A Study of Resistance Performed in the Works of Mouloud Mammeri, Mohammed Dib, and John M. Coetzee

Focusing on ways in which resistance is literary performed and how it has influenced both the production and critical reception of Algerian Mohammed Dib’s L’incendie (1954), Mouloud Mammeri’s L’opium et le bâton (1965), and South African John Maxwell Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), this thesis ambitions to present an analysis that would rigorously challenge the theoretical, cultural and political assumptions that are based on the ground for example, ‘insider’ against ‘outsider’, and ‘Self’ against ‘Other’. By interrogating literary discourses as a performance of social and intellectual territoriality and boundary marking in colonial and postcolonial stories that have come into prominence, this thesis seeks to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in the performance of resistance, performing literature, and performative pragmatics in an attempt to suggest a reconfiguration of the critical field. This study is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a general overview of postcolonial Algerian and South African resistance literatures and their performance from context to concept, indicating how these two forms of literature have rarely been analysed in terms of performance and in relation to each other. The second chapter investigates the power of ‘literary performative’ words and utterances of resistance in Dib’s and Mammeri’s narratives, co-speech gestures in L’opium et le bâton and its cinematic adaptation (1971), and ‘protest talks’ as literary performatives in Dib’s L’incendie. The third chapter looks at ‘speech events’, analysing the performativity of dialogues and ellipsis in L’opium et le bâton and L’incendie. Expanding on the study of ‘speech acts’, speech- related gestures, ‘protest talks’ and ‘speech events’, the fourth chapter looks at how descriptive narratives and linguistic revelations of body violence as literary performatives break the boundary between fiction and performance in Waiting for the Barbarians, L’incendie and L’opium et le bâton. The fifth chapter examines ‘Third Space’ as an active space where camouflaged identities take the form of theatrical-like performances of resistance staged in L’opium et le bâton, L’incendie, and Waiting for the Barbarians. After establishing a postcolonial performative pragmatic approach in the postcolonial narratives of Algeria and South Africa, further research is invited to examine performatively additional narratives within modern and postmodern literary traditions.