Book Review: Joseph Ford, Writing the Black Decade: Conflict and Criticism in Francophone Algerian Literature, New York: Lexington Books, 2021.

Abstract

In studying Francophone Algerian Literature of the 1990s, a period otherwise known as the Black Decade or la décennie noire, Ford finds out that the literary outputs, instead of clarifying the conflict, reify it. Indeed, literary outputs published by celebrity figures both during the 1990s and after not only stay neutral about the ideological struggle between the secular-and-military status quo on the one hand and their Islamist contestants on the other, but deem it their mission to testify for posterity. That war was tagged as cultural and simplified to the point of pitting progressivists against depressives. Such a binary portrayal gained currency during the post-Cold War context where ideas of the clash of civilizations become the modo Operandi.