De Marokkaanse slagerszoon zonder brilletje: De classificatie van Abdelkader Benali's werk in de Nederlandse en Vlaamse journalistieke kritiek

This article discusses the reception of Abdelkader Benali's work, a Dutch writer of Moroccan origin. I analyse a corpus of 82 journalistic reviews in order to trace cultural classifications. Ever since the literary debuts of immigrant writers were published, from the second half of the nineties onwards, literary reviewers and scientists have debated about their position in the Dutch literary field. I distinguish two main approaches according to literary theorist Urszula Topolska: the so-called integrating and separating approach. The integrating approach considers these writers to be part of Dutch literature and compares them with other writers of Dutch origin. The separating approach, on the other hand, sets the allochton authors apart from the latter. In this study I examine how often separating classifications, reflecting Benali's cultural background, occur in journalistic reviews. I have collected 82 reviews of fourteen books by Abdelkader Benali. I have studied how the reviewers classified him and which writers he is compared with. My results show that only in the case of the first two books, cultural classifications are present in more than one review. A total of 13% of the reviews were culturally classifying (separating). Benali has been compared to immigrant writers in 11% of the reviews, comparisons to writers of Dutch origin appeared in 28% of the reviews. Overall it can be observed that separating classifications gradually disappear.