Representing Algerian Women: Kateb, Dib, Feraoun, Mammeri, Djebar

by Edward John Still

Overview

This monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945–1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public agents. However, it crucially also argues that the canonical writers of the period, who were mostly male, both textually acknowledged their inability to articulate the experiences and subjectivity of the feminine Other and deployed a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual innovations in producing evocations of Algerian femininity that subvert the structural imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony. Though it does not shy from investigating those aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations, the book chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity, a pessimism regarding the revolution's capacity to deliver change for women, and an omnipresent subversion of masculine subjectivity in its canonical texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110583700
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	01/14/2019
Series:	Mimesis , #68
Pages:	231
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Edward John Still, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

Avant-Propos VII

Acknowledgments IX

1 Introduction - Une dissymétrie s'évoque 1

2 Kateb Yacine - Nedjma as Woman 17

2.1 Painful Beginnings 19

2.2 Mythical Interpretations 25

2.3 Masculine Perspectives on the Feminine Image: Desiring Objects 33

2.4 Rivalrous Relations 40

2.5 National Possibilities 45

2.6 Fragile Emancipation and Pessimistic Representation 51

3 Mohammed Dib: From one Gender to an Other 60

3.1 Realist Plenitude and the Coming Revolution 62

3.2 Feminine Voices, Articulating Change 74

3.3 Gendered Frontiers 81

3.4 Maternal Melancholy 84

3.5 For whom the Texts? 95

4 Mouloud Feraoun - Humility in the Representation of Women? 100

4.1 Masculinist Structures and Women's Participation 102

4.2 Breaking the Chain 112

4.3 Cacophonous Narration 123

4.4 Ventriloquism, Factitiousness, and Failure 129

5 Mouloud Mammeri - A Dissenting Masculine Perspective 135

5.1 Kabyle Sociology, Masculinist Structures, and Women's Suffering 137

5.2 Lévi-Strauss, Matrimonial Strife, and Positive Change 143

5.3 Masculine Blindness, Perspective and Scopophilia 149

5.4 Supplements, Activity, and Pessimistic Uncertainty 157

6 Assia Djebar - Movements Towards Self-reflexive Representation 167

6.1 A Representative Scribe? 172

6.2 Socio-historical Progression? 177

6.3 Psychic/Subjective Progression and Emancipatory Learning 183

6.4 Shattered Mirrors -188

6.5 Ideological Evolution 193

7 Conclusion - Women's Postcolonial Representation 200

8 Bibliography 211

8.1 Primary Sources 211

8.2 Secondary Sources 212

Name Index 219

Index of Theoretical Terms 221