Alterity in Moroccan Francophone Literature: Rethinking Postcolonial Reading in Light of an Aesthetics of the Text

Abstract:

The paper deals with the identity problematic and the self/other binary, in particular. It aims at   avoiding the risk of mummifying such concepts within the postcolonial discourse taking into consideration that they carry far more significance than what a postcolonial reading would offer. So the adapted strategy is shifting the perspective from a postcolonial treatment of the problematic to an aesthetic one through setting in opposition the postcolonial and aesthetic undertaking of these concepts. The study is carried out at a textual level as it focuses on the aesthetics of the text itself away from any theoretical framework. Two Moroccan Francophone literary texts are subjects to this study: Tahar Benjelloun’s L’Auberge des Pauvres (1999) and Driss Chraibi’s Le Passé Simple (1954). The study of these two works stimulates the reader to reconsider and rethink what have been taken for granted as postcolonial theory has flooded works of the same kind.