Contesting the Classroom

Contesting the Classroom explores how Algerian and Moroccan novels depict the postcolonial classroom, and how postcolonial literature has been taught in Morocco and Algeria. It argues that Arabized education has indelibly influenced the development of postcolonial novels, which have a deeply fraught yet endlessly creative relationship to the classroom.

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Contesting the Classroom is the first scholarly work to analyze both how Algerian and Moroccan novels depict the postcolonial classroom, and how postcolonial literatures are taught in Morocco and Algeria. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary novels in French and Arabic, it shows that authors imagined the fictional classroom as a pluralistic and inclusive space, often at odds with the narrow nationalist vision of postcolonial identity. Yet when authors wrote about the school, they also had to consider whether their work would be taught in schools. As this book’s original research on the teaching of literature shows, Moroccan and Algerian schools have largely failed to promote the works of local authors in public school curricula. This situation has dramatically altered literary portraits of education: novels marginalized in the public education system must creatively reimagine what pedagogy looks like and where it can take place. In illuminating a literary corpus neglected by political scientists and sociologists, Contesting the Classroom shows that novels about the school are an important source of counter-narrative about education and national identity. At the same time, by demonstrating how education has influenced writing styles, this work reframes the classroom as a necessary cultural context for scholars of postcolonial literature.