ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores new approaches to teaching French and Francophone women through the work of Hele Beji, a Tunisian author born in 1948. Over the past 30 years, Beji has written books and essays on the subjects of decolonization, cultural pluralism, feminism, and the problems of democratization in Tunisia’s postcolonial era. The author discusses how teaching Beji’s Desenchantement National, and her more recent articles on the Arab Spring, enabled his to develop new pedagogical strategies which sought to expand theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on colonial and postcolonial concerns and issues pertaining to historical and civic progress. Using Anne McClintock’s argument, students reflected on how looking at the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring from a constructed postcolonial standpoint is problematic when it embodies a continuation of Western thought and perpetuates the process of “colonization.”
