In this lecture we look at the ground-breaking work of Albert Memmi, a North African Jew who wrote the seminal account of colonialism in its political, social, and cultural essentials during the 1950s, thus establishing the principle that the structure, not the individuals who inhabit it, is the real determinant of the attitudes and experience of coloniser and colonised.

Albert Memmi was born in Tunisia in Dec. 1920, a member of the Jewish community and an Arab speaker. (He later questioned the term Arab Jew, widely used for people of this mixed heritage. He was educated in the French system through Primary and Secondary Level, attending the Carnot Lycée in Tunis before proceeding the the University of Algiers, where he read Philosophy. During the Second World War he was incarcerated in a labour camp by the German Occupying Forces. After 'Liberation', he studied psychology at the Sorbonne before returning to Tunis work as a teacher, psychologist, and journalist from 1953. In 1956, when Tunisia gained independence, he left the country and settled in Nanterre where he has tauchgt philosophy in the Practical School of Higher Studies in at the University since 1970.

Memmi has written a number of novels examining the predicament of the Jew in North Africa - caught between the French and Arab populations, an ambiguous inheritance which also informs his best known work Portrait du colonisé (1957; The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1965). La Statue de sel (1953; The Pillar of Salt, 1955) is an autobiographical novel dealing with a student’s search for identity and eventual resort to exile. Agar (1955; Strangers, 1960), focuses on the breakdown of a marriage between a Tunisian man and his French wife living in Tunisia. which focused on the destructive elements of oppression. Another novel, Le Scorpion (1969; The Scorpion, 1971) takes an imaginative journey into the past in an attempt to discover the author’s real identity. In Le Désert (1977), set in the fifteenth century, he pursued that quest further in a historical context. were followed by Le Pharaon (1988), a novel similar in context to his early fiction in which the conflicted protagonist is forced to choose between the two cultures of his inheritance.

His further non-fiction works of this period include Portrait d'un juif (1962; Portrait of a Jew, 1962), La Libération du juif (1966; The Liberation of the Jew, 1966), L'Homme dominé (1968; Dominated Man, 1968) and the controversial Juifs et arabes (1974; Jews and Arabs, 1975). Still later studies of colonialism were called La Dépendance (1979; Dependence, 1984) and Le Racisme (1982). Memmi also produced an Anthology of Maghrebian literature in two volumes (1965 and 1969). [For his letter “What is an Arab Jew” of that period, see infra.]

[An essay on Memmi will be added later.]