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  • Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria
  • Anne Donadey
Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria. By Jane Hiddleston. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2006. vi + 215 pp. Hb £40.00.

This thorough and concise study of the novels and short stories by famed Algerian writer Assia Djebar charts the evolution of her works from an early focus on the construction of Algerian identity in the 1950s and 1960s to an interest in developing a female Algerian identity-in-relation in the 1980s and early 1990s, to a final pessimism about the descent of Algeria into Islamist and state violence directed at intellectuals, women and the people between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Hiddleston's theoretical framework is heavily influenced by Peter Hallward's distinction (which she redefines slightly) between the singular and the specific and by Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of the singular-plural. This framework leads her to argue that Djebar's works have been moving away from seeking to construct an identity grounded in Algerian specificity and toward grieving for an increasingly lost Algeria. Although the argument had merit, the chronological organization seems at times a bit too forcibly linear. For instance, Djebar's first novel, La Soif, is arguably her most expatriated work and her next-to-last novel, La Femme sans sépulture, returns to Algerian history and to a focus on Algerian women. The argument that Djebar's last two novels, La Femme sans sépulture and La Disparition de la langue française, abandon Algerian specificity is unconvincing because both critique a history of recent colonial and postcolonial violence in Algeria. Finally, these two novels seems to form a thematic triptych of loss, trauma, and the ghosts of the past with the earlier Le Blanc de l'Algérie, yet Hiddleston's chronological treatment forces her to place her discussion of that narrative in an earlier chapter. In contrast to many book-length studies of Djebar's works that tend to heavily paraphrase the texts, Hiddleston maintains a tight focus on proving her hypothesis in a series of intelligent readings. However, the quality of the contribution to Djebar scholarship is somewhat uneven. Chapters 2 and 3 on the books that have received the most exhaustive critical treatment tend to repeat previously made arguments without always referencing them (especially in the sections on L'Amour, la fantasia, Ombre sultane and Loin de Médine). A number of the researchers listed in the bibliography are never mentioned in the text, and some scholars whose analysis would have supported Hiddleston's and allowed her to further her argument (such as Patricia Geesey, Andrea Page, George Lang and Carine Bourget) are omitted entirely from the list. Chapters 4 and 5 on grieving and being haunted by Algeria provide by far the most insightful contribution. Hiddleston masterfully demonstrates that Djebar's works since Le Blanc de l'Algérie are all poised between mourning and melancholia. Overall, this book is a welcome addition to the ever-growing scholarship on Djebar's works. It is written in accessible language and will be of interest to faculty and students in francophone postcolonial studies. [End Page 106]

Anne Donadey
San Diego State University
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