SOURCE: “Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism: Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun,” in Yale French Studies, Vol. 1, No. 82, 1993, pp. 43–61.

In the following excerpt, Lowe compares the literature of French colonialization of Vietnamese author Pham Van Ky and North African writer Tahar Ben Jelloun.

Even upon first arriving, immigrants sense they have been for a long time traveling in the West.

—Teshome Gabriel

In discussing decolonization in Les Damnés de la terre (1961), Frantz Fanon argues that one of the challenges facing those movements seeking to dismantle colonialism is to provide for a new order which refuses to reproduce the old colonial system; this new order must avoid, he argues, the replacement of the colonizer by a national party that would merely caricature the old colonialism, and it should be equally suspicious of an uncritical nativism appealing to essentialized notions of precolonial identity. In Fanon's account...