“Nothing is truly hidden”: visibility, aesthetics and Yasmina Khadra’s detective fiction

Abstract

This article examines the politics and form of Yasmina Khadra’s use of the detective genre to reveal invisible social conditions. I argue that the problem of visibility operates on multiple levels in Khadra’s crime fiction: firstly, at the level of genre, where the investigative impulse of the police detective novel is used to map the uneven socio-economic relations of the petro-state intensified by neo-liberalization; secondly, in catachrestic tropes of spectrality and invisibility which signal the seeming irreality of Algerian modernity and visualize the unrepresented atrocities of the civil war; and finally, in the ideological contradictions of the plots, where the emphasis on revealing occluded histories is contradicted by the texts’ erasures.

Keywords:

• Yasmina Khadra
• Algeria
• crime fiction
• detective fiction
• neo-liberalism
• petro-state

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the reviewers for their suggestions; Ranka Primorac for organizing the initial discussion of thrillers at ASAUK (African Studies Association of the UK); and Pim Higginson, Francesco Cavatorta and Vincent Durac for sharing their research.