Secular criticism in Dystopia: Time, Space, and mobility in Boualem’s 2084 La Fin du Monde

In dialogue with recent criticism on secularism and politics of literature, this essay first establishes the relationship between spatiality and temporality in creating mobility, then explicates mobility in secular criticism and shows how secular criticism offers pluralist/inclusive perspectives in the example of the dystopian novel 2084 La Fin du Monde . Critics of Boualem’s alleged radical secularism have crucially missed spatial and temporal elements of the novel’s form that inform its political position. In particular, through careful analysis of the spatio-temporal politics of the border and the museum, this study elucidates Boualem’s powerful assertion of the human right to non-exclusionary mobility, an assertion which is no less forceful for its being disarmingly open-ended and inclusive.