Assia Djebar Hiddleston, Jane
03/2011, Letnik:
6
eBook
For more than fifty years, Assia Djebar, Silver Chair of French at New York University and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Contribution to World Literature, has used the tools of poetry, fiction, ...drama and film to vividly portray the world of Muslim women in all its complexity. In the process, she has become one of the most important figures in North African literature. In Assia Djebar, Jane Hiddleston traces Djebar's development as a writer against the backdrop of North Africa's tumultuous history. Whereas Djebar's early writings were largely an attempt to delineate clearly the experience of being a woman, an intellectual, and an Algerian embedded in that often violent history, she has in her more recent work evinced a growing sense that the influence of French culture on Algerian letters may make such a project impossible. The first book-length study of this significant writer, Assia Djebar will be of tremendous interest to anyone studying post-colonial literature, women's studies or Francophone culture.
Kelly explores the relationship between the writer's self and literary expression through a study of the work of four North African writers and their complex relationship to language, demonstrating ...the importance of their work as a way of restoring cultural memory denied by colonialism and nationalism.
Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on ...the very basis of dissensus.
In a rare comparison of these authors' writings,Algerian Imprintsshows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous's inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar's narratives concern the colonial separation of "French" and "Arab," self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.
What are the political implications of an Arab feminist writing practice? How do the works of Assia Djebar, Algeria's internationally acclaimed francophone writer, relate to the priorities and ...perspectives of both Western and Arab feminist politics? Does Djebar succeed in her aim of reclaiming the history of her homeland, and of her religion, Islam, for women? Or in reclaiming the sexuality of Arab women? In Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminisms, Priscilla Ringrose uncovers the mechanisms of Djebar's revisionary feminism and examines the echoes and dissonances between what Djebar terms her "own kind of feminism" and the thinking of French and Arab feminists such as Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Mernissi and Ahmed. Arguing that Djebar's work is in constant dialogue with other feminisms, Ringrose assesses the strengths and weaknesses of its ideals and identifies their own particular intervention into current political and cultural debates. This book will appeal not only to scholars working on Djebar, but also to students of colonial history, women's studies and cultural politics.
