Algerian Imprints: Ethical Space in the Work of Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous

by Brigitte Weltman-Aron

Overview

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, this book 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 non-belonging. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231539876
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

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.

Table of Contents

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
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Columbia University Press

Editorial Reviews

The advantage of Algerian Imprints is that it activates and animates the texts of two important contemporary female Francophone authors in favor of serious reflections concerning their corporeal and scriptural 'origins,' relations to language, questions of testimony and hospitality, and the sexual politics of resistance. This is a book that many, both scholars and students, will want to read.

David Wills

Compellingly argued, Algerian Imprints brings together in novel ways two leading francophone writers, Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar. Working at the intersection of literature, history, and theory, Brigitte Weltman-Aron shows convincingly how these women write from their marginal positions to create a politics of dissensus

Verena Conley

Weltman-Aron draws on close reading and cogent theoretical sources to make a substantial and original reflection on the 'politics of memory' (Derrida), (un)veiling as a figure of both vision and blindness, and nonbelonging as a basis for a new understanding of community.

Marta Segarra

Brilliantly argued and beautifully written, Algerian Imprints is a powerful and daring book that provides a radical rethinking of the work of two major writers. Weltman-Aron's subtle and minutely detailed analysis helps us reconfigure and conceptualize the concepts that are at the heart of their aesthetics and political views. This book is the first to unravel the complex relationships that Cixous and Djebar have developed between body and language, writing and gender, and, above all, the connections between literary theory and the history of postcolonial relations between Algeria and France.

Réda Bensmaïa

Scholarly and an excellent read.... Highly recommended.

Choice