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The book focuses on literary production from the early 1930s to the opening years of the 21 st  century. It begins with the concomitant rise of Algerian nationalism and Berber subnational identity, moves through the decades surrounding independence, examines the Berber Spring of 1980 and its aftermath, and closes with the civil war of the 1990s. Chapter one, “The Emergence of Berber Consciousness, 1930–1949,” is concerned with the presence of Berbers in Algeria’s early-20 th -century francophone literature. It critically discusses the absence, acculturation, and folklorizing of Berbers in works associated with the Algerianist Movement of the 1920s during the heyday of settler colonialism. The author then considers the first indigenous Algerian francophone novelists, whose work exemplified the contradictions and ambiguities of the colonial situation. The chapter concludes by examining the emergence of Berber consciousness in literature, highlighting the sense of exile — the “feeling of foreignness” — that the author considers “intrinsic to the modern Berber experience” (p. 53). Chapter two continues this exploration, taking up works written by Berbers (in French) from the 1940s to early 1960s. The chapter traces the emergence of a new form of subjectivity defined by “biculturality, hybridity, and multiple consciousness” (p. 104) through close examination of the production of five well-known writers: Jean and Taos Amrouche, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri, and Malek Ouary. The gaze of the Other is shown to be crucial to the ability of these figures to develop a reflexive awareness of themselves as Berbers. Only from a position of distance, the author argues, were these writers able to engage in the project of reappropriating their patrimony.