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  • Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women's Literature
  • Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women's Literature Abdelkader Cheref . London; New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010. 206 pages. ISBN 978-1-84885-449-9.

From the early days of postcolonial studies, gender has been theorized as one of the key sites where the contradictions and tensions intrinsic to the construction of a postcolonial national community play out. In the context of political and cultural decolonization in the Maghrib, discussing gender implies considering the complex and at times conflicting social and symbolic processes that make the appropriation and dispossession [End Page 113] of women the touchstones of national identity. It is in relation to (and in opposition to) these processes that women construct their subjectivities and organize resistance both within and beyond the nation.

The project underlying Gender and Identity in North Africa is valid. The book proposes to investigate the many ways in which the two discourses of postcolonialism and feminism can fruitfully intersect to illuminate the corpus of women's literature from the Maghrib. Going beyond the confines of each national literature, this book productively considers the Maghrib in its entirety, both geographically and linguistically. Anchored in the discipline of comparative literature, which Abdelkader Cheref, drawing from Charles Bernheimer, envisions as a principle of absolute comparison across national, class, and disciplinary boundaries, the book offers a reading of three major novels from the postcolonial Maghrib with no restriction of geographic origin or language: 'Am al-Fayl (Year of the Elephant) by Moroccan Leila Abouzeid, Ombre Sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade) by Algerian Assia Djebar, and La Vie Simple (The Simple Life) by Tunisian Souad Guellouz. The task of bringing in conversation key texts from the Arabophone and Francophone traditions of the three Maghribi countries is commendable and, unfortunately, rarely undertaken in the field of Maghribi literature. In this respect, Gender and Identity plots a new course in comparative analysis and proposes a reading paradigm deserving of wider adoption.

Cheref asserts that "this book partly aims at exploring the ways in which women come to represent or stand for the nation in nationalist discourse and how this is manifest in the Maghribi texts under study" (11). His discussion of literature as "sociological evidence" (83), or "a means for sociological investigation" (84), successfully situates each novel in its own socio-historical context. The argument is committed to addressing "women's negotiation of [national and cultural] identities" in postcolonial Maghribi literature (4), and Cheref 's expertise in the history and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Maghrib makes for an informative reading that cannot but satisfy a reader eager for a concise yet thorough introduction on the topic. His sustained effort to contextualize his corpus in relation to national politics and pressing social issues highlights the key role played by literature in the construction of women as historical subjects. In this respect, his argument reaches beyond literature to tackle critical questions of [End Page 114] importance for Middle East studies and the broader social sciences.

Yet, his analysis of the ways in which "literature... intervene[s] in dominant discourses such as colonialism, neo-colonialism, nationalism and patriarchy" (54) is mostly restricted to a superficial investigation of the main "themes" and "subjects" (93) of the novels, all broadly related to a rather schematic view of patriarchal oppression (through usual tropes such as confinement, family honor, and the clash between tradition and modernity). The study lacks a complex discussion of the tensions and conflicts that have characterized the relationship between nationalism, feminism, and decolonization in each of the three countries of the Maghrib. To be successful, the fruitful historical and sociological thrust of the argument should be coupled with a convincing examination of the multiple symbolic valences of the woman figure, especially in relation to nationalist discourse. Despite the extensive (but often sporadic and outdated) theoretical survey in the Introduction and first chapter, the textual analysis never quite grapples with the theoretical and practical complexities of what it means for women to formulate claims for equality from a position of marginality.

Whereas the need for a comparative reading of women...

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