Contesting the Classroom is the first scholarly work to analyze both how Algerian and Moroccan novels depict the postcolonial classroom, and how postcolonial literatures are taught in Morocco and Algeria. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary novels in French and Arabic, it shows that authors imagined the fictional classroom as a pluralistic and inclusive space, often at odds with the narrow nationalist vision of postcolonial identity. Yet when authors wrote about the school, they also had to consider whether their work would be taught in schools. As this book’s original research on the...