Albert Camus and (Post)colonial Amnesia

Abstract

"My argument is that Camus is more fittingly defined as a para-colonialist writer, much in the tradition of western humanist and neo-humanist writers such as François Rabelais, Bartolomé de las Casas, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and André Gide, who criticized colonial atrocities in the European colonies without contesting the legitimacy of colonization itself, which paved the way for these atrocities. This article examines Camus’s relation to French colonialism in his final, uncompleted novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994) and Noces (Nuptials, 1938) and shows how his para-colonialist outlook is articulated, in large part, through the prism of amnesia, a key colonial trope that is often overlooked in postcolonial discussions of Camus’s writing. In both works, Camus uses the trope of amnesia as a dramatic device t tackle the vexed issues of identity, colonial guilt and trauma, and cultural and class divisions, in ways that reveal the intricate connections between amnesia and imperial ideology, identity and nationhood, and ethics and aesthetics."