In Defense of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire

＂A provocative, beautiful and defiant essay highlighting the pitfalls of integration in France by a talented young writer with North African roots＂--

The journalist Louisa Yousfi grew up in south-eastern France in the 1990s. She took a literature course at a crammer in Lille and then studied philosophy in Nice, ultimately enrolling in journalism school in Bordeaux. She was a conscientious student, following the advice of her working-class parents, who had emigrated from Algeria to France, to ’focus on [her] studies first and worry about politics later’. This political engagement duly materialised when she joined the Parti des Indigènes de la République, an anti-racist and decolonial movement whose ideas had a decisive influence on her first published work, Rester barbare. She is currently working on her first novel.