Search results

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh's article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women's literature tends to be seen as 'documentary', and this obscures the 'core issue of representation' as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant's and Bhabha's concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha's strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha's dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi's and Djebar's use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women's liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women's fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression.

The question of Derrida's relationship with postcolonial theory has for a long time been a fraught one. Some of the major postcolonial critics engage directly with Derrida's reflections on dissemination and excentricity, while others argue, on the contrary, that his mode of thinking is too abstract to tell us anything informative about the mechanics of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This article responds to these postcolonial critics, and analyses two recent texts, L'Autre Capand Le Monolinguisme de l'autre, in order to argue that the intermingling of philosophy and autobiography can tell us something new about the dangers and difficulties of postcolonial inquiry. These works attempt to examine the damaging effects of European cultural hegemony, and the imposition of the colonial language in Algeria, but, in including anxieties about this project expressed in the first person, they also convey a sense of doubt about the appropriateness of a universalising philosophical language. The philosopher grapples with an aporia between the need to describe the universal experience of alienation and dispossession in language (since this indeed weakens the coloniser's assumed position of dominance and ownership), and attention to the very singularities that colonial culture oppresses, and that resist theorisation in general terms. The hesitant incursion of the autobiographical subject into Derrida's later texts dramatises this aporia and its effects on postcolonial debate.

Introduction / Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy -- I. Critical Thinking: From Decolonization to Transnationalism -- 1. The 'Souverainement Orphelin' of Abdelkébir Khatibi's early writings: sociology in the Souffles years / Andy Stafford -- 2. Tireless translation: travels, transcriptions, tongues and the eternal plight of the 'Étranger professionnel' in the corpus of Abdelkébir Khatibi' / Alison Rice -- 3. Abdelkébir Khatibi's Mediterranean idiom / Edwige Tamalet Talbayev -- 4. Abdelkébir Khatibi and the transparency of language / Assia Belhabib, translated from the French by Jane Hiddleston -- 5. Khatibi and performativity, 'From where to speak?': living, thinking and writing with an 'epistemological accent' / Alfonso Toro -- II: Cultural and Philosophical Dialogues -- 6. Khatibi and the transcolonial turn / Olivia C. Harrison -- 7. Segalen and Khatibi: bilingualism, alterity and the poetics of diversity / Charles Forsdick -- 8. Khatibi and Derrida: A 'Franco-Maghrebian' dialogue / Dominique Combe, translated from the French by Jane Hiddleston-- 9. Maghrebian shadow: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Japanese culture / Nao Sawada -- III: Aesthetics and Art in the Islamic World and Beyond -- 10. Reading signs and symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi: from the body to the text / Rim Feriani, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani and Debra Kelly -- 11. Abdelkébir Khatibi: the other side of the mirror / Lucy Stone McNeece -- 12. The carpet as a text, the writer as a weaver: reading the Moroccan carpet with Abdelkébir Khatibi / Khalid Lyamlahy -- 13. The artist's journey, or, the journey as art: aesthetics and ethics in the Pèlerinage d'un artiste amoureux and beyond / Jane Hiddleston -- IV: Translations -- 14. Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974) / Translated from the French by Matt Reeck -- 15. Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même Livre (Paris: Editions de l'Eclat, 1985) / Translated from the French by Olivia C. Harrison -- Notes on Contributors.