| Summary: | In her 2004 study of gender and sexuality Undoing Gender, Judith Butler examines the uneasy relationship between human rights discourses and certain oppressed minorities, and cites Fanon in order to call for the continued redefinition of the 'human' each time the category is invoked. This article seeks to explore this continued process of redefinition by returning to the period of decolonization, specifically by means of a detailed engagement with Kateb Yacine's poetics of 'revolution'. Kateb conceives 'revolution' not only as the demand for regime change, but also as the broader movement of peoples in relation to one another and to the world, and he understands humanity to be defined by this ongoing movement. Moreover, his works on the decolonization of Algeria, including Nedjma (1956), Le Cadavre encerclé and Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité seek to perform the movement of man by figuring not only a commitment to contestation, but also a call for reinvention that evolves out of a reimagination of the past. Kateb's humanist revolution is a multidirectional movement that continually seeks out what colonial discourse effaced, not in order simply to re-establish tradition, but to rediscover it repeatedly and remodel it in the service of an open future. © 2012 Intellect Ltd.
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