Contemporary writers create narratives that delve into the residual effects of Western colonization while integrating them into a larger ethical discussion about the complicity and responsibility of the colonizers as well as the formerly colonized. In so doing, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors such as the French–Algerian Leïla Sebbar and the Algerian-born Jewish–French Hélène Cixous, whose works are situated in the larger framework of memorial writing about colonial Algeria, engage with the melancholic behaviors rooted in the traumas of the past, as both individual and collective phenomena. The concept of “postcolonial melancholia” theorized by Paul Gilroy proves especially productive for illuminating the cultural and ideological context in which these narratives emerge. In the chapter entitled “The Negative Dialectics of Conviviality,” Gilroy paints a vivid picture of the ideological contradictions characteristic of contemporary Britain's race relations and immigration policies. His critique is sometimes couched in sympathetic storytelling:

To be sure, the author of Postcolonial Melancholia elucidates such oblique accounts of the justifications (failure to integrate, unemployment, religious differences and terrorism) for unavowed segregation and discriminatory practices with careful explanations that are, in fact, the focus of his discussion: “Ethnic absolutism comprehends their evil and their affiliation to fundamentalist Islam as neither a choice nor an act of will. It sees this outcome as the result of their instinctive responses to the combined pressures of ethnohistory, divergent tradition, and biocultural or even genomic division” (Gilroy 123). However, the theorist reveals a larger issue that he describes as a vicious circle intrinsic to defining the very notion of the alien: “the rioters rioted because they were alien. The proof of their alienness was the fact that they rioted” (Gilroy 123).