Francophone writing in Algeria has traditionally been read as grounded in displacement and erasure of the colonised culture. Yet even the most assimilated évolué remained critical and conscious of a dual allegiance; and even the most resistant underwent significant acculturation, which they had to integrate into their claims to rootedness in a local community (itself jarringly reshaped by colonialism). Their writing (both fiction and non- fiction) is studied here for the first time as the hesitant articulation of strategies of alternative representation and, however modest, of deviance as a form of resistance. Although clearly indebted to the objectives and constraints of the Algerianist aesthetic of the