Tashkent Postcards: Algeria's Literature of Liberation in Languages of the USSR

This article acknowledges the ways in which the so-called national literatures of North Africa's deterritorialized communities sit awkwardly with modern historical narratives: In this case, the presence of Algerians in Russian-language texts (as well as others) from the First Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, during October 1958 serve as a complement to documentation in the archive of an independent nation. A series of text fragments (conceptualized as “postcards”) here connects individuals’ participation in this event with larger stories concerning the emergence of a postcolonial nation.