Studies European literary discourse on French Algeria between 1830 and 1954. It reveals the debate within Algeria that aimed to forge an independent cultural identity for the European settlers, and maps representations of Algeria in the discourses of Orientalism and the Algerianists.

The book also focuses on the dialogism operative in the works of Ecole d'Alger writers like Gabriel Audisio, Albert Camus, and Emmanuel Robles, interrogating the way in which their voices countered the closure of those earlier strategies and yet still articulated the unresolvable dilemma of an inherently unstable and impermanent minority whose identity remained grounded in otherness.

The end of El Djezair
Orientalist writing strategies
Writing the (in)visible: exotic and colonialist fiction
The politics of polarity: the colonial novel and the Algerianists
Ithaca revisited: the Mediterranean of the Ecole d'Alger
A dream deferred
A question of belonging: the Ecole d'Alger and the colonial presence