The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Howard Greenfeld; introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre; 39,000 words)Written in 1956 when Morocco and Tunisia gained independence from France and soon after the Algerian war had started, this book describes the inescapable bonds between colonizer and colonized. Born in Tunis, Memmi is one of the colonized, but as a Jew, he identified culturally with the colonizer. He moved to France in 1956 ...

Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977, The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles in the service of kings and narrowly escaping imprisonment, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country. At that same time, al-Mammi engages upon a spiritual journey to obta...

Born in 1920 on the edge of Tunis’s Jewish quarter, the French-Jewish-Tunisian sociologist, philosopher, and novelist Albert Memmi has been a central figure in colonial and postcolonial studies. Often associated with the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, Memmi’s career has spanned fifty years, more than twenty book-length publications, and hundreds of articles that are distilled in this collection.The Albert Memmi Reader presents Memmi’s insights on the legaci...

The Liberation of the Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Judy Hyun; 86,000 words)In this book, written after The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew, Albert Memmi writes, “It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular in...

The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi (with a new introduction by the author and a preface by Albert Camus; translated from the French by Edouard Roditi; 114,000 words)When The Pillar of Salt was first published in 1953, it caused a scandal in Tunis. Acclaimed sociologist Albert Memmi, the son of poor Jewish parents who lived at the edge of the equally poor Jewish and Muslim quarters, wrote candidly about the life of Tunisia’s small Jewish community and the f...

Albert Memmi a été l’un des auteurs français les plus influents dans le développement du discours politique et le renouveau du nationalisme dans de nombreux pays. Ses romans et essais, dont Le Portrait du Colonisé (préfacé par Jean-Paul Sartre), sont étudiés dans les écoles supérieures et les universités. Les cercles intellectuels les plus divers ont confronté, intégré ou rejeté ses idées, mais toujours de manière enrichissante et respectueuse.Publiée à l’origine en français en 197...

In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi—author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized—turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world.As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a m...

For more than 70 years until his passing, Albert Memmi was one of the most influential French authors in the development of political discourse and the revival of nationalism in many countries. His novels and essays, including The Colonizer and the Colonized (prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre), are studied in colleges and universities. The most diverse intellectual circles have confronted, incorporated or rejected his ideas but always in enriching and respectful ways.Originally publishe...

Portrait of a Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Elisabeth Abbott; 99,000 words)In this memoir and extended meditation on Jewish identity and anti-Semitic stereotypes written in France in the early 1960s, Albert Memmi paints a portrait of himself as a secular Jew. The book has been compared to Rousseau’s Confessions because of its meticulous self-examination. Written only 15 years after the end of the Nazi occupation and just over a decade after the...

An eminent social analyst examines the way racism works-and how it can be overcome.Racism: It is social, not “natural”; it is general, not “personal”; and it is tragically effective. In a remarkable meditation on a subject at the troubled center of American life, Albert Memmi investigates racism as social pathology-a cultural disease that prevails because it allows one segment of society to empower itself at the expense of another. By turns historical, sociological, and autobiograp...

A Holocaust survivor's surprising and thought-provoking study of forgiveness, justice, compassion, and human responsibility, featuring contributions from the Dalai Lama, Harry Wu, Cynthia Ozick, Primo Levi, and more.You are a prisoner in a concentration camp. A dying Nazi soldier asks for your forgiveness. What would you do?While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside ...

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of...