The Arab Avant-Garde

All of the North African artists discussed in this book have been influenced substantially by their immersion in French culture. All rely on the French language as their preferred medium for artistic expression. As such, these creative individuals are enmeshed in one of the central dilemmas postcolonial "non-Western" artists who express themselves in non-indigenous languages can face: how to use essentially "foreign" means to express an "authentic" vision of their own cultural inheritances and imperatives? As Flores shows here, the dilemma is heightened further by tensions of religion and the politics and varieties of Islam. The solution these artists have found is one that questions the constraints imposed on their creativity by external western notions of progress and modernity and the internally driven rigid orthodoxy of fundamentalist Islamic notions of authenticity. The result is art, literature, and film that forges new visions and avoids the constraints of both fundamentalist Islamic and Western definitions of what is aesthetically valid.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.