Abstract

Raylene Ramsay

‘Colonial and Postcolonial Hybridity in the Work of Camus’

This paper focuses on Le Premier Homme, L’Étranger, La Peste, Noces and Les Justes as works deriving from different genres and different historical contexts. It considers the nature of the thematic and poetic outcomes of the encounter between Algerian and European cultures in these diverse texts by Camus, in particular the extent to which colonial representation and a dialectic of ‘exile and kingdom’ work to create what could be called a ‘third space’.
What characteristics, if any, of the postcolonial ‘third space’ Homi Bhabha postulates; or of Deleuzian ‘nomadic’ space; or indeed, of the hybrid spaces of feminine writing articulated, among others, by Irigaray, do the new spaces created in Camus’s work exhibit?
Through the prism of the concept of hybridity, this study seeks to show the inadequacy of the designations ‘colonial’ and / or ‘postcolonial’ to contain and explain Camus’s work.


	Raylene Ramsay ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Hybridity in the Work of Camus’ This paper focuses on Le Premier Homme, L’Étranger, La Peste, Noces and Les Justes as works deriving from different genres and different historical contexts. It considers the nature of the thematic and poetic outcomes of the encounter between Algerian and European cultures in these diverse texts by Camus, in particular the extent to which colonial representation and a dialectic of ‘exile and kingdom’ work to create what could be called a ‘third space’. What characteristics, if any, of the postcolonial ‘third space’ Homi Bhabha postulates; or of Deleuzian ‘nomadic’ space; or indeed, of the hybrid spaces of feminine writing articulated, among others, by Irigaray, do the new spaces created in Camus’s work exhibit? Through the prism of the concept of hybridity, this study seeks to show the inadequacy of the designations ‘colonial’ and / or ‘postcolonial’ to contain and explain Camus’s work.