Objectification of colonized people undergirds their erasure in literature and law

Evidence

KILLING AN ARAB STANDS at the center of The Stranger. The landmark novel, set in colonial Algeria, features the forlorn protagonist Meursault—a white Frenchman who slays an Arab along the beaches of Algiers. Beaches that have cradled thousands of Algerian women and men who met death too soon. During 132 years of untold stories, these natives were buried between the pages of French imperial history and the coasts of colonial lands. … The Arab of Camus’s making is nameless, faceless, and referred to only as the “Arab.” Millions of readers only know Meursault’s victim as “the Arab.” His existence is narrowed and compressed into an object—far from a living being—left for dead on the book’s pages and the beaches of his colonized homeland. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1171

Categorization

• XREF: Cross-analysis: Beydoun opening a crusades/Islamophobia book with Camus’s The Stranger mirrors how Iftikhar structures his own argument with literary-cultural anchors; both use the figure of the depersonalized Arab to ground a policy critique. — connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”