Fatima Daas’s debut novel, La Petite Dernière ( The Last One ), has been both lauded and attacked for its autofictional representation of a Muslim lesbian growing up in Paris’s marginalized suburbs. Analyses of this work have focused on the protagonist Fatima’s multi-faceted identity as a young woman struggling to reconcile her faith and sexuality. This article shifts the focus from identity to affect by putting La Petite Dernière in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotion’s social functions. The novel’s reception showcases the limited cultural narratives available to queer Muslim subjects: either reject faith and find fulfillment in individual freedom or reconcile it harmoniously with queerness. Daas expands these possibilities through a “poetics of ambivalence” that exposes the complexity and discomfort of Fatima’s feelings without offering tidy resolutions. Fatima discovers that ambivalence, when shared with a partner, is more than a mere cause of social isolation, and can become the basis of a meaningful relationship. Ultimately, literary explorations of bad feelings can provide minoritized authors with a subtle form of resistance to the affective demands of sexual nationalisms.

L’article explore le thème de la post-paranoïa dans l’animation française, en se concentrant sur le film Avril et le monde truqué de Christian Desmares et Franck Ekinci. Il définit la post-paranoïa comme une forme contemporaine de paranoïa qui opère dans un cadre où le moi est constamment menacé par un autre en constante évolution et protéiforme. Ce passage de la paranoïa classique, qui traite d’oppositions clairement définies (par exemple, Est contre Ouest), à la post-paranoïa reflète la complexité de la vie politique et sociale moderne. L’article examine comment l’animation française, y compris les récits dystopiques et post-apocalyptiques ( Tante Hilda! , La prophétie des grenouilles ), reflète ce thème de la post-paranoïa, dépeignant souvent des mondes manipulés par la tromperie, la conspiration et la méfiance. Dans Avril et le monde truqué , situé dans une uchronie steampunk, la protagoniste fait face à un monde gouverné par la falsification et la manipulation. Le récit mêle la post-paranoïa avec des thèmes d’uchronie (histoire alternative) et de steampunk, soulevant des questions sur la vérité, la réalité et le pouvoir. L’article discute de la manière dont l’esthétique et la narration du film, fortement influencées par le style graphique de Jacques Tardi, renforcent la critique socio-politique présente dans le film. Il relie également ce thème à des préoccupations plus larges sur l’éthique scientifique, la destruction écologique et l’autoritarisme, situant le film comme une forme de critique politique et culturelle dans le contexte plus large de l’animation française.

In 1966, ten years after Morocco gained independence from French colonial rule, a group of decolonial writers founded the journal Souffles (1966–1972). Its mission was to deconstruct the suffocating binaries, concepts, and essentialisms that trapped Morocco in an enduring French cultural imperialism or hermetic cultural atavism. In this article, I draw a critical genealogy between leading Moroccan anti-imperial thinkers including Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel Vivre à ta lumière (2022). Just as the Souffles generation exposed the politics of illiteracy that had cemented the conditions of oppression during the Protectorate and its violent aftermath under the reign of Hassan II, so I argue that Taïa inhabits his mother’s illiterate tongue in the novel as a decolonial language that refuses to make itself legible to monologic forms of European, or Moroccan neocolonial, intellectualism. Attentive to the metatextual tropes of language, words, letters, scripts, and even envelopes as spaces in which Taïa reworks hegemonic colonial and absolutist narratives, I explore the poetic potential of illiteracy not as a cultural lack, relegated to silence in Morocco’s post-independence struggle for national sovereignty, but as a potent instrument of postcolonial literary critique.

The ideas and discourse associated with homosexuality and queerness provide a useful and relevant critical framework for understanding Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa’s works. My essay expands this existing frame of reference by discussing the portrayal of poverty and social mobility, which I argue is an equally meaningful yet neglected aspect of Taïa’s writings. I develop this argument by showing that shame is linked not only to sexuality but also to social class. For a comparative perspective, I examine texts by Didier Éribon and Édouard Louis, who, like Taïa, are queer writers from a working-class background. Despite these shared characteristics, there is a significant difference in the framing and critical reception of Taïa’s writings, on the one hand, and those of Éribon and Louis, on the other. This essay investigates the reasons for this difference by exploring the phenomenon of the transfuge de classe and the crucial role played by the absent dimensions of race and coloniality. Situating narratives of queerness and poverty in relation to each other suggests a dialectical mode of reading attentive to different discursive contexts.

Abstract The late 1990s and early 2000s marked the liberalization of the media in Morocco, giving birth to new private and semi-private radio stations that primarily target Moroccan youth. Breaking with traditional radio stations that were usually monolingual, these new stations targeted an audience of multilingual Moroccans, allowing informal, everyday languages to be used on the air and resulting in a mixture of Darija, French, English, and Spanish, all used simultaneously, as occurs in Moroccan daily life. This article focuses especially on the role played by the French language on the widely popular Morning de Momo radio program. It examines the current position of French in Morocco, its relationships with other local languages, how it is evolving in Morocco’s postcolonial context, the impact of the internet and new technologies on the use of French in Morocco, and its future. The results of this study show that French is very present in the everyday speech of Moroccans and that it is often used together with Darija, the vernacular language spoken by more 90 percent of the Moroccan population, suggesting that more than sixty years after the end of French colonization, Moroccans have taken ownership of French and Moroccanized it, moving beyond the confines of French as a colonial language or a language from France.RésuméLa fin des années 1990 et le début des années 2000 ont marqué la libéralisation des médias au Maroc donnant naissance à de nouvelles stations radiophoniques privées et semi-privées qui ciblent principalement la jeunesse marocaine. Contrairement aux radios traditionnelles habituellement monolingues, ces nouvelles radios mettent en exergue le multilinguisme du Maroc en mettant à l’antenne des langues telles que la darija, le français, l’anglais et l’espagnol souvent utilisées simultanément à l’image des conversations multilingues dans la vie quotidienne marocaine. Cet article analyse particulièrement le rôle joué par la langue française dans l’émission de radio très populaire le Morning de Momo. L’objectif de l’étude est de discuter la position actuelle du français au Maroc, ses relations avec les autres langues locales, son évolution dans le contexte postcolonial marocain. L’article vise aussi à étudier l’impact d’internet et des nouvelles technologies sur l’usage du français au Maroc ainsi que son avenir. Les résultats montrent que le français est très présent dans le discours quotidien des marocains et qu’il est souvent utilisé conjointement avec la darija, la langue vernaculaire parlée par plus de 90 pour cent de la population marocaine suggérant que plus de 60 ans après la fin de colonisation française, les Marocains semblent progressivement s’approprier le français en le marocanisant défiant l’idée qui réduirait le français au Maroc uniquement à la colonisation française ou à la France.

This article presents the results of fieldwork carried out in Kabylia, Algeria in 2019, as part of Screening Violence, a major research study into imaginaries of conflict in five countries that have recent experience of civil war. We apply the concept of the imaginary to our fieldwork data in order to engage with our participants’ constructions and perceptions of political violence, while transcending the conventional binaries between affect and cognition, between emotion and understanding. After a summary of debates around the theorizing of affect, we develop the concept of conflict imaginaries in order to analyze in granular detail participants’ testimonies about violence in Algeria, as well as their gestures and reactions such as laughter (which can signal group cohesion and shared norms). We explore the legacy of the past in the present, generational differences between our participants and their elders regarding the fear of violence, and the connections our participants establish between the Hirak protests of 2019 (which all our participants were engaged in) and the so-called “black decade” of the 1990s civil war in Algeria. We conclude that affect has an important place in survivors’ understandings of mass violence in general and the Algerian civil conflict in particular.

Abstract This article explores the theme of repair in the work of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, focusing on its implications for our understanding of time. Attia’s art features repair on the one hand as a physical practice, one that involves mending by re-piecing, suturing together, substituting, or supplementing. These explorations of physical repair often highlight cultural and ideological variations on what needs repair and how repair is done by juxtaposing or paralleling practices from different parts of the world. The term is also deliberately chosen by Attia to convey the joining or hitching together that continuously occurs when any two peoples, places, or ideas are brought into contact under any circumstances, including natural, political, and cultural ones. Drawing on the resonances between Attia’s ideas and those of both Bruno Latour and Édouard Glissant, I explore the ways in which this more abstract use of the term, derived from its physical workings, is employed in Attia’s work to challenge grand narratives. Amongst these are a belief in linear progress, which upholds Western modernity as a moment of historical exceptionalism, and in circular messianic time, which sees the present moment as one of continuing decline as we move ever further from an originary moment of purity and towards possible selective redemption. Attia’s notion of repair proposes an atelic understanding of time which frees societies from reductive narratives about the past, highlights the variety and social dynamism of the present, and challenges predetermined notions about the future in ways that free the social imagination.RésuméCet article centre sur le thème de réparation dans l’œuvre de l’artiste franco-algérien Kader Attia et interroge les implications de ce thème pour notre compréhension du temps. D’une part, la réparation est représentée dans l’œuvre d’Attia comme la pratique manuelle de rapiécer, suturer, substituer ou supplémenter ce qui est endommagé ou compromis. En juxtaposant des pratiques de réparation des différentes parties du monde, ces explorations de réparation physique soulignent souvent les variations culturelles et idéologiques qui déterminent ce qui est réparé et la manière dans laquelle la réparation est faite. D’ailleurs, le terme “réparation” est délibérément choisi par Attia pour accentuer la continuelle acte de jointure qui tient lieu à chaque fois que deux peuples, deux endroits ou deux idées sont mis en contact dans n’importe quelle circonstance. Cette circonstance peut être provoquée par des phénomènes naturels, politiques ou culturels. En soulignant les résonances entre les idées d’Attia et celles de Bruno Latour et d’Edouard Glissant, j’examine les façons dans lesquelles Attia emploi dans son œuvre cette notion abstraite de la réparation (qui est tirée de ses mécanismes physiques). Il s’en sert pour contester les versions grandioses ou officielles de l’histoire. Des telles versions se centrent soit sur une croyance en une progression continue et linéaire selon laquelle la modernité occidentale est arrivée à un moment de progression exceptionnel par rapport aux autres cultures et civilisations, soit sur une croyance à un temps cyclique – dit messianique –, selon lequel le présent fait partie d’un déclin continu qui mène vers une future rédemption sélective. En revanche, la notion de réparation chez Attia transmet une compréhension atélique du temps. Elle élargit les horizons de l’imagination sociale en contestant les récits limités du passé, en ouvrant les yeux sur un présent vibrant et dynamique, et en mettant en question la notion d’un avenir prédéterminé.

This article proposes an analysis of recurrent linguistic strategies that have become prevalent in French journalistic writing about les contrôles policiers. It compares the coverage between 2016 and 2022 from two French newspapers, Libération and Le Figaro, and their use of temporal adverbs when discussing the deaths of individuals of color in police custody. Drawing from Norman Fairclough, Judith Butler, and discourse analysis, as well as the biopolitics of Michel Foucault, I argue that this linguistic structure is a method that devalues victims of police brutality by fostering misunderstandings of how racialized individuals die during these police stops. I suggest therefore that these linguistic structures inscribe a negative perception of the racialized individual that perpetuates a social indifference to their deaths.