... mon pere » ? Depossedee ? Vraiment, et queI aiguillon vous incite al'ecrire ? Pourquoi vouloir ainsi Ie clamer atous vents ? -Assia Djebar, Nowhere in My Father's Housel I f the passing of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar in 2015 has been the occasion for scholars to revisit a number of issues in her...

... or herself. As many critics have observed, her polyphonic and multilayered texts offer a marked contrast to the certainties of historical narratives, including the doxas of Algerian nationalism. Djebar's texts work their magic cumulatively, building layer by layer, rather than unfolding in a linear movement...

... a postcolonial lens, focusing primarily on Algerian colonial history. As a result, the reading of French patriarchy in her work is frequently confined to the framework of French imperialism, where it is seen as an oppressive structure, but also as a liberating outlet: Djebar's French education opened the door...

...: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993) 221. The Romanic Review Volume 106 Numbers 1-4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 3° CATHERINE MILKOVITCH-RIOUX ceremonies that women so often preside over and give voice to. For, in the face of death, the corpus of Assia...

... in the same way that the French language "disappeared" from Algeria in the 1990s. These parallel disappearances could be said to evoke, in the case of the former, the murders of many Francophone intellectuals during the violence of the decennie noire, and in the case of the latter, strict Algerian Arabization...

... of their own history, then they were subjects of the history of despotism and tyranny, not that of emancipation and freedom. For some French historians, the only true Algerian nationalists were the Algerian communists, European or Europeanized in their majority, for whom political "engagement" was not linked...

... geographic and historical span of francophone postcoloniality. The essays by Christopher L. Miller and Doris Garraway focus on Haiti in the wake of its independence in 1804 and during the dark years of the Duvalier dictatorship. Daho Djerbal explores Algerian historiography, and Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak...

... silence to make movies, the novel recounts her search for Zoulikha, the renowned, almost legendary female resistant, a moudjahidda who fought in the maquis during the Algerian War of Independence. The book, as Djebar asserts in her avertissement, is itself composed like a feminine fresco, a mosaic: "J'ai...

... to present-day Algeria to express a deep discontent with both the colonial past and the present. In particular, Daoud’s narrative expresses strong aversion to the growing visibility of Islam and Islamic observances in present-day Algerian society. 19. “Wine production became the most important economic...

... Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.5 This is the nature of my debt to Djebar. In many different contexts, lessons learned from her writings crop up to help me think. Who can forget such tremendous insights as the locked steel car with the modern Algerian woman· driving, as still a veil? Beyond the veil...

... experience. Derrida and Cixous of course contributed to this trend by examining the intersections of French and Algerian history in their own biographical writing of the 1990s and 2000s.2 But if Bachir's suggestive comments on 1968 in West Africa lead us to think again about French history, they also bear...

...," French Historical Studies 25.2 (2002): 295-329. 13. David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) 31. 14. "Les forces qui s'affrontent dans la tragedie sont egalement legitimes, egalement armees de raison. Dans Ie melodrame ou Ie drame, au...

... Homme prompted a renewal of interest in his work, and particularly in his relationship to Algeria. At a time when colonial and postcolonial studies were becoming increasingly influential, Le Premier Homme reminded readers that Camus was first and foremost an Algerian writer. It encouraged a more...

... cultural forces at work. And these forces are not necessarily the same ones that push Bouraoui's Algerian heroine to "a self-mythologizing realm that becomes a refuge because it has never been previously appropriated," although Van Zuylen argues for a definition of this realm in terms of monomania...

... and the Commune? How did he react to World War I? Would he have supported the Popular Front? What did he do during the years of Occupation? What position did he take during the Algerian War? But this approach, on second thought, would be false and illustrates the difficulty of the task at hand: Schulman ably...

... the experiences of two groups of non-Muslim Algerians, the pied-noir and Jewish communities. The first essay, by Hafid Gafaiti, is particularly rich both in argument and historical detail. Gafaiti portrays the debate over immigration that in recent decades has mobilized political discourse and public opinion...

... away from polemics-as his long engagement with the fraught politics of the memory of the Second World War, the Purge, the Shoah, and the Algerian War clearly demonstrates-but he was also keenly aware of the way in which polemics create their own weather. Gabriel Rockhill, with whom Phil coedited...

... Gaulle's memoirs are a classic version of the genre (in every sense of the word), but Jeannelle finds in Simone de Beauvoir's La Force des choses (1963) an important account of the period of the Algerian War since it provides a compelling illustration of what proves to have been a painful recognition...

... and the international communist movement and equivocated in its response to the Algerian war, costing it the allegiance of a crucial generation of potential supporters in the process. I cannot dwell upon this period, but I do want to ask one question about it: if Thorez was so much the slavish vassal of Stalin...

... of expansion-from canonical metropolitan literary authors to Algerian writers, to philosophers like Ranciere, and, more and more, to cinema. If Phil Watts taught and studied "French literature," then we must enlarge the scope of what we call "literature" in order to include in it not only Francophone texts...