Grounded by close attention to literary renderings of Algeria’s national epic, this chapter examines the historical entanglement of novelistic and nationalist projects in the wake of the decolonizing movements that founded independent nation-states across the African continent in the mid twentieth century. It begins by reconsidering Frantz Fanon’s diagnostic phenomenology of postcolonial nationalisms across and beyond the continent, articulated in two essays concerning national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), alongside the novelistic experimentation of Kateb Yacine. To further explore some implications of Fanon’s claim that revolution is above all an aesthetic project, the chapter unfolds by surveying texts by Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Mahmoudan Hawad to elucidate the ways in which African writers have theorized, anticipated, eluded, and unsettled both nationalist narrative imperatives and Eurocentric interpretive protocols concerning this paradigmatic literary form of modernity.