Towards a hybridization of culture: The 'dialectics of deliverance' of a 'pensee-autre' in the Moroccan Francophone novel

This dissertation aims to uncover the dialectics of cultural identity and the representation of Self in the Moroccan postcolonial Francophone novel. Literary texts of the Maghrebi Francophone literature in general seem to be "seduced" by what Abdelkebir Khatibi calls a "haunting thought" of a new hybrid cultural identity as a basis of new nationalist movements and a new self-consciously attributed literary production. The Maghrebi people, being a patch-work of Berber, diverse Arabo-Islamic communities and other ethnic groupings, yet strongly westernized in perspective, are constantly trying to achieve a socio-political synthesis of these different influences, and tend to re-orient them between civilizations, in an intermediary position--just as they are located geo-politically on the shores of the Mediterranean at the interface between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. A polyglot culture owing allegiance to as many traditions as the vestiges of its history chronicles permit, past Maghrebi cultural traditions and heritage live on as an effervescent cultural unconscious in the making.;Examining the emergence and development of the Francophone literature of this area, this study also traces the specific literary, historical and socio-cultural contexts within which new anxieties about cultural transmission and new emergent literary genres concerned with tradition, on one hand, and contemporaneity, on the other, reflect the cultural crises of the colonial and postcolonial moments. At the same time, as the tropes of the Maghrebi hybrid cultural condition strive to establish themselves, they tend to take on a life of their own to a point where their relationship to the existing Arabo-Islamic culture and the social relations they represent becomes increasingly oblique. Proclaiming a hybrid discursive space, its advocates negotiate an alliance among all existing trends and admit to the ambivalence of the tensions between the cognitive acknowledgements of cultural heterogeneity. My main objective is to delimit literary categories (genre, mode, style, ideology and criticism) within which the Maghrebi Francophone writer operates. These categories will help make the reader's task at best anxious to interpret the Maghrebi writer, whether such interpretation is a form of parabolism, allegory, symbolism or pure interactive correspondence.