Publications

Assia Djebar: L'Amour, la fantasia—avant et après. Volume 48, 2008 (Winter)

This collection of original essays on the works of Assia Djebar celebrates her fifty-year literary career by centering on her 1985 masterpiece L’Amour, la fantasia as a turning point in her oeuvre. Essays by major and emerging Djebar scholars address issues of history and autobiography, desire and exile, aesthetics and politics, the role of women in Algerian society, and the role of multilingual writing in postcolonial societies. The last piece is an English translation of the end of Djebar’s last book.

Cover art by Houria Niati, Algerian-born artist, “No to Torture,” 1982, central panel, used by permission of the author.

Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Co-editor with H. Adlai Murdoch. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005.

This book collection brings together methods and insights taken from literary criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, theory, film studies, and linguistics to define new parameters of study for the emerging field of francophone postcolonial studies. While francophone writings share some characteristics indicative of postcolonial literatures in general, they also have their own unique set of characteristics, including issues of migration, stereotyping, continued relationships with France, and creolization. This book gathers together some of the best-known francophone literary scholars to examine various francophone texts through a postcolonial lens.

This in-depth study of the works of major Francophone writers Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar redefines postcolonial literature by focusing on three characteristics. Donadey understands postcolonial literature as being both oppositional to and complicit with a variety of power structures. This literature also reclaims through fiction a history written primarily from a Eurocentric perspective. Finally, postcolonial literature engages with a variety of intertexts, which it alternately contests, reclaims, and reinvents. This work challenges the current practice of postcolonial theory by moving away from a focus on English language literature. Donadey argues that rather than being peripheral to postcolonial concerns, gender is one of the main reasons for the ambivalent aspect of much postcolonial literature.

Recasting Postcolonialism outlines historiographical debates over the Algerian war and the place of women in the war. Donadey examines the narrative strategies Djebar and Sebbar use to rewrite an Algerian history that was partially erased by French colonialism. She also offers a clear analysis of how these two women's writings demonstrate the prominent role played by Algerian women and the historical memories of women in the recasting of Algeria's colonial past.