ASRC 6325 - Albert Memmi: Theorist of Dependence

Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

G. Farred.

Albert Memmi: Theorist of Dependence. This course will read the Tunisian thinker – colonial/postcolonial critic, novelist – as a theorist of dependence. Not, it should be noted, as a “dependency theorist” in the mold of, say, Samir Amin, but as a thinker who is interested in the relationship between colonizer and the colonized, between decolonized and the former imperial power. Dependence, we might say, is for Memmi as much as a matter of the psyche as it turns on economic entanglements (in Amin’s sense), history (the impossibility of disarticulating colonizer from the colonized) and the established flow of traffic between the erstwhile metropole and the colonial periphery. Memmi’s singularity as a figure from the Maghreb resides precisely in the ways in which he attends to the difficulty of dependence. It is this relationship and the ways in which the colonized/colonizer (and its many afterlives) refuses to conform to the logic of capital or postcolonial politics, to the Fanonian imperative (the need to create a “new man” who can, finally, put paid to the legacies of colonialism) or to the insistence that national sovereignty puts a definitive end to the relationship between the former colonizer and the formerly colonized. It is dependence, in its many and unexpected iterations, that defines Memmi’s oeuvre – it is the question that troubles him, that runs like a self-strengthening thread through his work. It is, indeed, the thread that always threaten to impose itself upon his thinking, so much so that it seems, in moments, likely to undo any effort to avoid the difficulty that is dependency.