Geography, Identity, and Colonial Cosmopolitanism. Reflections on Pierre Benoit's L'Atlantide

This article examines the entanglement of geography, literature, and colonial ideologythrough a reading of Pierre Benoit’s 1919 novel L’Atlantide. Following Edward Said’s Orientalism and scholarship on colonial cartography, it argues that geographical knowledge functions as a narrative weapon that supports imperial domination while simultaneously producing exoticized fictional imaginaries. L’Atlantide is thus analyzed as a paradigmatic example of what ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ can represent both as fiction and as an idealized colonial model. Benoit’s novel, set in the Algerian Sahara, combines geographical realism with a mythical narrative centered on the lost city of Atlantis and its enigmatic queen, Antinéa. This setting enables the concept of a ‘good’ colonial cosmopolitanism with its perceived ‘bad’ pendant. While the French officers in the novel embody an idealized cosmopolitanism, Antinéa represents its threatening, non-European counterpart. Atlantis could therefore be seen as a “heterotopia” in Michel Foucault’s sense: a space that juxtaposes incompatible geographies, histories, and identities—and which, in its turn, reveals the deeper heterotopic nature of the colonial space itself.