Malek Alloula was born in Oran (Algeria) in 1937. He is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure and studied literature in Algiers and at the Sorbonne. After his brother, one of the leading intellectuals of his country, was killed by islamists in 1994, Alloula created and headed the Association Abdelkader Alloula (AAA) for ten years. In this period he published a volume with homages and commemorations dedicated to his brother entitled \u00bbEn m\u00e9moire du futur\u00ab as well as French translations of two of his dramatic works: \u00bbLajouad\u00ab and \u00bbLagoual\u00ab Alloula has been a publisher\u2018s editor in Paris from 1974 until 2012.<\/p>\n
Alloula writes poetry and prose as well as essays on poetics and philosophy in French. His early poetry collections contain dense, epiphany-like miniatures, concerned with existential themes from the outset. In 1966, in \u00bbSouffles\u00ab, the journal dedicated to cultural criticism, Alloula spoke out against the appropriation of poetry in the service of the Algerian Revolution following the liberation from France in 1962. Alloula is also poetic in his prose works \u2013 which is clear in \u00bbLes Festins de l\u2019Exil\u00ab: here, in Parisian exile, the taste of familiar food recalls memories of Algeria. The author introduces an important aspect of Algerian-Berber culture: festive hospitality. In philosophical and autobiographical essays he answers 33 questions about the act of eating. He also inquires, in his most recent collection of autobiographical short stories, \u00bbLe Cri de Tarzan\u00ab, into how the past can be communicated \u2013 and he does so through language rich in masterfully loving irony without any melancholy or nostalgia. He collects significant episodes from his childhood, remembering his father, his teachers, and his friends \u2013 the witnesses of his youthful, Trickster-style escapades. Alloula\u2019s most well-received book is, without a doubt, \u00bbLe Harem Colonial. Images d\u2019un sous-\u00e9rotisme\u00ab (1980\/2004; Am. \u00bbThe Colonial Harem\u00ab, 1986). It is to this day a classic essay in the critical tradition of orientalism in the school of Edward Said, in which Alloula interprets the colonial photographic gesture in the light of Roland Barthes\u2019 theories on photography with reference to the psychoanalytical category of \u00bbFantasmas\u00ab which \u2013 like the harem itself \u2013 at once attracts and repels the European observer. In the \u00bbphoto novel\u00ab \u00bbPaysages d\u2019un retour\u00ab (2010) the compositions by artist Pierre Clauss complement Alloula\u2019s stories of a man living in exile who returns to his home village in Algeria, but finds no traces whatsoever of his past there, instead finding only concrete ruins that symbolise the forced process of forgetting. Most recently he also wrote the text for a photographic book \u00bbAlger sous le ciel\u00ab (2014) in collaboration with architect Halim Fa\u00efdi and photographer Kays Djilali.<\/p>\n
In 2014 he was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, where he wrote on his cyle of poems \u00bbil vient (m\u00e9t\u00e9rologies)\u00ab. Malek Alloula died in February 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11776,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[499,501],"jct-ilb-years":[603,608],"class_list":["post-40516","authors","type-authors","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-algeria","jct-origin-france","jct-ilb-years-2009-en","jct-ilb-years-2014-en"],"yoast_head":"\n