Albert Memmi 1920 – 2020

Albert Memmi was a Tunisian-French Jewish philosopher, novelist, and essayist whose The Colonizer and the Colonized became one of the founding texts of postcolonial thought, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Drawing on his own experience as a Tunisian Jew educated in French institutions, he reconstructed the colonial relation as a deformation of both the colonizer, who must accept privileges he cannot justify, and the colonized, whose self-image is shaped by the gaze of the master. His later Portrait of a Jew, The Liberation of the Jew, and Decolonization and the Decolonized extended his analysis to antisemitism, Jewish identity, and the difficult condition of postcolonial states.

Albert Memmi was born in Tunis in December 1920 in the Hara, the Jewish quarter of the old city; his father was a Tuscan-Italian Jewish saddler and his mother a Berber-Jewish woman of Tunisia. He attended the Lycée Carnot, began studies at the University of Algiers, and in the war was confined to a forced-labour camp by Vichy before completing his bachelor's at the Sorbonne in 1949 and taking the agrégation in philosophy in 1953. He taught at the Lycée Carnot and ran the psychology centre at the Tunis Institute of Educational Studies, but in 1956 he emigrated to France, where he taught sociology at the University of Paris X — Nanterre and at Paris XV.

His books include the autobiographical novel The Pillar of Salt (La Statue de sel, 1953), the celebrated essay The Colonizer and the Colonized (Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur, 1957) prefaced by Sartre, the Portrait of a Jew (1962), The Liberation of the Jew (1966), Dominated Man (1968), Dependence (1979), Racism (1982), and Decolonization and the Decolonized (2004).

Memmi described from inside the colonial situation the psychology of both colonised and coloniser, gave Jewish identity the same minority phenomenology, and treated racism, dependence, and domination as continuous structures rather than detachable accidents. He stands with Frantz Fanon as a founding voice of post-colonial thought from the Maghreb. He died in Paris in May 2020.