Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.

Chapter 1 advances a redefinition of world literature with specific focus on the periphery. Annotating a politically charged terrain of intellectual history, I maintain that the humanist imagination emerged as a key topic of debates since the early twentieth century, and second, that anti-imperial currents emphasized the role of the imagination in envisioning an alternative conception of the world. As part of this internationalist constellation, the chapter discusses the intertwining histories of Rabindranath Tagore’s pioneering lecture on “World Literature” ‘1907’ and Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on art and literature ‘1942’. Such a constellation sheds new light on Fredric Jameson’s much-debated notion of “third world literature as national allegory” ‘1986’, going beyond extant critiques. It further complicates, I argue, the conventional separation between twentieth century anticolonial, postcolonial, and contemporary globalization-era literatures.