France has a long and influential history of crime/detective writing, as the use of ‘noir’ as a loan word in other languages attests. Though noir literature and film waned in importance after its heyday in the 1950s, it has lately made a comeback, not only in France but also in former French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean where French remains an important language of cultural production.
In these contexts, crime writing often explores the terrain of social and political injustice and inequality, particularly postcolonial, racial and transnational dynamics. Enquiries into the repressed memory of state-sponsored violence, notably the memory of the Holocaust and colonial brutality, these narratives harness the familiar mood, characters and structure of the crime genre, while giving it a local inscription.
In this course we read contemporary crime fiction from France and Africa/the Middle East, considering how texts respond to local social and political circumstances and play with the conventions of the genre. We devote particular attention to Algeria, where crime writing has emerged as a preeminent genre in the wake of the acute yet still murky violence of the 1990s, a conflict aptly, if rather crudely, described by Adam Schatz as “one big murder mystery.” We also explore some of the principal critical debates associated with detective fiction, including theories about genre and about high and low culture, and readings that situate crime writing in light of questions of international justice, punishment and human rights.
The course is taught in English. Readings can be done in French or English (all of the novels included on the syllabus are available in translation), and papers may also be submitted in either language.
