation of Algeria in a postcolonial context. The majority of Pieds-Noirs, formerly the French citizens of Algeria or Francais d Algerie, left Algeria upon its independence from France in 1962. Due to the French difficulty dealing with the loss of Algeria and the willful forgetting that immediately came after the war, the Pieds-Noirs have been able to put forth their personal stories as the official version of colonial Algerian history. The traumatic absence of Algeria and the difficult integration into France after the war have led the Pieds-Noirs to rewriting their homeland. Although repetition and return have traditionally been received as mechanisms to preserve the Pied-Noir past and culture, this dissertation analyzes the techniques as narrative strategies for articulating identity and gaining authority in postcolonial France. Through an examination of written returns to the homeland, this work demonstrates colonial identity as being worked through and sustained in the motion of return and the act of repetition. Theoretically this work employs psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and postcolonial theories to address exile narratives. Specifically through the use of the Freudian notion of the compulsion to repeat and more recent psychoanalytic work on the pleasure of repetition and the deconstructionist concept of representation, this dissertation demonstrates the displacement and dispossession inherent in the fiction of Pied-Noir identity which is articulated through the motion between the nostalgic recreation of Algeria and the symbolic notion of France as an elsewhere.PhDEuropean historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123867/2/3106086.pd