For more than 70 years until his passing, Albert Memmi was one of the most influential French authors in the development of political discourse and the revival of nationalism in many countries. His novels and essays, including The Colonizer and the Colonized (prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre), are studied in colleges and universities. The most diverse intellectual circles have confronted, incorporated or rejected his ideas but always in enriching and respectful ways.Originally publishe...

Albert Memmi a été l’un des auteurs français les plus influents dans le développement du discours politique et le renouveau du nationalisme dans de nombreux pays. Ses romans et essais, dont Le Portrait du Colonisé (préfacé par Jean-Paul Sartre), sont étudiés dans les écoles supérieures et les universités. Les cercles intellectuels les plus divers ont confronté, intégré ou rejeté ses idées, mais toujours de manière enrichissante et respectueuse.Publiée à l’origine en français en 197...

Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977, The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles in the service of kings and narrowly escaping imprisonment, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country. At that same time, al-Mammi engages upon a spiritual journey to obta...

Written in 1957, when North African independence movements were gaining momentum, The Colonizer and the Colonized studies the enduring legacy, political as much as psychological, of colonisation throughout the world.Albert Memmi depicts colonialism as a disease of the European but crucially he demonstrates that colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized, providing penetrating insights into colonial inheritance and resistance that remain as re...

The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Howard Greenfeld; introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre; 39,000 words)Written in 1956 when Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and soon after the Algerian war had started, this book describes the inescapable bonds between colonizer and colonized. Born in Tunis, Memmi is one of the colonized, but as a Jew, he identified culturally with the colonizer. He moved to France in 1956 ...

Born in 1920 on the edge of Tunis’s Jewish quarter, the French-Jewish-Tunisian sociologist, philosopher, and novelist Albert Memmi has been a central figure in colonial and postcolonial studies. Often associated with the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, Memmi’s career has spanned fifty years, more than twenty book-length publications, and hundreds of articles that are distilled in this collection.The Albert Memmi Reader presents Memmi’s insights on the legaci...

The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (with a new introduction by the author and a preface by Albert Camus; translated from the French by Edouard Roditi; 114,000 words)When The Pillar of Salt was first published in 1953, it caused a scandal in Tunis. Acclaimed sociologist Albert Memmi, the son of poor Jewish parents who lived at the edge of the equally poor Jewish and Muslim quarters, wrote candidly about the life of Tunisia’s small Jewish community and the f...

In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi—author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized—turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world.As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a m...

An eminent social analyst examines the way racism works-and how it can be overcome.Racism: It is social, not “natural”; it is general, not “personal”; and it is tragically effective. In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology-a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiograp...

'A beautiful book' ALBERT CAMUS'A Tunisian Balzac graced with Hemingway’s radical simplicity and sadness' NEW YORK TIMESFirst published in 1953, and the recipient of the Prix Carthage, The Pillar of Salt introduces us to Alexandre Benillouche, a young boy growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood of Tunis. Though his ailing father — the patriarch of a poor but proud family — expects him to leave school and pursue work, Alexandr...

Portrait of a Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Elisabeth Abbott; 99,000 words)In this memoir and extended meditation on Jewish identity and anti-Semitic stereotypes written in France in the early 1960s, Albert Memmi paints a portrait of himself as a secular Jew. The book has been compared to Rousseau’s Confessions because of its meticulous self-examination. Written only 15 years after the end of the Nazi occupation and just over a decade after the...

The Liberation of the Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Judy Hyun; 86,000 words)In this book, written after The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew, Albert Memmi writes, “It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular in...