End Date :
The Heyman Center for the Humanities,
Komoda Room
ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium presentation by
Erin Twohig(French and ICLS)
Open to the ICLS community, the ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium provides an opportunity for our graduate students to present selections from their dissertations-in-progress and receive feedback from students and faculty. Please see the ‘program’ section below for a description of Ms. Twohig’s topic.
For more information or to schedule to present in our spring colloquium, please contact the ICLS offices.
Ms. Twohig’s topic:
As part of the ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium, Erin Twohig will present a chapter of her dissertation, which deals with education as a theme in postcolonial literature from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. In the literature of the Maghreb, education is a critical theme in narratives of childhood. The school is a fiercely contested space: where language is learned, political and cultural ideologies disseminated, and the legacy of the colonial past and the imagined future of the nation converge. Literary criticism has made much of depictions of the colonial-era school in the literature of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, yet little has been said about the theme of education in postcolonial fiction. This lack of critical discussion on the subject is surprising, given the contentious debates surrounding education in the post-independence era. Policies of Arabization (making Modern Standard Arabic the sole national language and the primary language of education) were seen as a way to rectify the wrongs of French colonial education and blaze a trail for the future of language policy in the Maghreb. Yet Arabized education had its opponents, and as the topic became controversial, education served as a proxy for arguments about the Arab and Islamic nature of the new nations, the role of minority languages, and the continued importance of French language instruction. Maghrebi literature, in its discussions of the Arabized school, has been an active voice in the polemical debates surrounding post-independence education reforms. The chapter presented at the colloquium focuses on narratives of the “transitional” era: novels which depict protagonists who begin their education in the French school, and end it in the independent Arabized system.
