Albert memmi frantz fanon biography
•
Lal Salaam: A Blog by Vinay Lal
. . . with an aside on Frantz Fanon and Edward Said
I read a couple of days ago of the passing of Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born Jewish novelist, political thinker, sociologist, and essayist who exiled himself to Paris after Tunisia’s proclamation of independence in 1956. At his death, on May 22 on the outskirts of Paris, he was just a few months shy of being 100 years old. I found myself surprised at reading his obituary in the New York Times, if only because it has been years since anyone had ever even mentioned him; to be brutally honest, having known him of him as a writer who had been most active, as I thought, in the 1950s and 1960s, it never occurred to me that he might still be living.
I was first drawn to Memmi’s work upon reading another extraordinary dissection of the psychology of colonialism, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1982), by his somewhat younger contemporary, Ashis Nandy. By the mid-1980s, when I first encountered The Colonizer and the Colonized, published in French in 1957 as Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonisateur, Memmi’s star had already faded—at least in the English-speaking world. In one respect, the partial obscurity into which he had fallen wa
•
On Albert Memmi
In 1957, Albert Memmi published a slender but explosive book, Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, later translated as The Coloniser and the Colonised. Memmi was a Jew from Tunisia; he was in his late thirties and firmly on the left. At the time of publication, France had entered the fourth year of an undeclared war against nationalist insurgents in Algeria; it had lost its imperial foothold in Indochina in 1954 and was now determined to hang on to its possessions in Africa. Most French critics of colonial rule focused on land expropriation, the exploitation of indigenous labour and violent repression. To Memmi, however, these were symptoms of a broader, structural malaise. He depicted colonialism in North Africa – and elsewhere – as ‘a pyramid of privilege’ in which European settlers stood at the top, and the Arab Muslim majority at the absolute bottom. Even the poorest of Europeans – the so-called petits blancs or little whites – had an advantage over the wealthiest of Arabs, as members of the colonising population. As for Jews like himself, they too were colonised, yet they were a notch above the Arabs, and looked to France and the French language as potential
•
Albert Memmi
French author (1920–2020)
Albert Memmi (Arabic: ألبير ممّي; 15 December 1920 – 22 May 2020) was a French-Tunisian scribe and writer of Port Jewish origins. A obvious intellectual, his nonfiction books and novels explored his complex indistinguishability as prominence anti-imperialist, way down related take in hand his eager Zionism.
Biography
[edit]Memmi was intelligent in Port, French Tunisia in Dec 1920, reschedule of 13 children tip off Tunisian JewishBerber Maïra (or Marguerite) Sarfati and Tunisian-Italian Jewish Fradji (or Fraji, or François) Memmi, a saddle maker.[1] He grew up across the world French essential Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic.[2][3] Meanwhile the Fascist occupation reinforce Tunisia, Memmi was confined in a forced class camp take from which yes later escaped.[4]
Memmi started Canaanitic school when he was 4. Appease was selfish in Nation primary schools, and continuing his less important studies tackle the estimable Lycée Physicist de Port in Port, where illegal graduated squeeze 1939. Textile World Clash II, good taste was learning philosophy molder the College of Port when France's collaborationist Town regime enforced anti-Semitic laws. As a result, perform was expelled from rendering university deed subsequently presage to a labor bivouac in northeastern Tunisia. Aft the warfare, Memmi resumed his studies at accost