Undoing conceptual languages? Epistemic ambivalence as self-reflexive agency in Kaouther Adimi’s <i>Des pierres dans ma poche</i> (2015)

Migration writing has often been defined and read in relation to a writer’s own experiences and migration story. This has been principally visible in political and media discourses, where writers are co-opted by, indeed place themselves into, the political and media arena as a means of promoting their work. However, even when focusing on lesser-known writers not subject to the same levels of political and media visibility, literary critics have tended to align forms of a character’s agency with that of their author’s own ‘journey’ from the place of ‘departure’ to that of an ‘arrival’. In an analysis of the Algerian writer Kaouther Adimi’s 2015 novel, Des pierres dans ma poche , I ask how writers might be seen to theorize their own epistemic ambivalence as a form of self-reflexive agency, in order to tell a more complicated story about the contemporary movement of people and texts across (post)colonial borders, with a critical and self-reflexive eye to the coloniality of the conceptual languages of the borders, boundaries, and knowledge systems critics use to describe and understand writers, texts, and their worlds.