Creator Bio
Albert Memmi
1920–2020
Best known for his fictional, autobiographical, and sociological studies of racism and colonialism, Albert Memmi was born in Tunis near the Jewish ghetto of Hara. After completing his secondary studies in Tunis, he studied at the University of Algiers and the Sorbonne, where he met his Catholic wife. During the war, Memmi was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp, from which he managed to escape. Following the war, Memmi taught at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis and published The Colonizer and the Colonized, a reflection on the decolonization of French North Africa, which has become one of the principal texts in postcolonial theory. Ironically, the anticolonialist agenda of the Tunisian independence movement led to Memmi’s expulsion to Paris in 1970.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Portrait of a Jew
I was born in Tunisia, in Tunis, a few steps from that city’s large ghetto. My father, a harness maker, was somewhat pious, naturally somewhat so, as were all men of his trade and his station in life…
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The Colonizer and the Colonized
The body and face of the colonized are not a pretty sight. It is not without damage that one carries the weight of such historical misfortune. If the colonizer’s face…
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The Pillar of Salt
My name is Benillouche, Alexandre Mordekhai.
How galling the smiles of my classmates! In our alley, and at the Alliance School, I hadn’t known how ridiculous, how revealing, my name could be…