“The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria” writes Jill Jarvis at the start of this book, “is such that only aesthetic works, in particular, literature, have been able to register its enduring effects” (2). Literature has the capacity to “register the traces of the disappeared in ways that provoke disturbance, unsettlement, pain, anger, and movement” (3); aesthetic works “move in an elusive, anarchival relationship to the power of the nation-state and its laws” (173). The introduction already offers a fine illustration of what Jarvis has in mind, as she deftly tracks the meanings and emotions echoing through Assia Djebar’s uses of cris, écris, and various cognates and homophones in the first pages of L’amour, la fantasia (1985), where Djebar describes how the French fleet, with an eye on something like “memory,” arrived not only with obliterating force but with painters...
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