Skip to content Skip to navigation
University of Warwick
  • Study
  • |
  • Research
  • |
  • Business
  • |
  • Alumni
  • |
  • News
  • |
  • About

University of Warwick
Publications service & WRAP

Highlight your research

  • WRAP
    • Home
    • Search WRAP
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse WRAP by Year
    • Browse WRAP by Subject
    • Browse WRAP by Department
    • Browse WRAP by Funder
    • Browse Theses by Department
  • Publications Service
    • Home
    • Search Publications Service
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse Publications service by Year
    • Browse Publications service by Subject
    • Browse Publications service by Department
    • Browse Publications service by Funder
  • Help & Advice
University of Warwick

The Library

  • Login
  • Admin

The specific plurality of Assia Djebar

Tools
- Tools
+ Tools

UNSPECIFIED (2004) The specific plurality of Assia Djebar. FRENCH STUDIES, 58 (3). pp. 371-384.

Research output not available from this repository, contact author.

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

Recent postcolonial criticism suffers from a sense of anxiety regarding the appropriate balance between cultural specificity and post-identitarian hybridity or 'creolisation'. Thinkers differ in their understanding of the importance of identity, at times advocating that the affirmation of a particular subject position is the only means of resisting (neo)colonial domination, and at others asserting that a celebration of relationality and cultural plurality can serve to critique entrenched power relations. Conceptions of postcolonial resistance waver between the urge to privilege an alternative, monologic identity on the one hand, and liberation through the dissolution of all specified identity categories on the other. The apparently stark opposition between these two modes of thought demands, however, to be unsettled and rendered more subtle. I want to use the texts of Assia Djebar, with reference also to the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Hallward, to rework the terms of this debate. Rather than championing exclusively either cultural specificity or trans-culturation, Djebar's work incorporates a continued struggle between the specific, the singular and the plural. First, Djebar's texts set out to unveil or conceive a feminine Algerian identity, rescuing Algerian women from occlusion both by colonialism and Islamic law and giving voice to their repressed specificity. Despite her belief in the necessity of this project, however, she finds that it is troubled on two levels. On the one hand, the desire to retrieve some particular essence results in the continual retreat of that essence, and the more the texts hope to uncover, the more they inadvertently mask or hide. Algerian identity is replaced, therefore, with a sense of the intractable singularity of the occluded 'self'. Furthermore, the singularity turns out to be not absolute but composite, as the erasure of the subject is coupled with a proliferation of diverse traces and echoes. the quest for identity intermittently dissolves, and Djebar displays postcolonial experience in Algeria instead as a curious coalescence of intractable singularity and ongoing intercultural plurality.

Item Type: Journal Article
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Journal or Publication Title: FRENCH STUDIES
Publisher: SOC FRENCH STUDIES
ISSN: 0016-1128
Official Date: July 2004
Dates:
DateEvent
July 2004UNSPECIFIED
Volume: 58
Number: 3
Number of Pages: 14
Page Range: pp. 371-384
Publication Status: Published

Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item View Item
twitter

Email us: wrap@warwick.ac.uk
Contact Details
About Us