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 Imprints shows 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.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dissensus: The Political in the Writings of Djebar and Cixous
Part 1. Colonial Demarcations
1. The Gravity of the Body: Djebar’s and Cixous’s Textuality
2. Going to School in French Algeria: The Archive of Colonial Education
Part 2. Poetics of Language
3. Vanishing Inscriptions: Djebar’s Poetics of the Trace
4. Poetic Inc.: Language as Hospitality in Cixous
Part 3. Algerian War
5. The Sound of Broken Memory: Djebar’s Women Fighters
6. Allergy in the Body Politic: War in Cixous
Conclusion: The Logic of the Veil; or, The Epistemology of Nonseeing
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the author
Brigitte Weltman-Aron is associate professor of French at the University of Florida and the author of
On Other Grounds: Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century England and France.
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