Decolonizing the Classroom

The second chapter examines novels that cast Arabization as a new colonialism: both by arguing that Standard Arabic was a “foreign” language in Algeria, and by discussing foreign teachers as a colonizing force bent on shaping a multilingual Algerian people into an “Arab” nation. Karima Berger’s l’Enfant des deux mondes (The child of two worlds) argues that studying Arabic after independence made her French-educated protagonist feel like a colonial subject in her own country. Haydar Haydar’s Walimah li-aʻshaab al-bahr (A banquet for seaweed), written by a Syrian who taught in Algeria in the 1970s, tells the story of a young Iraqi teacher who falls in love with an Algerian student, and must fight society’s impression that he is a sexually “colonizing” threat. Despite different approaches, both novels use colonialism as a metaphor to understand Algeria’s assumed “otherness” to the Arab world. This otherness is reflected, and indeed reproduced, in official textbooks, which often present modern Algerian literature as the lesser other of metropolitan French or Middle Eastern canons. This chapter explores the problems and limits of the colonial as metaphor, along with pedagogical theories of “decolonizing the classroom.”