A Settler-Colonial Genealogy of Modernism: Albert Camus and the Aesthetics of Elimination

Abstract This article explores the influence of settler colonialism on the emergence and development of literary modernism in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on Algeria-born Albert Camus's first novel, L’étranger (1942), questioning the critical tendency to read this work solely in relation to metropolitan literary and philosophical trends. Recontextualizing L’étranger with regard to a largely forgotten corpus of French-Algerian colonial fiction, including novels by Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau, and Paul Achard, reveals parallels between Camus's “absurd hero” and the hypermasculine and violent protagonists often idealized in this cultural milieu. Reading L’étranger within a French-Algerian context suggests that Meursault's “existential” transcendence of conventional morality emerges within the ideological nexus of settler colonialism—a situation defined by the need to eliminate the indigenous population while disavowing responsibility for doing so. This analysis suggests tantalizing connections between the aesthetic innovations commonly called modernism and the material-affective structures of settler violence. Such parallels make it important to consider the frontier as a space that is central to the cultural developments of modern literary history.